This study attempts to establish the extent of the influence that digital information can have on users. The paper demonstrates that one does not have to directly observe the data, in order that s/he may be influenced by it.
The words for today are:
Antebellum, Cogent, Captious, Scion
Sonia & Alexandru:
Antebellum came the marks of fury; Antebellum came the shots of warning. Cogent cries became drowned and bathed in their own blood. No scion or saviour could be delivered; and the ravaged served as a captious declaration, utterly unforgiving. Now, the generations of tomorrow shall cast their own shadows and so end all.
The words for today are:
Biblicoclasm, Chthonic, Paracme, Magniloquent, Selcouth
Alexandru:
The cigarette burned between his lips, smoke cascading upwards, towards the plastered ceiling. Thin rays of light filtered through the tendrils and struck the girls face, silhouetting her. They made an odd sight, the two of them, standing amongst the ruble. He was tall, strong and clad in metal. She was a girl of six. “The bad men were here” she says, her tone indifferent. He nods, switches the cigarette to the other corner of his mouth; “They camped for the night”.
His eyes see the building as it used to be before the chthonic mouth of hell vomited it’s bile over the world. A magniloquent cathedral, supporting itself on three walls, color and shape interwoven in its selcouth structure. An old sanctuary, not that he believed in such religious fancies. “Wait here” he tells her. Careful that his armor does not glint in the afternoon sun, he begins to scale the farthest, toppled, wall. Pebbles stream downward, and the girl’s eyes follow his ascending figure until paracme. She patiently waits for his hand to motion her; then, when his fingers trace an invisible arc in the air, she climbs next to him. At the top, the city lays sprawled before them in all its buried splendor- A smoldering page in the biblioclasm of history. He waits for her to take it all in, for the wave of that unknown feeling she called ‘potentiality’ to crash though her, then, cautiously, points somewhere in the distance. “They are there.”. She looks. Further along a dilapidated street, four grey shapes busy themselves around what had once been an ambulance. “We wait for them here.”
__-__
Sonia:
Her breathing quickened as she descended slowly along the stone wall. Sweat dribbled down her temples and stained the collar of her shirt. In the darkness, her footing was lost for a moment and she almost slid off. A question flitted through her mind: Why am I here? In response, her mind threw her backwards through time. The magniloquent shaman had been difficult to deal with but in a moment of cooperation, he told her that she would find answers here. Her questions would lead her to legends of the chthonic, lost and buried deep within the earth. But that was in the past. Now. The moment was now. Quickly, she regained her footing and clambered down the wall and into the damp selcouth abyss. There was an enormous stone door with a tiny gnarled knob and she hesitated as she placed her hand on it. Memories of her travels, frustrations, hardships and trials came rushing back at once. She had lived a lifetime, well beyond her paracme. Now. The moment was now.
Short story (2k words) which attempts to mess around with temporal frameworks. The first three parts each respectively represent the present, the past and the future. The fourth part is ‘outside time’ -in respect to the diagesis.
->Read<-
The words for today are:
Imbue, Lorgnette, Bellicose, Castigate, Perennial
Alexandru:
Remove the drapery –
Behold! To all of us,
there comes a second nature;
Ambivalence of trained desires
opposing what within ourselves
imbues the human question.
Inevitable law of flesh
within the mind –
creates a warring tension.
Perennial, the thoughts collide
and deep beneath the mask of rhyme
rip souls in two dimensions.
***
Bellicose gods, they take me down;
from mind’s high sky they take me.
To green and brown,
and amber drowned
to land removed from safety.
***
Wings of memories and spit –
we built,
to touch the cloud of reason.
Castigate, or cast aside
all that which, within our mind
saw this perverse intrusion.
…
Lorgnette
__-__
Sonia:
The eyes peer through the lorgnette, watching curiously as a lovers’ quarrel plays out on the stage. A beautiful expression of anger flashes across the woman’s face. The air of the theatre becomes imbued with electricity and excitement with the dramatic tension. Can an emotion be captured? Can it become the perennial photograph of a universe? The audience sighs at declarations of love and cries at the subsequent betrayals. The unfaithful are met with bellicose glares, merciless and unforgiving while the heroic are remembered and immortalized through myth. Eternity castigates and entertains with its constant innovations. As the curtains fall, darkness throws them into anonymity. Goodbye thank you for coming this is the end of the yellow brick road.
This paper endeavors to demonstrate the upper and lower limits of human knowledge. It shows that no matter how wrong an individual is, there is a fundamental grain of truth within his ideas. Conversely, no matter how right an individual is – his is only an illusory, relative rightness.
ADDENDUM: Upon reading Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, I discovered that much the same argument is put forward by him, in a considerably more convincing manner.
The words for today are:
Canaorous, Repast, Tenebrous, Nescience, Effulgence
Alexandru:
In the court of the high king there is, hidden from nescient eyes, a garden. Its paths are marked by slender grace, its shades are canorous in timbre, and ere the stream and lightening tree, tenebrous shades linger. Effulgence and shadow there converge, around a kindled fire, where prince and princess meet tonight — between smoke and tendril and desire. Removed from age and place, from time and space, from day and night and wisdom. The prince the princess steals back today, in gallop; back to his kingdom.
