Waking up in the Accelerated World

 Like waking up from a dream where you had to fight a fire with whatever clothes could suffocate the flames...I woke up with a sense of urgency to put words on a screen. There is a fire awaiting our graduates and there is no mechanism to put out the flames. No mechanism that does not come with hard work not gathered from the statistical and analytical interpretation of printed pages. 

We are now living in "The Accelerated World." We can no longer just print off a page of whatever Google, ChatGPT, or Grok...an AI entity...responded to our queries. We not only have to interpret that dissemination, we have to do it in a way that defines our answers, that expands our parameters, and that leaves us a loci to build upon a theme. That may sit well with those of us who have accumulated a particular vocabulary or developed a deep sense of analytical discernment, but not those fed a juvenile education lacking those elements enabling the student of life a modus operandi to assimilate themselves into a world where the answers to the questions we ask are beyond their comprehension.

Why am I racing to put out the fire in the dream? Because we have a vast under-achieving class of people who cannot enter the level of thinking necessary to master the AI-influenced world. The system will inherently fail on a greater level as the new world accelerates. Without a rebuilding of the education system in light of that new revolution, we will be producing that underclass, that peasantry, that settles in the basement of the performance charts. 

Because learners are at such a dark disadvantage, those individuals must take the reigns of their own education. The teacher, without proper re-education, cannot be the agent of change since they have been wedded to a now failing approach. The way to enable the graduates of tomorrow to reach the level necessary to succeed in this new world requires critical analysis skills developed from a much more sophisticated and rigorous vocabulary development, with a reading level no educator proposed before. The student must read not two levels more but at least ten levels more than any graduate level entry student. They must reach a vocabulary level and critical analysis skill set we now expect from our doctoral-level students. Unfortunately, for today's secondary teacher, it requires that the intransigent system be removed from the equation so the student may excel. 

The fire is upon us, students, and your goal is to put it out with knowledge you must assimilate. You must rise above the copy and paste and build an intellectual base within that will weather the coming times when intelligence is paramount...or you will be relegated to the peasant class.

all the world was in black and white

the world was different some fifty years ago

when photos were glossy, but harder to picture

and you didn't have a second time to shoot

to frame the dark, the light, and the subject.

when Chronkite would say "that's the way it was"

and nobody watched past one in the morning,

i played with a Kodak hidden under the Pine

the finest plaid-wrapped present in the 1970s.

truth comes out following the finishing of a roll of film

like the photo of Santa's cookies where i drank Santa's milk

when we watched all the people a-passin' the peace

and the pretty girl beside me kissed me right on the lips

back when all the world was in black and white 

when we didn't have a clue about the absence of color

i captured a moment of everybody's time

in the window of my very first Kodak camera.

 

the endless melody

 when the music still surrounds 

then envelopes

the lines of your heart...

the cross beat

yours...and mine

shard-white shatters

scattered strands

cold silver tables

side by side by side

breath and bone 

the white cotton and the linen garment

one rising one settling both surrendering

one passing into another

one taste of afterlife

one drop of finality

passage.

The Coming Maturation of America

 The seeds of tomorrow's America are evident in X posts blasting involvement in distant foreign wars, gridlock in the mechanizations of federal government, and in paragraphs pining for a country where we focus less on everyone else and get our own house in order. There have been fervors of this sort in the past, but not at this level. We have come out of the tunnel post-Pandemic and are now heading for a gradual maturing as a nation, a settling, an almost quiet reorganization. An American tomorrow.

Gone are the days of boisterous globalism, with the realism that the world is a multi-regional pie where regional giants have a sphere of influence and free trade is a term of the past. Tariffs have replaced an Internal Revenue Service, and no one is full of "positive vibes." Unlike the prophets of gloom and doom, artificial intelligence has settled in nicely with no sentient antichrist threatening to globalize an over-reaching robotic mind. The fear of the day has returned to rogue cloning issues, particularly with regard to medical procedures and robotic clones, including "hybrid pets." 

Nick Fuentes had his day...days...in the sun, before becoming irrelevant when America turned toward...America. A new worldwide ecopolitical reality defies former logic as the USA, Persia, Central Asia, and Russia- in one surface alliance- dominate the energy market worldwide. Everyone may trade with everyone else...you may work "in Uzbekistan" via the internet and "streaming face time" but when it is time to turn off the lights at night, everything in your world is suddenly local. 

When anyone or anything matures, that someone has to face reality. America will have to face the fact that it is essentially built on debt. Debt funds debt, everybody owes the other entity. We Americans have such faith in this foundation that we are myopic. Everybody plays the game. That is why tariffs are the present and future stability to the economic foundation of the nation. And why it is necessary when regionalism rules the planet and your dollar isn't traded quite like it is today. The concept of currency is undergoing a revolution, and the future will be multi-faceted. It has to be. The status quo is untenable- for everyone. Crypto is just a playground for what will happen. What if you were to trade a percent of your business entity to do business? Is it likely? Like holding stock, you hold a very small percentage of each other's transactional base in order to do a transaction. Equity-trade brokerage enables a new kind of exchange bypassing a global or regional hard currency. And how do all these surface alliances trend, then fade, to serve temporary trading blocks and regional dominance? Is this the world of tomorrow?

