Looking Back

 by Shaun Lawton 

            Outpainting in DALL*E w/ 'digital watercolors' technique in DDG

    How words transform into weather patterns 

that keep the world in check on a seasonal basis 

  remains a mystery along with the rest of the 

questions and enigmas we have yet to resolve 

in our mind's eye.

      

    That's one of the ongoing problems with our human narrative. We have a tendency to forget we're partly behind the forging of the script, not just handed down over the generations, but we're so intent on writing the programs of our individual lives, our forgetfulness of the vital role we play in the unfolding dramedy of Life comes to the fore once again, leaving us rudderless and without a sense of direction.

   At least so I've come to regard a certain quality of our situation here, afloat if from nothing but the conjoined motion of celestial objects arranged in such grandiose a pattern as to have its origins escape our knowledge completely, and as for its ultimate outcome none but the blindest among us having the faintest clue. Looking back remains the very least we can do, and that's exactly what we do when we look in to the stars. 

 

   The notion that something or someone may be looking back at us while we fruitlessly search the constellations for any given so-called signs of extraterrestrial life becomes comforting when we imagine ourselves to be the ones looking back at perhaps those out there who may be in the process of searching for us.  The Trade-Off that seals our half of the bargain of existence seems to be that the circuit of eternity breaks for every incarnation made into this material plane.  With that momentary breach of connection comes the dissolution of death and the consummation of rebirth.  By looking back, in a manner of speaking we look forward. 

   By straying behind, we may as well be getting ahead of ourselves, because we're only repeating the cycle of exercise needed to move forward. Otherwise we're coasting on the winds of dream, which is to say spending roughly one third of our existence sleeping.  Look forward toward the approaching horizons of the remaining days of our lives. What you see there, whether fully formed in your mind's Eye or not, resembles more of the same as its ever been.  Looking back we get to look forward, as if into a mirror, to the time that we, like our own ancestors, make it as far as we can. 

   It can also be noted that we all spend just enough time here to never look back, after a manner of speaking. Seen in another way,  looking back is a form of memorization. A technique used by scholars and actors, primarily. When all the world's a stage set with characters realized from our dreams it will be the ones who gave away the benefit of their doubts whose bravery will be redeemed. This is simply another way to say that the endless set of eyes, both lidless and shut, that have arrived to the here and now, are always looking back on one another in our simultaneity of experience, as we all keep our attention set on the road before us dead ahead. 

:Or, moment of equilibrium

 by Shaun Lawton  

What we have here  

    a virtual series of interruptions 

 we're passwords used and perpetuated so often 

we evolved into sentient beings 

   we're long forgotten passwords that still manage to unlock 

   doorways of perception

 we're  passwords past recollection never memorized 

     because we create our own reality 

  the doorway to our creation wraps around us in 3D

 We think in three dimensions before being interrupted 

  by a virtual series of passwords 

    because we awaken we lift our eye lids

  to be interrupted by the light 

we recognize this interruption for the firing of the neuron

 we memorize enough passwords to decode one letter 

    of the new password preventing us from access 

       to the word passed over by so many that

 the impasse left in its wake has been forgotten

 

   never mind being interrupted 

     the password required itself is an interruption 

        that renders an abeyance into action 

 almost as if all these examples of latent remission

    the consecution of quiescence in suspension 

   are sending whispers to us over the wavelengths

 of time: Or, moment of equilibrium 

   from which our interruption 

     may intrude upon others who from

  afar themselves may have been watching 

  our procession of disturbances

~ art & words written by Shaun Lawton  

 

Gematriatic Experimentations

 

text prompt:   ALV MIKAL GBRIAL VRPAL

one result in DDG:

four variants in DALL*E:

Here's a screen-grab to give you a better idea of the first Gematriatic Experimentation. 

As you can see, I entered the old Hebrew 'ALV MIKAL GBRIAL VRPAL', [click on image above to see larger better detail] which translates to "These are Mikhael, Gabriel and Raphael;" for each phrase = 701.

Note the seasonal aspects of the first four random variants.  The seasonal aspect is eerie with winter in the first image, spring in the second, summer in the third culminating in the fall season organized like a township around a church.  

   As random forms of divination go, this AI guided tool for generating images stands second to none. 

Vestiges of a Reflection

 

  by Shaun Lawton 

   We all know there's nothing left of our dream. When it comes right down to it, not enough of us made it. We who are left are the few, the stranded. Lost on the shores of a rapidly changing cosmic tide. Once together strong in our own respective packs, now strewn far apart with very few left together, nearby or in between. It's as if the natural tendency for gravitational vortices to be generated around every living body across the scale, from the microcosmic on up, makes you wonder if our own solar system could be considered but a cell in a gigantic macromolecular construct fleshing out the skeleton of time. 

   It leads one to begin thinking about the possibilities behind the idea of resurrecting the land with mycelium feeding on the decomposition of organic matter. Striking the circle of life's spark into ignition with the Sun and ushering in the blossoming of a self sustained life cycle. Things most people don't take the time to think about. After all, what good will it do after you learn it? The cycles of the quartermoon sky will sweep on by for incalculable degrees, adding to the feeling we're really traveling far into the distance of what we've come to consider as outer space. Only in time may we find the answer to have rested with us all along. That time becomes the space we're rooted in, each to one another's oblivion. 

  By then it will be far too late for any one of us. Who knows where we'll be, those of us left alone in our own homes respectively. Each one facing the inevitable outcome. At that point it shouldn't matter anymore. Drive out for a couple of hours toward the northern shores of the nearest lake. There you will find a hill of volcanic rocks or a spiral jetty coiling inward on a sandy shore with pink puddles strewn about in a labyrinthine assembly stretched to the horizon where the blue sky's almost entirely erased by the cloudbank piling up into the air. Perhaps we will think of each other for a moment right then and there and smile. 

   

Suspended Animation

by Shaun Lawton

Once I wrote words of molten metal (calling to action for the good of the moment)
Forged in the heat of my lucid dreams (exalted convictions for the benefit of all)
They may be used against me eventually (after they are written down to be read)
Because everyone's on the so-called good side (seen through their own eyes)

Stepped In Life

   To really uncover the manifold viewpoint which my speculative exercises in creative writing lead toward, it becomes necessary for us to take the tip of a clue and run to the ends of the iceberg with it.

   Given that the real nature of our solar system is an order of magnitude different from how most
of us are likely to perceive it, it's quite enough to scale up the relative accuracy, that is to say, refocus it to clearly see just how ignorant we naturally are to begin with, take a close look in the mirror, and smile.

   Knowledge is a process which begins with the lack of
   knowledge, and that lack is what we use to define ignorance.

   The truth, as it appears to our normal everyday thinking about the "experienced knowledge of our solar system"(and by extension, the galaxy it belongs to and the universe as well, of course) always falls short of the real magnificence on display not by one single order of magnitude, but by so many orders of magnitude as to leave one stunned in abject shock reeling with the inability to further process it all.

   Even when we compare things which seem different by suggesting they are "like night and day"to each other, it doesn't come close to capturing the sheer degree by which we are so wrong about everything in this life--beginning with our real place in it.

   By "it" I mean the cosmos of course--what else could I possibly have meant?

   It.  Here.  Now.  Reality.  The Universe.  You.  Me.  This planet.  History.  Our lives.
All of us.  We.  This.  This thing we share.   This street which has no name with our own names
already fading from it.  This address to which is prescribed one resident.   There...now.  All better, world.

~   ~   ~  

The end of the iceberg is a magnifying glass fore cast to melt 

the next time this star comes rotating into view

 from behind the frozen armor of our world.   

~  ~  ~

   We must perforce gaze through it quickly before it melts away completely.
The big Reveal is relatively simple once it's been given to a life form to grasp.
The problem is one of having to necessarily remember or recall to be exact
the stupendous breadth of our cosmos while being navigated upon the course
of our exhalation's depth, a combination (our beholding the universe and our selves)
that rarely gels into clarification for any creature caught up in the experiencing.

   Yet clues are collected in the cuffs of our clothes.
If a fading colored bead falls in the forest, hear it
echo like a cannonade of pealing thunder!
Know the leaves dessicated and blown back down
trampoline shattered have been scoured and cleansed
of all pox populi but the parts which remained a grippin'
thus scarcely yet barely meaning 'more than is god given enough'
or another word for plenty which while we're on the subject
of words that's what they all mean ever last lovin' one of em, PLENTY.

   The word means plenty.
   Plentiful.  Plentiplutarian.

   It all translates, roughly, to

   "That which we are capable of imagining always equals the lowest common variable
denominator plus itself...we are capable of imagining, at the very most, one thing plus itself,
which means we are capable of imagining two things; but that is where the capacity for us to imagine
anything else drops off abruptly to absolute zero, nill, null, void, empty set, nothing, zilch, nada, zero."

   Unless we try harder, that is.  That's jumping ahead of ourselves.
   The way things really are is at least a billion times more interesting than how we normally think of it.

   UNLESS, again...that is,  We.  Pull.  Ourselves.  Together.  But what does that even mean? 

