For today’s edition of Wordsmith Wednesday, I share this poem in honor of TV-Turnoff Week 2008. It was written after my wife and I first gave up watching TV years ago.
A dream you can’t share with the outside world
1.
It’s the digitized code, I tell you,
the lines of code. Somehow,
it’s embedded there and
our brains are scanning it
subconsciously, unconsciously.
I’m sure Jung would understand
the subtext of this dream.
Somehow I believe it’s all connected
to binary numbers: 01000000010000001,
in the way the numbers are arranged.
It’s ancient. Numerologists were right.
You only see it when you break free
of TV. It came to me in a dream:
a conflagration of fire explodes
from the house, flames rolling
from the house, rolling upon rolling
like in a movie but not.
What’s the world coming to?
An end. It’s a vision
that has been shared before
in a movie of a different name
but this wasn’t the exact plot,
the characters were different,
the scene, the sequence
of numbers behind it,
the allegorical subtext,
though, is the same –
which ironically
makes you want to go to the computer
and research it — but no,
you should go to a library, that is,
if there are any left,
if the blast hasn’t destroyed them
and check out, not literally,
because they can trace you –
whoever They are — not Big Brother
the government, but Big Brother
the corporate machine.
There is the need embedded in all of us
to check out books, feel them
with our own hands and read
for ourselves, even if they are watching,
they won’t know what we’re looking for:
the nefarious truth.
2.
It’s why we all we all want to be neo-
Luddites deep down inside.
Wendell Berry is right, you know:
the lure of the pastoral draws us,
magnetic like gravity.
Newtown would understand
in his mercurious state.
It was what he had
when he sat up on the edge
of his bed before he woke,
sat for hours upon hours:
true thought.
The imagination of our children
is limited by the box at the center of the room,
the corporate names we dare not repeat
like those who don’t speak the name of G-d.
It is sacrosanct to utter their names,
the ineffable truths of corporate America
are tangled up in potential litigation.
Where does it all end? “Ball of confusion
is what the world is today.”
The words are not your own, but channeled
by musicians under the thumb of
the corporate giant, the domain,
the domain name…proprietary right…
what did the small print say?
The needle’s done, the damage done.
It’s like where we are now
on the cusp of the 21st century,
this is what Earth has come to:
our psyches seared
by pornographic images
of rape, of the ineffable in
but another way.
The Marquis de Sade knew
it well: we share,
spread the sickness
like the plague it is worldwide to all
the children, our grandchildren
theirs and so on until it becomes
intertwined around the double
helical structures
that make up our lives
we can’t escape it.
I actually had a third part to this poem, but decided to leave it off because it simplified the answer. And now in honor of TV-Turnoff Week, and turning off the screens as well, I am signing off the computer for the rest of the day, to try to break free of the binary code hidden behind what I write, what you read.
