collateral damage
Cut and tear and burn and melt and tape and glue. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque arm wrestle on a cafe table, Le Monde under each elbow, as Juan Gris takes notes. The rude descend the staircase. Robert Zimmerman peers through a kaleidoscope and sees a multi-dimensional tarantula. Old Bill, with a shotgun blasting through canvas, or cutting up his words with a pair of scissors in one hand and a needle in the other. Tribal masks dance through a haze, induced by the smoke from melted plastic. Tangible, analogue control X and control V. If you go too far, you cannot come back. No matter; nothing matters. All is matter. All is fodder. The edges are not clean, they are not smooth, they are never perfect. As for the center, it cannot hold.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”