i wish
riverfeier
Saturday night festival of explosions, fireworks and low-flying fighter jets scamming the river. I was standing behind five dark rows of people. Festive. Restive. Everybody chatting. The city stood lit up behind its bridge, then the fireworks started. Without hesitation the crowd bloomed like a field of poppies, dozens of tiny, high-held screens. Disbelieving, I looked around. Everywhere people were holding up their phones at arm’s length like you would hold a small child to show them a marching band. It was impossible to watch the world without seeing it onscreen and multiplied, as though we were standing in a broadcast instead of our lives. A girl near me held up her phone for so long that when the fireworks died the blokes behind her asked, “Aren’t your arms getting tired?” She tucked the screen in to her chest and began seamlessly typing and scrolling. No pause. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” I thought. “There was, and there still is, but who cares.” Watching her mouth tuck itself in at the corner I translated, out of the dim bitterness of my heart: At Riverfire. Amazeballs, you shd see it. Luv u Brisbane.
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if you want to watch it on a screen, live stream it, stay at home and save petrol. Sadness.
My thoughts exactly, James. It is hard not to tap people on the shoulder and say, Pssst! This is life… and you’re missing it.
The moment. It’s about the moment. You remember the feeling, the sounds, the smells and you describe it to others. You don’t really need that video. (Well that’s how we did it before).
See it all the time and despair a little more and more. It’s one of the reasons I don’t own a mobile. The biggest reason being that it seems to most that the person on the phone is more important than the one you are with.
I agree, Scott. From my heart. The moment is all we have. All we ever can have! Literally nothing else exists.
Extra eyes in the sky, held there as though they may see something more than we do. Wishful god’s-eyes, second sightings ,vision once removed like a distant relation.
privacy
.
so, there is a heaven:
the sky remembers everything we’ve said
every single call
every bulb of gas
the sky has eyes, the eyes of governments
twitching at the ends of stalks
.
missing the point yet seeing all
PC, TV, satellite dish
that eye inside the house has wires to every room
collecting the dew a sleeping family breathe.
Still we are creatures impervious
to enquiry, innerly driven
luminous on the ocean floor and
carrying on our backs lit cities visible
from space, from space
.
what has lit space to do with us
I will go about my business.
.
Now did the gas man in my ceiling
leave a tiny camera
secretly are we married now, tied like
two cans on a wire
.
first I scuttle; then I strip.
Like the Japanese private
fighting alone on an island in ’59
I hope by outgrowing nubility
to escape commercial value
.
So come out, come out,
wherever you are!
deploy your Angelinas and your Brads;
let them seduce the lens
away from the twelve, no – the eleven
people who’ve never made a phone call.
Sponsor the founding of a home
for the poor (‘heaven’)
and for the rich (‘earth’)
.
.
“and a forest of spikes”
.
“for the ark of sample animals”
.
“so we can all watch each other”
.
“and never, ever sleep”