tired of london

Both Captor and Hostage, My Mind and I

The atoms pulse and hover and fade as I turn away, then focus and form into the familiar upon my return. In my absence they can be themselves: solids relax into blurry whirls of possibility; liquids bend and unravel at their leisure, scattering themselves into marbles of gossamer; even the air assumes hues and shapes that slither along the tenuous matter in which I believe. I believe in the cloaks of objects, and in the consensus constructed around them. Because I believe, you believe, and because we believe, they believe, and they believe because those before them believed. The painters and the poets aspired to lose their faith, and pierce the gauze upon the world to reveal its truths; their tools conspired against them, being in on the ruse from the outset. Even the mind, unseen and unknowable, is particularly unreliable in penetrating material truths. It harbors great secrets. Out of kindness or contempt it refuses to offer a glimpse of what lies beneath. The mind gives form, gives names, gives expectations and veils the buzzing hovering of matter. This enemy within is unflinching. If I stop believing, will objects dissolve into themselves as they are without the deceitful filters of eye and mind? Am I to have faith in what I cannot see, or faith in what I can?


Copyright 2010 Max Jukes/Brian Edward Hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without permission from the author. Illustration copyright 2010 by max jukes/brian edward hack.

Labels: Biocentrism, Haeckel, Impressionism, Monism, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Physics

posted by max jukes @ 9:35 AM 0 comments

Up the gallows stairs we race

with faces caked with death and aching for its taste. Tipping and slipping our heads through the open loops, tasting the knotted portals as they tighten against our necks, we accept the invitation into whatever follows. In the westerns they hang a man at dawn, but here it could happen at any moment deemed uninteresting enough to warrant such a brief but satisfying diversion. A double hanging on a Sunday means nothing but a busy Monday for the shovelers and pine box builders and the insatiable alchemists of the flesh. Does it matter what we did? Does it matter what we did? In both senses: no. But it should be mentioned that while doing it we felt that life and its opposite were not opposites at all but merely the a-side and the b-side of a one-hit wonder from which the labels had become unglued before we were born.

Copyright 2006 max jukes/brian edward hack. No quotation or reproduction of this material without express written permission of the author.

Labels: 45 rpm records, Biocentrism, Gallows, Hangings

posted by max jukes @ 8:24 PM 0 comments