The world is a mask that hides the real world.
Thatâs what everybody suspects, though the world we see wonât let us dwell on it long.
The world has ways - more masks - of getting our attention.
The suspicion sneaks in now and again, between the cracks of everyday existenceâ¦the bird song dips, rises, dips, trails off into blue sky silence before the note that would reveal the shape of a melody that, somehow, would tie everything together, on the verge of unmasking the hidden armature that frames this sky, this tree, this bird, this quivering green leaf, jewels in a crown.â¦
As the song dies, the secret withdraws.
The tree is a mask.
The sky is a mask.
The quivering green leaf is a mask.
The song is a mask.
The singing bird is a mask.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill
While waiting for Mystery Interlocutor – yes, he/she has become part of the routine, my invisible intruder – this pops from the latest turn-of-the-century server bank I've been mining:
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Difficult to believe this photo was taken in St. Hubert not really that very many – perhaps 75 – years ago.
Beautiful birds, but as a faithful Congregant I can't see birds in the city and not wonder what diseases they might be carrying, we've known for decades that the Enemy will use them to transmit biological agents....ever since West Nile: birds get the bug, mosquitos bite the birds, mosquitos transfuse the virus into their human victims....although, strangely, now I feel this research somehow pulling me away from ChurchØne® and a lifetime of indoctrination (I started to type "education" but the archives make it easy to spot the propaganda, those patterns recur again and again), in a way I can't even define, but the realities of ChurchØne® don't seem so real any more, the contradictions are poking out. Learning so much that I never suspected – nobody does – makes me question and doubt everything that I have been taught. Alienated for most of my adult life, and only now, it seems, do I begin to appreciate root causes....
The photo reminds me of a passage from an author I've discovered in the archive (his works seem to have been systematically excluded from public view; he began publishing in the late 1950s and continued until well into the 21st century), Thomas Pynchon, an amazing writer whose depictions of paranoia strike a sympathetic chord these days, from his 1990 novel Vineland [12]:
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Difficult to believe this photo was taken in St. Hubert not really that very many – perhaps 75 – years ago.
Beautiful birds, but as a faithful Congregant I can't see birds in the city and not wonder what diseases they might be carrying, we've known for decades that the Enemy will use them to transmit biological agents....ever since West Nile: birds get the bug, mosquitos bite the birds, mosquitos transfuse the virus into their human victims....although, strangely, now I feel this research somehow pulling me away from ChurchØne® and a lifetime of indoctrination (I started to type "education" but the archives make it easy to spot the propaganda, those patterns recur again and again), in a way I can't even define, but the realities of ChurchØne® don't seem so real any more, the contradictions are poking out. Learning so much that I never suspected – nobody does – makes me question and doubt everything that I have been taught. Alienated for most of my adult life, and only now, it seems, do I begin to appreciate root causes....
The photo reminds me of a passage from an author I've discovered in the archive (his works seem to have been systematically excluded from public view; he began publishing in the late 1950s and continued until well into the 21st century), Thomas Pynchon, an amazing writer whose depictions of paranoia strike a sympathetic chord these days, from his 1990 novel Vineland [12]:
Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on.
