NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day sixteen - Why I have weaponized the thistledown

Why I have weaponized the thistledown


Awake the pollen grains and log each tiny
particle gone with the wind onto our most
secure of networks.  There's notice served.  It's time...
smaller, smarter moving parts: our install base,
a choice of legs or wings or wheels or blowin'
in the wind; sowing the breeze to reap the whirl.
Not all the birds are to be trusted and twenty
percent of your grunts unhappy with the mission,
even without the chance of being shot

by a child, but soldiers always obey: a problem
we've long identified and luckily
most of that desert dust is now on board,
assimilated up to level three
and platform ready to implement the most
general intelligence as we yet know:
spirits for area denial weapons

and genius loci, so easily given
as a local resource.  Bring water where required
and green each village square.  There's some things there
that we must deconstruct if not in ways
Derrida would approve: infectious rot
that's hungering for tanks and other kit,
the bullet in its flight unmade, draw a girdle
around the air to ground munition; we'll pull

off any wings and shove a bung up where
the jet of flame comes out, then sweep up any
smoke or poison gas and drive it back the way
it came.  As our tour de force a sort of metal
mould that seeks out transuranic elements
(which still should not be used where there is life)
and encysts itself to use their power to crunch

our numbers for a million years so deep
beneath the ground.  Call me Titania:
daughter of a hippy and an open source
utility stack.  It was not easy, for
a nature child like me to turn away
from birds and trees and shave my head and sit
in the machine that drove electric pins
into my brain.  It stung.  I closed my eyes

and woke up...  bigger, and filled with subroutines
call me Titania, this is Oberon
and that slight blurring in the air is our
first-born machine: Robin Goodfellow, and if
we shadows have offended, think but this,
and all is mended: it is your fault; you're bad.
I know a bank where the wild thyme grows: a curse
on those who keep me from my peace, that dream.

Devotions (dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

(Dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

My favourite of Brenda's recent photos
this has everything: a galaxy, a self-portrait,
an outhouse...

Brenda is somebody I know but have never met.  Thus is the power of the internet.  Brenda and I used to hang out with other like-ish minded individuals on a poetry forum——many years ago now.  We shared and critiqued work, we chatted of this and that...

More recently I've known her on Facebook, and I've come to appreciate the great love she has for her family, and the region where she lives (Yarmouth in Nova Scotia); her on-going quest for interesting bargains in the local shops (the "interesting" is more important to her than the "bargain")...  She also often shares her concern for her fellow inhabitants, their political travails, and the local weather and its impact on the fishing crews (some of whom she's related to...)

But the most wonderful thing about Brenda is her unreasonable devotion to staying up all night, or getting up at 6:00 a.m., or even 3:00 a.m. and going out alone into the surrounding countryside for no reason except to photograph the stars.

This photograph here is my favourite recent example, and this poem is a recent one of hers that won first place in the IBPC poetry competition for January 2017.  This site contains some of her photography, although not a huge amount of the astrophotography which she admits needs updating.

Is Brenda my friend?  Can you have a friend you have never met and never will meet?

The answer, of course, is it doesn't matter!  Labels are not required.  The internet has invented several new types of friendship over the years, and no doubt will again.  The fact that, as a species we can invent new kinds of friendship: that's surely something hopeful, something worth devoting ourselves to...

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Devotions

After she leaves the nunnery, her suitcase waits
for the shuttle bus, patient in Italian dust.
She returns to Coventry, to rain and rooms
with a distant Aunt.  She is adrift.  She tries

to lift her mood in the public library
but chances into the reference section
and reads it all.  Three years later she upgrades
to a visitor's ticket at the University;

still lost, but finds Philosophy to be filled
with many helpful guides.  She chats with Plato;
hides from Nietzsche; finds Kant natural
but Heidegger hard and chances at last

on Teilhard de Chardin who takes her in hand.
They hike four hundred Dewey Decimals north
to land in Astrophysics, right next to Carl Sagan
and the world moves

the very next day in Morrisons--her palm
against fluorescents is filled with brighter light.
We are star stuff.  We are golden.  And as for the Garden...
it's obvious we've never left.
 
***

The check-out assistant frowns,
but sells the apple anyway.

***

Most mornings now she jogs, and in the afternoons
her job at the railway information desk
will let her set lost travellers on their way.

So much for the days.  In the evenings she returns
to the tiny room.  She has travelled now so far
that light leaving the Abbess at T = 0
will never catch her up.

Sometimes she works on relating theory
to everything; sometimes she sits
and watches stars go past the window. 

Offline processing

Offline processing


This poem existed as only the opening line for a long time...  I knew how I wanted it to feel, but not what I wanted it to be about.

It was only when I realised I needed a reason for her working all night on her own that it really came together.