__-__
Sonia:
Hate is a strong word. So when I tell you that I hate this shithole of a city, you better fucking believe me. Tenebrous shadows dance down the street. In the surprising effulgence of a street lamp, a woman shrieks suddenly as a hooded figure snatches her purse and disappears into the black alley. But she does not chase after him. Doing so would be a terrible mistake on her part. A few stolen dollars are not worth her fragile sanity. This city is where demons come to repast and to satiate their filthy fucking selves. A fog of nescience and indecency permeates up from between every pebble and grain of grime as if we were built on a pocket of Hell. The sad thing is that it’d be better if this were Hell; at least I’d know that it can’t get worse. The canorous rumble of a distant gunshot passes like a stroke of lightning; brilliant and powerful for an instant and wholly apathetic, leaving behind the ravaged ruins of this illusion we call “order”.
The words for today are:
Solipsism, Assertoric, Ostensibly, Purposive, Tutelary
Alexandru:
Every day without fail the people brought offerings to their new God. Every day for seasons lost from memory. Every day since the “Great Descent”. The tutelary iron God had given them true eyes, eyes that now understood the world; that measured, that estimated. Assertoric eyes. They had been faithful, they had understood and followed their God’s purposive gifts. But now it was different. The mad times were coming. They no longer understood God, they no longer saw.
He had crashed on an uncharted world; trapped within the confines of his own wreckage. Alone to his own self he had fashioned himself God to those outside. Creator of a new, better, civilization. The centuries that passed brought his children, and his solitude, to maturity. Alone, so utterly alone. Ostensibly he maintained direction, willing his sons to their destined spirit. Yet so alone; with himself and himself and himself and himself. He saw now that his children did not exist. They never had. How could they? There was only him and himself and the others. A universe within a mind within a solipsism.
__-__
Sonia:
She remembered those naive times. The tragedy was, she realized, that they were not realized as such until they became solid. But even afterwards, they would decay, disintegrate…die. Thinking back to those times, a face from the dusty cobwebs of unconsidered time emerged. Her hand slid down the wet slick surface of the rain-streaked window and slammed down on the window sill. With that purposive gesture, the face fragmented and disappeared into the ruined depths. “I will never think of that face again,” her reflection had announced assertorically. There would be no question; that face would inevitably cut her again, break her down and make her fall to pieces. She had ostensibly loved him and nobody had any reason to think otherwise. After all, he had been everything and more: a tutelary friend, a lover, a kindred spirit. But he had not turned to be who she had thought – or perhaps, who she had hoped him to be. “Solipsism is lonely,” her reflection said sadly. She did not reply; instead, she turned and left. Her reflection could do nothing but stare numbly at her retreating back.
The words for today are:
Susurrus, Capitulate, Dapple, Incipient, Capacious
Alexandru:
A room, modestly decorated in the Victorian fashion. Man enters. He fills the velvet-brocade armchair, capitulating to the comfortable indulgence. Welcome. Amiably he returns the greeting. He looks expectant; what do you do? Ask about the moon’s shadow over water. He smiles and gives the expected response. You are both of the accord. He entrusts you with a susurrus of information, knowledge the queen herself would hold dear. Your next action is now inescapable. No one must know it was you; the revolver deafens the capacious residence. The man topples on the floor. Red dapples the upholstery. This will be the first of many as the night continues; The incipient plot has set in motion.
__-__
Sonia:
Night was pulling its darkening curtain across the sky. It became dappled with the eyes of lost gods. They watched the bloom of the incipient love a galaxy away. On the edge of a capacious clearing, two lifetimes converged. Energy pulsed and sighed in unison to their rhythms, sending out waves of susurruses. Hand in hand, they climbed higher and higher and higher, gasping, and breathing, building and spirally up together until finally at the apex, they capitulated to the intensifying tempo and at that moment, cosmos stilled…out of the stillness was a beat. The first of many; the beginning.
The words for today are:
Apodictic, Liquidise, Distrait, Deprecate, Umbrage
Alexandru:
By the time he was twenty the magic had left the world. It was inevitable he reasoned; he now had enough information to piece together an accurate interpretation of this universe. One has to go to work, breathe the corporate air, make money and buy things. It was Apodictic. He told himself this. Every day. And every day he became more distrait. On his twenty-first birthday he remembered his childhood dream. His childhood promise to himself; that night staring at an endless sky, he had promised never to grow up. That night. Oh how he wished he could liquidise those dreams and inject that fever back into his veins. Let it burn through him, consume this new umbrageous soul, scorch his eyes clean. Virgin eyes. By twenty-three he was sycophantically going through his memories. Touching, seeing, inhaling, being. Searching for every piece that was himself and switching it with its current deprecate iteration. He would be whole again. He will. Again. Whole.
__-__
Sonia:
What is this? A thought. This particularly apodictic one contains something that ensnares Attention. It is pulled through the window pane to find itself dwarfed by the vast expanses. Never realizing that so many possibilities existed behind the walls, it chooses a path out of many. One excited step forward but, it becomes distrait by a tsunami of apprehension. The path keeps winking in and out of existence, shifting each time it reappears. Attention glances back. Where its footprints lie, the path is solid. Many of them are strengthened; some are even created. But broken connections are a terrible umbrage. Consciousness always deprecates the dysfunctional. In turn, it is liquidised to build more and more until they form a single common nexus. A single common nexus that is but another’s footprint on another path.
