The invention of time

No-one wondered 

"Where do we go?

Where do we come from?"

Yes, people were born, 

and people died,

but all remained here,

living, dead, and unborn, 

caught up together in the eddies

of the eternal present.  

There was nowhere else

for anyone to wonder about

so how could they go anywhere

or come from somewhere else?

Then a man looked at a star. 

He stopped seeing it

the way he saw the rest of us.

It was far away and different. 

He started looking at it,

and discovered the idea

of somewhere else,

somewhere different. 

This knowledge brought grief.

The dead no longer stayed with us

now there was somewhere else to go.

People dug holes, or built pyres, 

raised tombs and temples, 

left offerings on altars

and replaced them once they rotted,

because decay now existed,

because the dead had gone,

and the world had to be changed

to fill the absence that they left

and stop the void suffocating us. 

The man had created death,

at least, as we now understand it, 

which assumes it existed all along,

so complete is our overthrow. 

All delight in the world stopped. 

Everything could now decay

and be discarded, disposed of, 

sent somewhere else, 

as easily as a body in a grave.

Everything fell from our hands

and fell forever, into oblivion.

The world fell into Tartarus.

So he resolved he must go

where the dead go, 

but he must go without dying,

and he built a vessel 

that would go in a straight line,

an arrow that would escape

the cauldron rim of his horizon,

and instead of the eternal present

it would carry him to the stars

where he would build zodiacs

to carry time on their shoulders, 

a calculus of sunrise and seasons, 

and the future was invented

to replace the past. 

The hunt

They haven't got round to you yet. 
They will eventually, like all the rest.
You think you're different? You're just the same.
It's just a matter of time until it's you they find 
when they're looking for someone to blame.
We're all illegal. We're all fugitives.
Don't confuse respite for safety,
even if you've enjoyed it your whole life.
The books will burn and it'll be your turn.
They'll knock on your door one night, 
because rules are all unwritten,
though they drift on and off the page,
and even though you think you're in charge
the dogs will turn on you one day.

The wrack

We idealise our fellow passengers 

because reality is too painful to consider.

We forget the cruelty, absolve the sadism, 

so casual, so relaxed, so unremarkable

that it is not remarked upon. 

We disregard the teeth bared in every smile,

the snarl in every laugh.

We approach the subject in a controlled manner,

crop and collimate it in the aperture of our words,

and manipulate it into an acceptable form 

with the molten lens of our sentences.

Polite lexicons inventorise 

the locked archive of our imperial mischief, 

the derelict war museum of the mind.

We are drowned citizens of sunken cities, 

the sea surrounding us an amniosis of amnesia.

Crabs escape their ruined ribcage creels

in the barnacled marketplace. 

Statues personifying virtues we extolled,

gestures frozen in a paralysis of hypocrisy,

marble faces clenched in a rictus of righteousness

as they clinch some pointless argument,

wear the kelp laurel of futility's triumph, 

monuments to the broken compromise

between competing cruelties above the waves.

We slip past mines and sink to this place,

following our anchor to the seabed,

any grip on the world above purchased 

only by loosening someone else's fingers first.

The storm gives expression to a rage we deny,

an anger of unknown origin that will never be satisfied

and consumes our vessel. We abandon ship, 

abandon each other, abandon ourselves: 

the individual is what remains of every doomed collective

after their successive disintegrations;

the sinking ship, the lifeboat overwhelmed by the swell, 

the flotsam and uncertain fate to which we cling, 

hope bought with coin minted from the despair 

of those left for dead at every increment of disaster

until at last we each drown alone in useless wealth

and all that is left to do before we go is ask our children 

to forgive us for the fragments of humanity they inherit.

Narcissus

We live, 

not on the surface of things,

but on the ripples,

motion, not substance,

and to stand still is to cease,

fall forever into the infinite regress 

of our own reflection.

We tell ourselves great lies,

the monstrous myths

of static and simultaneous being,

the annals of time and space, 

so we can escape into our imagination 

of everywhere and now

from the nowhere and never

on which the evanescent ripple rides.

We are ephemera, rumours, 

whispered from star to star,

the gossip of atoms 

whose burden of reality

we cannot share. 

Orphans

Those without a mother find her in the earth. 
Those without a father find him in the sky. 
Those rejected by their peers,
as awkward, unconfident, and inept, 
accept the wider world's indifference 
in all the astronomies and excavations
with which they explore what they don't have,
and find in it a kind of divinity to celebrate,
and consolation in an oblivion less bitter
than the cauldron of emptiness inside them,
where the lost can lose themselves at last, 
in the embrace of their mother in the earth 
and the embrace of their father in the sky. 

The diegetic audience

Cinema is a stomach, 

the auditorium a cavernous gut

in which we are digested

by light and sound.

Aisles slick with spillage

like ducts for bile, 

bits of foyer fodder,

soaked in soda, stick

to the soles of your shoes

as you take your seat. 

At one time we believed

the soul lived on the tongue,

at another, in the lung. 

Greeks spoke of πνεῦμα. 

Now when songs are sung

the head and heart

make rival claims

to be seat of the soul,

but as the titles roll

and celluloid thoughts

unspool upon the screen

we see the soul sits in the gut.

The windows of Saint Denis

once filled our world 

with lux aeterna

and lumen de lumine.

The projectionist kindles 

a more earthly light

and we dissolve in it, 

the diegetic audience,

the digested audience. 

Dogma 22

Camera position and movement are diegetic, but not in the style of "found footage". The audience should have the perspective of an object in the scene rather than a participant in the action. 

Therefore zoom, rack focus and hand held movements are excluded. 

Pan, tilt, dolly, track, pedestal, follow, crane and aerial shots are limited to movements that could be made by an object in the scene. 

In general, the position should remain static unless the movement corresponds to motion of an object in the scene serving the narrative. 

The fundamental tension that cinema navigates should not be between the role of the audience and the actor, but between the individual antagonist and universal inertia, between personality and objectification, action and futility. 

Cinema should allow the audience to experience the annihilation of character as a consequence of narrative, not use character development as a vehicle to indulge fantasy and arrive at a destination that merely re-articulates and confirms some set of values or assumptions that have been contested within the narrative. 

Therefore the narrative should portray a process of disintegration rather than development. The narrative does not serve to develop character, but dismantle it. Cinema should reduce and degrade the character until it shares the same status as the audience, of being an object in the scene. 

This can only be achieved and understood if the audience is already an object, as they cannot contribute to the narrative. 

This status of the audience is not because of a theatrical arrangement, where action is viewed in the round, or through a fourth wall. Cinema can place the audience within the action, but only as an object, if the story is to avoid all possibility of wish fulfillment on the part of the audience and remain independent of preconception and agenda. It is only as powerless spectators that the audience can be part of the universe the characters become part of as they are annihilated. 

Cinema has the capacity to communicate truth directly, rather than just dialectically. It is only as an object that the audience is released from the need to engage in a dialectic that would interrupt and obfuscate this transmission of truth through direct experience. 

Any music is diegetic, for example, You Were Never Really There (2017), the kitchen scene, as "I've never been to me" (Charlene, 1977) plays on the radio.