I hear the tree in the forest: Part Two.
I figure that the audience, stunned by my first deconstructive hip-shimmy and kidney punch, will be further rocked by a compilation uppercut of a series of male member enhancement haikus. I set the set the ambient projection to “phallus mode” and unfurl a blasted contatenation of individual penile growth legends designed to lure the neurotic, the worried, and those Arabs newly living in London who have yet to make some mates in Shepherds Bush, to pursue new ways of unloading their credit card information:
Young nymphos love my hot rod, they rock and suck all night long / Want greater pleasure in bed for both yourself and her, get it here now / Know how Stella got her tube packed? / Make your girl want you more with your huge device / With this rocket ship the moon is but the final destination / Your bed snake will eat furry hamster by cock crow / Steel is the rod but intention is the will of God / Serve up a love plate for the most gastrous of diners / Invest herein and see your circumcised foreskin tip the scales of adoration / Indyrace 2000 is the least of your circumspect momentum when you’re thrusting with this hot rod / A Harem Scarum / Girth Unlimited as George Bernard Shaw cannot ignore you.
The final legend draws forth a gasp from the audience (as we all know, the esteemed English playwright GBS once famously said that the worst thing a human could do to another was to “ignore them”); they are amazed to see the worlds of literature and cock upsizing cuddling together in the webisphere like two kittens nestling in a rococo hammock. A lanky goateed individual (either a German youth or a Greek lesbian, no one is sure) at the back feels the need to initiate a discussion about the meaning of such automatic parsing; rightfully identifying in this latest version of web automata that there is an increasing schizophrenia between simple “come hither” penis enlargement advertising catchphrases and the commandeering of more complex concepts of the cultural commonweal of the last two thousand years. As s/he puts it:
“How do we get from the fusty drawing room of Britain’s greatest philosopher provocateur, engaged as he was with forwarding the principles of the post-Victorian suffragette movement and putting it to the landed gentry about the dignity of labor, to a swarthy twenty-something pulling on his pudding above a halal shop off Hyde Park wanting to lay some pipe on gaggles of tight-bodied GAP shoppers?”
“AHA!” I shout (causing a Glaswegian welder on some Kenyan sensimilla to wake up for a nano-second), ” because the cultural net of web poetry is cast by indiscriminate fishermen; creating by automatic proxy new connections between individual words and phrases, regardless of the historical cachet that some of those more cultured contributions may have garnered in the pre-internet world. Now we shall judge quality or merit no more…”
I pause for effect, before delivering my final blow:
“This is the world that Burroughs envisaged in his spunky fever dreams in Marrakech, and I herein announce as the future face of creativity: a self-replicating process beyond concepts of talent or insight, or shared values; wherein all of us are part of the monkey mass, creating a poetry defined by the savage juxtaposition of the work of talented icons with that of some bling-wearing basement dweller with a shed full of dodgy Mexican sugar pills. Total cultural democracy. Poetry defined regardless of creed, religion, race, color, upbringing, or whether or not Russell Simms deems the whitey wannabes to be urban enough not to be caned by all those (rightfully) angry black dudes in the audience.”
I let the implications set in.
“Poetry is dead. It has escaped the creator (Man. And Dykes too. It’s an equal opportunities phenomenon.) and will perpetuate itself way beyond our pathetic lifespans. If the children of Arcadia and Babylon should disappear off the face of the earth right now - whether by Iranian SCUD, long ignored Mormon judgments (shame about that), or Bushian Kyoto cold-cocking - the words and products of our species will continue to be replicated by automated programs that can make an infinite number of associations between the word “rod” and every other combination of vowels and consonants.”
I follow up quickly with a series of associative/disassociative contrasts between e-mail subject matter and the consequent imbedded message:
Man gets bitten while peeing in bush / It’s too much for one James Bond!
JFK closed after bomb threat / The Dark Knight bombs at box office–
But the crowd goes wild, overthrowing chairs and bulimic Swedes like they were chaff in the face of their bewilderment; replicating the riot of the resistant audience first exposed to the genre-atomizing wonderment of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring in 1913 at the Theatre de Champs Elysées in Paris.
As the fistfight spills out into the street, I judge the evening a total success. I pack up the Mac and projector into my neoprene backpack, and pick my way through the crowd of wailing gnashing combatants, who pull innocent Plastic Bertrand fans, as they body-pop down the sides of the canals, into their awful gravity of horror and denial.
Not only have I driven the final stake into the bourgeois subjective concept of human creativity, I have probably guaranteed myself a cushy tenured position at the école of my choice-
- until a pasty thin man puts a long limpid hand on my chest.
“Signeur?” he asks, sweating profusely on his upper lip (doubtless in the grip of some absinthe trip), “I am Menon Sweazy. We should talk about my poetry.”