Glimpsing Beauty and Sublimity Amidst an Ever-Pervasive Background of Publicly Enforced Technological or Cultural, Harassment Averse, Self-Isolation

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).

EMILE DEWEAVER, "Profile"

You see me swagger to a stop

at the crosswalk, chin bobbing on

the currents of my playlist, and the Nike

Swoosh on my sleeveless says

I hold my shape after washing.

I look upstreet, presenting you

the question curving along my cheek.

What a nice man you’re thinking,

his Afro is nonthreatening

like a light bulb invented by Thomas Edison.

You’re having ideas, right? Weighing

myths and elongating for answers.

I’m walking your way, broad as day,

and you have to choose. Do

you relax your shoulders and step

into the street or clench your toes

and face your faith in the human

race: all men are created

sequals, every black

man is not a syllable.

---

...nor every man/ woman his/ her profile,

unless we all so genuinely pretend

So in the music video, we see two behaviourally different profiles of a young woman, one commuting/ blending into an "urban normie" profile version, the other at the beach, establishing a fitness/ beauty profile version.  Gone is authenticity.  Gone is sincerity.  All we see is the genuine pretending of her adapting her profile to suit second order observational positions of "profilicity" through the self-isolation technology of music and headphones, she dances, alone.  All opportunities for presenting a dance card to a like-minded individualist on a comparable derive, technologically foreclosed. 

Object-relations mediating the social.  Cultural-relations mediating the social.  Will human-relations ever restore or establish a new social without such intervening and foreclosing intermediaries?

Post-Punk

Mr Peeps

Salacious cat called Mr Peeps

who spent his hours fast asleep,

Would view his man with cool disdain

I guess one learns to live with pain.

His antics were a mite bizarre

He wore a suit and drove a car,

And rose when he was half asleep

then left the blankets in a heap.

The walk around the neighbourhood

would get him out and do him good,

A bowler hat was held aloft

and folk declared he was a toff.

It's said he would create a stir

his overcoat was classic fur,

With half-moon glasses on his nose,

he came up smelling like a rose.

- Tparry898

You are Now Entering Dyschronia...

Astrum. Closed city. Paradise.

[Music]

The nano machine collective, Kairos eliminates the population's dark thoughts during dreaming.

No crime is possible. But today, the founder of the city has been murdered. It's your duty, Supervisor HAL, to find the killer.

Explore your abilities as a variant. Use your memory dive manipulate the past...

[Music]

...and unveil the truth avoid the destruction of the last paradise of humanity. Bring the murderer to justice. But be careful, the past hides mysteries for a reason.

"Let's finish this. Shouldn't I be dead?"

[Music]

Dyskronia - Kronos alternate

MidSommar

Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Act I, sc i); Excerpt:

THESEUS: Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires
Like to a stepdame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue. 

HIPPOLYTA: Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities. 

THESEUS:  Go, Philostrate,
Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments.
Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.
Turn melancholy forth to funerals;
The pale companion is not for our pomp.
[Philostrate exits.]
Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries,
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.

The Wheel of the Year (Wiki): 

Sometimes Ya Jes' Gotta DANCE!

I sometimes forget

that I was created for Joy.

My mind is too busy.

My Heart is too heavy

for me to remember

that I have been

called to dance

the Sacred dance of life.

I was created to smile

To Love

To be lifted up

And to lift others up.

O’ Sacred One

Untangle my feet

from all that ensnares.

Free my soul.

That we might

Dance

and that our dancing

might be contagious.

~Hafiz

Che Vuoi? What does the Other want from Me?

On Sincerity in the Age of Sincerity: Me, being what the Other expects me to be, and me genuinely accepting that identity for myself.  

In an Age of Authenticity, THAT (Sincerity) is "atavism", In an Age of Authenticity, I'm now being an Identity that I choose and want to be, irregardless of the Other's wishes, and practicing "sincerity" only in my close family relationships. 

And in our current Age of Profilicity, YOU must recognize MY curated Identity concept of my own Authenticity, and validate my curated Profile.  And I will genuinely pretend that an approving "General Peer" is my family.   And I try and see myself as being unquestioningly loved and accepted by them, Walter Mitty-esque like.

 

???