Suffice to say, there is no roadmap to the future but the trends of the present. If everyone is to thrive in the coming environment, we must throw aside adolescent behavior and take responsibility for our actions- on each level, particularly on the regional and local levels.

Change is coming...it is in every post, every random reply, every face time, every message, every phone call. Will you change yourself, your country, for the better? Will America, reflecting on reality, mature? Or will we all deteriorate into a sci-fi scenario worthy of an unending book series for hard core fantasy fans? God, please, no.

  

 

 

Slicing into emotion- a layer beyond

sounds often have a hidden sharpness- combined or alone- as alliteration cuts to the core of an emotion. like a knife she slices open a surface glance, opening a wound, a vale, within. 

the word "sceal" (shkeel) in Irish implies a tale, a story. But "scian" (shkeeun), knife, cuts sharp like sceal. in one sight, those sounds work in conjunction, giving the American, or English-speaking, reader a sense of going deeper. And that is where most poets want to go...beneath the surface.

but it isn't so with much of what i read from other poets...when i do tunnel into that realm i generally avoid- other people's writings. these, too often, are populated by prosaic formulas that read like my failed college compositions and dark attempts at Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright.

Like a last-minute colonoscopy, these wet morsels of old soggy remnants come out, ejected from my system. The shock can be mildly nauseating. The verbiage in these wet morsels reminds me of speed dating...a terse word on one line, followed by two or three, followed by sequences not making a lick of sense. 

suffice to say, if you find yourself creating something not aligned with  fellow creatives in your field, you might want to avoid consuming much of their creations, lest you descend into post-modernism or pseduo-Nihilism. Rather, continue to write your own narrative, sing your own song, create as only you were gifted to create. 

I will, therefore, not compose senseless work of "art" lacking emotion and clarity...unless it is stream of consciousness or soundscript. Neither is in vogue, so I will spare you from such ventures. 

To end this chocolate-enriched dialogue just before midnight, I shall bid you adieu, leaving you with these dipping crumbs to add to your mental soup...if you are going to write poetry, for the sake of decency, please write something that cuts into the skin, rather than reads like the label on a GMO cereal box. 

 

An Cat Sceal

the cat tale

(An-cot-shkeel)

with a too-thin tongue

she licks the moon beyond

in that radiant reflection-

moon shine.

she's not so much a cat

as a connoisseur of the tail,

as she prances upon the table-top

framed in window-light. 

December 13th

 the snow has slowed-

gnarled, rough-winded, puffing,

sputtering along the way.

she's a wild wench from peasant times,

hair like a matted Medusa-head... 

this silent storm viewed from my window.

a breath like a December morning's pop-tart,

a slice of breakfast fit for an electrical failure.

Poetic Fiction Explained

 If you search through the list, the categorization of all genres of literature, there is no genre called "Poetic Fiction." Yet, I am composing a novel in poetic fiction.

What is Poetic Fiction? 

One of my previous posts explains what poetic fiction is. In essence, it is the poetic, including forms within a "paragraph" that mesh with a standard prosaic fiction form. It may look like this...

She was a child, riding a horse-drawn wagon through grain fields... wheels rutted in a slushy road, the cattle bells clanking within her eardrums...a concertina, a bazouki, a fiery-stringed fiddle...grandfather a young mustached gentleman, dancing within the music...now hillsides of wandering vineyards, caravan wheels taking her into the fog...grandmother smiling, babbling something, nodding her head...

This is a dreamscape from within my new novel. Like stream of consciousness poetry, it rambles, as a dream would tend to, maybe disjoined, maybe seamless. 

Or, it may look like this...

He sniffed pungency...the musky air, pine needles, soggy leaves, and decay...a guttural wail from somewhere on the ridge to his right...the reverb echoed inside his soul...and he trembled. Slipping through the shrub-boulder maze, passing rusty-red rhododendron, he came to the edge of a rock-ring...

The characteristics, within the descriptive part of the writing, tend to be punctuated and accented by the poetic. In Poetic Fiction, I may use the same word in three sentences within one paragraph because it is a tool used within poetry. In that sense, because it is fiction, which is usually prosaic, it must adhere to a hybridity, poetic style within a fiction format. 

Dialogue, and internal thoughts, work within standard parameters of usage, existing as it always does within prose. 

So, the poetic fiction piece is not wholly one, nor wholly the other. It is both. It is poetry, and it is prose. It is descriptive but may not follow standard description.

And while I am engaged in the composition of a novel, it is not my sole concern. At this point, I must pay my bills with an income from outside my principal gifting. It is the time and season. If, upon completion of this venture, I am able to embrace my gifting, enhanced with adequate financial reward, I will lay aside every weight that burdens me and run the race with unhindered passion.

Until then, I shall return to this locale, with a creative menu, feeding my readers with a buffet of beautiful works.

One hundred is a beautiful thing

 Just a quick note to my audience spanning the globe...from the forests of Appalachia to the Canadian arctic...from the tip of Tierra Del Fuego to the streets of Singapore...

After composing Post # 100, I am thankful for all of you. 

I am blessed to have a worldwide audience.

May God bless you now and each and every day.