   Must we pull ourselves together individually before we get it so that we can pull ourselves together as a people?  Think on it.  Thank you.  It's necessary to begin at the beginning...and that means every single one of us.

   Is it possible that there is One Meaning to this thing which no matter how many other ways of slicing it into different and separately contextual sub-definitions manages to nonetheless capture the totality of possible spirits manifested within it?   The answer is a resoundingly and infinitely echoing into underlapping silence YES and I am pleased to know this backwards as well as forwards.  SAY-YES.

   JUST LIKE our Solar System is not TWICE as amazing and complex and mindblowing as we formerly thought it was, and not THREE times more so nor even FIVE times more so and no not even TEN TIMES more amazing than we formerly thought, and not one hundred times more so nor one thousand times more, but somewhere on the order of a HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES more astonishing than we formerly thought possible.   And then some.


   Just like this teensy weensy almost insignificant observation, we may infer that most queries into the unknown nature of our existence most likely as well would provide insights so stunning as to be beyond our capacity to even imagine?  Oh wait--it is.  By definition.


   See, it's NOT that we cannot imagine a supermassive, titanic amount of God-staggering data; it's specifically and exactly that our ability to do so is necessary not for the task of imagining complexities we enjoy fabricating in our mind's eye, but for the actual necessity of understanding truth, which ITself may appear staggering on a level far too many times removed, in terms of complexity of execution, from that which we are capable of being programmed to normally comprehend; but for a built in genetic clause, which, when activated, triggers an elemental information-exchange program which raises the level of awareness in the mind of its host until the saturation point causes a flash-pan messianic complex, often with results far superior to those which were anticipated.

   The fundamental paradoxes we've detected at the base levels of quantum and classical physics point toward a deeper design which accounts for how  THE BIG PICTURE frames itself:  from aligning two mirroring halves--the micro- and macro- aspects of our universe.

   We human beings exist at the cutting edge level of where the macroverse and microverse appear to meet.   In a real manner of speaking, our feet are mired down in the thriving, living muck of the microverse itself just seething up and out and away from the planet core of our beautifully idiosyncratic world spinning in revolution about our yellow Dwarf star, itself on a vastly more gigantic scale circling about the central galactic core of the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy amid billions; while our heads tower upthrust through the clouds in our mind thinking our eyes can "see the view above the world" with a clarity that often mistakes the real nature of what we are examining.

   For when we study the remainder of our universe; that is, every other star in our own galaxy as well as which might be contained in every other galaxy out there--bar none--we may truly lend the focus of our gaze to the most magnificent mystery which has haunted our species since we first crawled out of the brine to stand upon these sandy shores and dream.  We are staring at nothing less than Death itself.    

   In order to direct our attention towards and examine carefully with our own eyes that phenomenon known as Life (from which we ourselves appear to have stepped in to remain relatively unscathed for the time being, at least individually as far as we can tell) it becomes necessary to cast our gaze down at our feet onto the ground and pay strict attention to the vast aspect of this earthly dominion we have either inherited, or to be quite frankly put out enough to suggest, that this terraformed planetary habitat has been unfortunate enough to have received our rather rude and thoughtless imposition on its once, shall we say, more  pristine original condition...

   All of which is to say, after a manner of pointing out, here on this isolated blog Exorlyric on Google's blogger domain,  that the common denominator appearing throughout different examples of depictions which convey how things really are as contrasted against how they have been understood by most of us,  is mainly that the difference between the reality and our perception of it is by an order of magnitude so unexpected that it would leave us all dumbfounded with astonishment and amazement bordering on stupefaction, were we to be exposed to it.    

   It's important to point this single fundamental principle out.  The Truth Is Far Crazier Than We Think, Even If It's Simple.  It's a point of reference which might better be cited as a point of reverence--why-?--because of the altogether Far Crazier Platform Of Amazement which reality appears to operate on--which, regardless of how any living sentient creature on this Earth might perceive it to be, is and always shall remain weirder and more unexpected than anything any one of us could ever imagine.

   The mere fact our existence on this spinning ball of rock, metal and plasma apparently caught up in billions of years orbiting about our nearby yellow Dwarf Star is still an ongoing phenomenon mutually enjoyed by us all and which has yet to be and may not ever become accounted for by science, I say, is evidence enough for even the most rigorous logician, doctor, or priest to sit before in a moment of silence and share each other's speechlessness before it all.   

Outside Language

When you're out of things to say,
Something goes beyond stating.

 From the void a countenance emerges,
  From something it has forgotten.

When a face forgets the color of its mask,
It's time to paint another.

Do not fold away into a flower,
Escape into the snake eye's reflection.

(to be cont.)