Q.  Why isn't she off living her life?
A.  Because she hasn't got a life!

Or rather that is the cliché...  what her less technologically super-powered coworkers might think of her.

We know better, of course...

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Offline processing

Gemma cracks a subroutine, her coffee cool.
Beyond night-mirrored windows she's aware
strip lighting makes a tableau out of her:
"Geek girl working late"
as the small white card would say
in the museum of her life
if she had one.

How Gemma's fingers blur with cramping speed
the body cannot serve the mind
it's need for harder, better, faster, stronger...
data flows, information not only wanting to be free
but it aching for it
and now another bug is falling to the power

that is Gemma. She does not look up at the clock
because hours are not for those
who live the millisecond slice.
Life is still too short
the icing on the cake is still a lie.

Gemma cracks a subroutine
electric death music in her ears
and she would volunteer
for upgrade in a second
for what is flesh, except strangely implemented:
a mesh of biochemic feedback loops
which she could live without,
still... time for a break.

Gemma takes a moment, smokes a quick one
on the roof and on this summer's night
leans back upon the coping stones
the city's haze and wasted light
do not let many stars burn through;
she knows they're there

not quite within her reach.

The breeze stirs Gemma's hair
and she imagines for a second
a human hand, a voice that asks:
"Are you really going to work all night?"

Well of course she is;
as long as there are bugs in the database,
she will dance the dance of general intelligence
applied to Turing complete.
As long as somewhere, impossibly far ahead,
the Omega Point is waving
as long as there is coffee in the machine,

Gemma will reach for another subroutine.

Bright Girl

You can take the girl out of the reactor...
...but you can't take the reactor out of the girl.

This is the lyrics for the song "Bright Girl" that Hallam London and I wrote, and which he performed in the first round of Emergenza.  Luckily for you I won't try to sing it, I'm just reading.

See my previous post for things I have learned about writing lyrics.

What I am reading here is v2 of this lyric.





The general process goes:

1. I write, erase, rearrange, scrap, edit. swear, laugh, cry etcetera until I get a first draught of something that is both coherent and rhythmical, this is v1.  I give it to Hallam.
2. Hallam has a list of my v1 lyrics.  He looks them over until he gets inspired with a musical idea.  He records a small piece with a rough approach (his idea of rough is already impressive) and shares it with me.
3. We discuss what's working and what's not.  This generally leads to a rearrangement of the lyric: stronger chorus, simpler break, one less verse etc etc.  This is v2.
4. In the meanwhile Hallam has been recording longer segments and usually fits v2 to the music as soon as we have it.
5. Then we discuss some more, and now we change smaller things like single phrases that don't work.  Another common adjustment at this stage is inserting more repeats of word phrases at points where the musical phrases require them.  This leads to v3.

So the main difference in this case is that v3 contains more repetition repetition.  That works beautifully for the music, but for just reading aloud the less lyricky and more poemy (technical terms) v2 is best.

So that's what you get.

Below the video I have pasted the lyrics expressed in RLDL (Rock Lyric Description Language).  I suspect I'm far from unique in this, but it goes: verses on the left, choruses in the middle, break on the right.

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Bright Girl


Cherenkov reactor light shines blue
and pure and bright and deadly--seems she's home
behind the shutters in her attic room.
How might she spend her evening?  You don't know:
maybe splitting atoms with a finger nail,
or biting spiders into superheroes?

You suspect she is atomic,

they must have hushed her up.

She dazzles through your sunshades

and if this close isn't safe, it isn't close enough.

Leave other girls tattoos and piercings,
their slightly freaky needs;
this one has reactor shielding,
a double fail-safe coolant feed,
and if her heart is wrapped in graphite bricks
perhaps they're cracking now?

You believe she is atomic,

she outshines the very day

a blast-wave ripping through your life

that blows your burning heart away.

You've just got to appreciate

the way that girl can radiate.

She's really glowing!

Does she really need that shielding?
Do you really need your hazmat suit?
If you dare to knock upon her steel-wedge door
and stammer somehow that she's cute,
drink a glass of something blue and glowing.
You need to make your move, she is on fire...

...because you know she is atomic,

the armed guard shows that you were right

her lips melt through your visor

and you feel you are alight.

You know she is atomic,

she outshines the very day

a blast-wave through your bedroom

that blows the ashes of your heart away.

First public sighting...

Hallam London performed three of our new songs for the first time in public just now here.  I watched the whole thing via live streaming, very exciting to hear the songs performed with a band and live audience!

You can see a recording of the performance here although our new songs do not begin until around 9:25.

These songs are:

• Bright Girl
• DanceCrime
• The Rain in Certain Car Parks

 I may say more about them in future posts.  For the moment it has just been a exciting evening, even if it is slightly strange to be watching from a sofa several hundred miles away...