Prosetry? I decided to call it that. Then decided to Google. It's like bobbing for apples, right? And the word came up, with links clinging like seaweed. These led to free verse advocates, poets engaged in changing the established order. Persiflage.
The new bird just sat there on the fence, watching. I had just put out some bits of walnut. But it's watching. What can I say?
There is another way of communicating.
Words in their context lead to others that sing their own songs. In a way then, I'm not entirely in charge of what I'm saying. Themes out of other traditions pass through, on the strength of a rhyme or a pun only discovered in the last moment.
These are timeless? The whole is self-recursive, yet lacking self talk. Or does it matter. Questions arise that I have no intention of answering. The pen moves on, plowing through familiar fields, riding into impossibility, between the lines, through the cracks and a promise of meaning is luminescent. It is in the eye of the beholder, in a cloud of midges startled by a beam of light. They stick like sand to a squashed orange.
Ah, we've caught it! Infamous for rhyming with nothing.
Well, catch as catch can, I say. Prosetry makes itself up as it goes along. The show must go on.
It seems to have wrapped itself around in a circle, going faster and faster, as though hurling a slingshot. Next it will colonize the moon, hoping to discover water there from which to synthesize fuel for more distant leaps. (The military advantage is not mentioned.) Remember Jackie Gleason?: To the Moon, Alice! It was a joke, of course. But now it's: Mars!
Shall we take this seriously? Possibly. More and more, science fiction is becoming true science.
Not so long ago, there was an Iron Horse. Ka-chug! Coal became king. The pea soup fog of London ended that dream. Excuses were made. But science to the rescue – an internal combustion engine. It developed more power than the Horse, and did not belch smoke. The invisible fumes made London look better, though it started getting hotter.
Little did Londoner's know, or care, that a new source of energy would be developed. It would be from an intellectual discovery made by a genius. Science became king. A brief equation, E=MC², revealed enough energy in a few grams of uranium to fuel a nuclear reactor capable of powering cities. Or in fact, of destroying several with one blow. It's developer quoted: “I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.”
Discoveries eked out by patient observation, with subsequent hypothesis and experimentation, have revealed impersonal laws of physics. The discoverers, immersed in their pursuit, have left uses to be worked out by technologists. Who is at the helm?
Suppose I say, hey, slow down here. Take stock of what's happening on our planet. Who will put the ends together? We've sliced and diced it, destroying ecosystems. Invisible fumes that cleared London's air stayed around to suffocate it. And in fact, the whole earth as well.
No one is at the helm. The dangers of nuclear energy production are well known, and storage of nuclear waste is a long term and short term growing problem. The chariots of the gods are being prepped for further excursions, and who cares? Science rides us bareback.
Oh, but it's for the common good, isn't it? Ever onward we trek out to the stars. The advance of knowledge is what matters.
But our children know. “How dare you!” said Greta Thunberg. The hurt and anger crying out before elders at the United Nations, convened. Is she to be answered with ever larger rockets?
Until the ends are put together, faster and faster, revving up the sling shot. . .
