Reality

 

[Reality]

“A line of verse has as much reality as a cheese coupon or chilblains.” (Etty Hillesum, December 1941)

 

Sometimes reality seems to have

no beginning or end

but we do.

 

Experience teaches how reality

inspires intense research;

other days it’s just shut the door.

 

Running one way is one way

while everyone else is running

the other towards reality.

 

The loudest voice in the room

is worth distinguishing from

the silence that is beyond words.

 

Reality is work and vice versa,

testing the body to the limit;

it is rest, pondering change.

 

O the follies accomplished

and the heavens found with something

tangible as reality.

 

When it’s hot it’s hot.

Reality is whatever’s there

in the cold light of day.

 

Humans are landscapes

breathing invisibility deep

and taking the medicine.

 

Innocent words cover lots of

territory, trialled and transcendent,

but to be scrunched and thrown away.

 

 

 

Reality

 

Having never watched even five minutes of reality TV in my life, it comes as a surprise to watch one of its most famous promoters going steadily mad in real time. Every time he opens his mouth he cannot lie straight in bed. Even when his mouth’s shut he twitches and glares as the camera catches his descent towards an insane asylum. Countries where the state control its media would limit its ageing mouthpiece’s appearances to 60 seconds of the “hello!” hallowed cult leader. The script would keep to the script. But the former leader of the free world lives in a country of 24-hour feeds where his every word is regurgitated for everyone to see and hear. Reality TV was never like this, I imagine. The worst of the regurgitation was edited out before going to air, leaving only prime gurge for the public to gorge upon. Instead we have a stream of consciousness that hasn’t read a book for several years, Rambo rambles every colour of the rainbow. AI cannot keep up with the script, AI being programmed to understand grammar and present a monotone version with some relationship to reality. Unusually, this reality TV show is called a presidential election. Usually such an election requires future leaders of the free world to know when to say something, and when not. This is a norm and is called politics in the free world. Lawyers are good at this technique, real estate grifters not so. Hence, when a former leader who would be a future leader of the free world fills every second with his next thought, it is a new kind of reality TV. The Senate and People of Rome were never party to the endless unconnected opinions of an unhinge, which is as well given they had to worship their leader as a god. Forsooth, Romans were conditioned to rumour. They would have felt uncomfortable having the rumours about Unhingeus confirmed in permanent news cycles that Unhingeus himself was only too willing to circulate. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Sounds weird, but not as weird as watching it every day on our screens, as the amateur psychologist in all of us examines why the former leader of the free world pretends his wife is not living a separate life from his. Pretends he knows people he’s never met. Pretends to have policies. Pretends that his rallies are the biggest in history, at the very least, or even bigger. Pretends he has not had sex with a concubine, even though a law court found he shifted millions of denarii to keep her quiet about it. Pretends he has read a book. Fortunately for historians, AI was invented to study his insane transcripts in condensed form, even as he descends for the whole world to watch towards either a jail or, as mentioned earlier, an asylum. Critics uniformly give his performance half a star: doesn’t keep to the script, every third word is ‘nasty’.        

Reality (January)

Transfers of red flowers are handed to January visitors entering Yayoi Kusama’s space. The writing is on the wall at the entrance: “I saw an entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers… My soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space. This was not illusion but reality itself.” Flowers, peeled off, are fixed to surfaces, leaving red outlines on the backing. But there is another reality: Conditions of Entry. A guard warned it isn’t allowed to take home used transfer backings left in the bins provided.