Year of the Living Dead

How close were we?

Close enough to collapse

At least that's what Mervyn said

Walt was having nothing of it

We have collapsed (he insisted)

It's not possible (Virginia opined)
and I refuse to believe it

It was only one year ago that I found myself
checking my accounts every thirty minutes
and decided that we would brave the storm
and come out stronger because of it

But we are not stronger --

(she waited but hearing no other, continued)

We are not even resilient

We are Modern

Meaning what? (she rhetorically asked herself)

Meaning we are the living dead

But at least we have iPhones
(she quipped and began searching
Google News under the term
"Great Depression")

We have to admit that we are exacting

But is it possible to press a little further
and wonder whether we may not refer to
our sense of being "in recovery"
as being temporarily "in remission"?

How shall I set myself free of
all of the imposed methods?

(Virginia asked this aloud
knowing that Walt was thinking
pretty much the same thing
even if their methodologies
were anything but in sync)

Is it the method that inhibits the creative power?

Virginia shook the question off
but then it came back to bite her:

Is it due to the method that we feel
neither jovial nor magnanimous
but centered in a self which
in spite of its tremor of susceptibility
never embraces or creates
what is outside itself and beyond?

Walt secretly wished she would just ditch
this whole gargantuan task of ridding the self

There's nothing to get rid of --

(he once chastised her)

so just get rid of it

Do you suppose --

(she hesitated)

Do you suppose our contemporary aesthetic
is always already openly derivative?

Walt was not sure how to answer her

Counter-party risk in intersubjective role-playing
was a totally new operational mode of becoming

something he had never really traded in

He could speculate on their certain demise
for hours and hours on end
forecasting where all of this would lead them

But the more he speculated the more he returned
to the inevitable transfer of funds that would
mark the trajectory of their mutual inheritance

Money is a kind of poetry --

(Walt began quoting Wallace Stevens)

-- but then there is the story of
what in the past I have thought of as
my tendency toward creating speculative fictions

... of risking everything for the making of new work
that could easily make it impossible to continue
surviving ...

These speculative fictions are not poetry at all

Walt was acting as if he had had a couple drinks

They are intuitive rolls of the dice
where one codes new programming languages
that transform the techniques of data visualization
(what is sometimes called "creative visualization")
into the pure potential of postproduction

Virginia knew her time was up

She went to bed and started reading:

People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

---

Metadata: collapsing, becoming, programming, reading