 

The Original Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Insatiable Desire for One's "Identity" to be Affirmed by Others

The Pervert's Dilemma (Che Vuoi?), "This is what I AM for You!"  "Use Me!"  "Make Me Feel 'Authentic'!"

Marcin

Asturias, my beloved Fatherland,

My loved one Asturias,

Ah, lucky he who could be in Asturias

For all times!

I have to climb the tree

I have to pick the flower

and give it to my brunette

so she may put it in her balcony

May she put it in her balcony

May she put it not

I have to climb the tree

and the flower I have to pick

Your Toll

I know it well.

It is better

not to desire anything,

it is better not to preserve

anything in our memory,

it is better not to have

homelands where to came back,

but in that case,

we will not understand

any poem.

I know it well.

All the good poems (like you)

have a price,

all the good poems are achieved

by paying the toll

of our melancholy.

- Xe M. Sanchez

Performative Profiles- "Fitting In" before TikTok: Mods & Rockers

Days of Fun

Walking, talking, sat in the sun

Perrys, parkas, ‘I Am One’

Friendship, mates, laugh and sing

Girls, music, clubs and dancing.

Loafers, shermans, button-downs,

All dressed up to go to town

Hanging out in cafs and shops,

The action then would never stop

The endless days at the beach

The beer you drunk, the food you ate

The people looked on and laughed

Just a craze to fade and pass

But then you didn’t really care

Just let the wind flow through your hair

Doing then what you wanted to do

With a sense of freedom to pull you through

A time when new friends were met

A time that you will never forget.

Anonymous - To all the late seventies and eighties mods

"Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love"

- St. John of the Cross

The Famous Blue Raincoat

More.

Fear

A Story of an Anchor and a Kite

'we run afloat', though, means 'we have a big hole in the hull' and is perfectly consequent to 'all hands on deck' as a serious alert.

All hands on deck, we'll run afloat I heard the captain cry "Explore the ship, replace the cook" "Let no one leave alive!" Across the straits, around the horn How far can sailors fly? A twisted path, our tortured course And no one left alive We sailed for parts unknown to man Where ships come home to die No lofty peak, nor fortress bold Could match our captain's eye Upon the seventh seasick day We made our port of call A sand so white, and sea so blue No mortal place at all We fired the guns, and burned the mast And rowed from ship to shore The captain cried, we sailors wept Our tears were tears of joy Now many moons and many Junes Have passed since we made land A salty dog, the seaman's log Your witness, my own hand 

S.O.S.  Save Our Ship... fail.

Franz Kafka,"The Silence of the Sirens" (Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

Proof that inadequate, even childish measures, may serve to rescue one from peril.

To protect himself from the Sirens Ulysses stopped his ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship. Naturally any and every traveller before him could have done the same, except those whom the Sirens allured even from a great distance; but it was known to all the world that such things were of no help whatever. The song of the Sirens could pierce through everything, and the longing of those they seduced would have broken far stronger bonds than chains and masts. But Ulysses did not think of that, although he had probably heard of it. He trusted absolutely to his handful of wax and his fathom of chain, and in innocent elation over his little stratagem sailed out to meet the Sirens.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one's own strength, and the consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it, no earthly powers could have remained intact.

And when Ulysses approached them the potent songstresses actually did not sing, whether because they thought that this enemy could be vanquished only by their silence, or because of the look of bliss on the face of Ulysses, who was thinking of nothing but his wax and his chains, made them forget their singing.

But Ulysses, if one may so express it, did not hear their silence; he thought they were singing and that he alone did not hear them. For a fleeting moment he saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting, their eyes filled with tears, their lips half-parted, but believed that these were accompaniments to the airs which died unheard around him. Soon, however, all this faded from his sight as he fixed his gaze on the distance, the Sirens literally vanished before his resolution, and at the very moment when they were nearest to him he knew of them no longer. But they--lovelier than ever--stretched their necks and turned, let their cold hair flutter free in the wind, and forgetting everything clung with their claws to the rocks. They no longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulysses' great eyes.

If the Sirens had possessed consciousness they would have been annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that had happened was that Ulysses had escaped them.

A codicil to the foregoing has also been handed down. Ulysses, it is said, was so full of guile, was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armour. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretence to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield.