Friday, May 25, 2012

ISTL Season 1

ISTL Week 10 $50 Exhibition - "Respect"

The Future is Now! the Daily Times exclaimed.
The latest scientific journal headlined: Life... explained!
The year is unimportant, the calendar's been pulled for analysis,
with GenMod's assertion that mortality's been challenged.
This year is a new year, with its corporate fountain now spouting youth;
Advertisements were precisely contrived to confound the truth.
"We will choose the best candidate to become the first immortal being!
Applicants will have the medical establishment's support completely..."

Born with a life-limit, she chose to live accordingly.
At four she was awarded due to increased mental absorption speeds.
Memory exemplary:
language skills gave her peers and teachers the strangest feeling,
how a child could speak so forcefully...?
Eventually she sped ahead of her friends and authorities,
clearly an anomaly: but fearing not she wondered exhaustively
about everything from principled morality to government policy.
The times were changing, and she noticed she could play a role.
With the genetic clock ticking in her body she knew she had to take control.
She avoided faith and antiquated methods to save her soul,
and instead dedicated her existence to humanity's greatest goal.
The implications were immense, if she could be the first success,
the immortality ensued would clearly be worth the stress.
She wrote a brief letter to GenMod's president.
Careful not to deify the man with any exaggerated Pretend-God epithets.
She spoke in simple terms, with clear logic and argument.
She was the most brilliant in her region, and her problem was arduous.
What a waste it would be to see such genius extinguished,
by something as trivial as genetic predisposition...
She sealed the envelope with her tongue and smiled.
She sought immortality with a stubborn hunter's guile,
and wouldn't be denied, in fact, she couldn't be rejected.
A dead genius is no good to society, and... she wouldn't be respected.

Born in privilege: he chose to live recklessly.
Spent on a whim and treated no one respectfully.
He had the money to obtain anything material.
And spent to avoid his unadulterated fear of truth:
the fear of his own morality encountering society,
but still he chose to live selfishly with every ounce of his propriety.
His rivalry was poverty, to avoid struggle at all costs
and never wondered what would happen if he woke up with it all lost.
He'd assault transactions with greed and manipulation,
and didn't really care if moral structures disintegrated.
The implications of immortality had obvious appeal;
more reason to pursue wealth with obnoxiousness and zeal.
With the respect his money earned, his problems were concealed.
And he knew his vicious nature would be impossible to heal...
As soon as he heard that he could live forever,
he wrote a check for a substantial amount and placed it in a letter.
To GenMod's president he wrote of his intentions:
He pledged to engage the world with philanthropic aggression.
He assured him of the reward he would receive in publicity,
if such a powerful man were to be the first to live infinitely.
He knew he'd need incentive to carry on in his ways...
the thing about material existence is that it's gone with your days,
profits decay, lost in dismay: all that you've fought to obtain.
So he'd solve that problem regardless of the cost it would take.

The President of GenMod stood aloof on his office balcony.
The city moved beneath him, he thought of how it would feel falling down
as he pondered his options. How could he decide...
Either choice would require sacrifice.
Would he squander his profits in favor of the world's most ample mind?

Think of the implications of having to choose your first immortal soul.
As a president responsible for ensuring corporate growth,
would you deprive the world of genius for sufficient payment,
allowing Greed to encompass the first immortal in the nation?
He's known now as just another corporate head,
which decision would help garner more respect?
This technology is unprecedented, the control is his to decide,
he's slated to undergo the treatment as soon his approval's signed...
It becomes about respect: for the present day or future growth.
Then he decided... why shouldn't he just move for both?
It's both about longevity and the profit it generates,
let nature take its course with an honest respect for Fate...

A year passed, the first of humanity to surrender to longevity
emerged from their procedures.
The girl was now perfection genetically,
she was determined to free Earth from its deadliness.
But the public, failed respecting her as Heavenly,
didn't see salvation in her intentions, didn't perceive her respectfully.
They were threatened by her brain, not in awe of its utility.
There's a sense in which she realized as a mortal with a short life
despite her intellect she was more liked...
The first task He set about to do with his enhancement complete,
was to fund the most lavish retreat for the President of GenMod and
never did he feel so happy and complete.
He wrote a check to lift the ten bottom countries from madness and disease.
The last of the impoverished were shown posterity.
His deeds made the headlines, once again his respect climbed.
It's not terribly implausible to imagine this outcome.
How else could you truly gain respect and happiness without funds.

Philosophers in the academies recoiled at the developments.
Morality was turned upon its head with sacrificed intelligence.
Never before had humanity truly learned about respect.
A girl genius lives forever but was cast-aside: irrelevant.
Practicality without the ideals of a liberal society.
"Whatever works," said the pragmatists in interviews with sly decree.
The lesson is of true concern, our course presently depends
upon decisions that contribute to our longevity, but
if a life is just another means to a greedy end
then clearly life is not a concept that needs respect.

-----------------

ISTL Week 10 - "Captain's Ode"

"Captain's Ode"

Beloved:

I have little time for words, for we have a campaign to wage.
My dearest, I fear you must do away with the champagne we saved...

Prologue: Dawn of War
I'm writing now with the hopes to convey...;
today all I've witnessed has been the atrocious display
of defeat, all our focus on the goal has diminished.
Like a sinking vessel, a simple hole and were finished.

Ode to Command
Gazing into the horizon...with the sun setting we oblige:
alive yet amazed, what with the blood letting and the collecting of demon hides.
My machete's stains serve to constantly remind me
of that blitz into the abyss. The defiance of Divine myth.
In the midst of defeat, within an inch of retreat
decide quickly to divide us, or keep the advantage with precision.
Glinting steel: our battle standards advancing our position.
And lift the veil, but conceal intentions to attack.
Your decision is our mission: keep our legacy intact!
Contain the enemy: be aware of the perimeter.
Your control over the tides, you're our scribe, you're our God...
you're alive as our parish and parishioner!

Ode to Soldier
Muse wielding battlements, anticipating savageness.
Feeling passion rip the fabric of our reasoning capacities.
There's little logic in a Soldier's day.
He responds to what controls his fate.
He will not be dominated by these legions slinging tragedy!
In moments we shall confront the Depths.
For all that's holy we shall punish Death!
We will not be stopped by hatred, we'll free our kindred from their shackling.
Count the war drum's rhythm, feel the pure thud driven
by our lust for the thrust of our swords in their guts!
Listen to the hush before the last drum's signal
on the final eighth we shall invade.
Attack from the shore to the hill with grace and valiant Blades.

Ode to Understanding
Another day with Reason marching, thinking of freedom largely,
and what possibly a notion of God could teach us.
A mythical regress, cyclically blind to peace, just
needs, wants and linking the Mind to genius, hardly
feasible truths breaking the membrane
of paradise, just sterilized creations of End Game.
Let's say, we finally reach our tenth pace
and rather than getting struck with canonry, it just rains.
I've guessed Grace in the past was the way to the Path
but the dualistic nature of that made me change with the fact
that life is simply the exchange of a shameless attack with hatred attached.
They took the ethics of greater ancients and painted them black...

Epilogue: The Last Days
I'm writing now with the hopes to express proof,
that life is just the patching of the holes in your vessel.
The tides of war divide the pure from their lives of peace,
but war exists between more than these rifts in society.

----------------

ISTL Week 9 - "New Order"

April 20, 2412
United Federation of the Hegemony

Listen to my story, it is a tale of two paradigms.
I am but a fraction of the whole, beneath a veil of truth terrorized.
I am not destined to be static, but cursed to be paralyzed
until irony ensues and my worth can be verified...

---
Dystopian fictions fail to describe the situation at present;
Orwell was innovative and clever, Wells instigated in letters
fear of the unknown through swift invasions and intimidation.
Today is a different day, its, beyond any distant Matrix,
even the one written in cinema now is considered ancient.
These words are a simple preface: we live in a technocracy...
where robotic philosopher kings manipulate the Fed's policies.
They couldn't be wrong, they've accounted for all contingencies,
until one day a boy stumbled upon me as I drifted along the city's stream:

Through his eyes I had to seem like a hieroglyphic dream,
he, used to eye scanning as the instant means of transmitting "me,"
for currency is now accrued based on one's latent abilities...
You are the face of your "dollar bill," not some vagrant from history.
In the past I was the root of all the evil that surrounded humans.
Nothing more than a curse, simply a profound illusion
that forced people into enslavement to earn a fraction
only to turn around and contribute to their existentially coercive habits.

I'm being carried from my resting place across the platform toward a sentry.
The boy showed its "eyes" his embedded passport affording him entry.
I can see the domes above controlling the impact of solar flares,
until we entered his home, upstairs where he lived alone and scared.
The boy scanned me with some interesting device.
"What is this piece of paper with such intricate designs?
It seems to resemble what I learned in History that time,
about a species of humans who traded objects for paper,
which had such value as the society's progress would favor..."
He noticed inscribed upon my body a cryptic inscription:
Novos ordo seclorum, little did he envision,
that in 2412 I'd be the salvation of his kindred.
In an instant he turned and ran toward his pixel-screens,
on them a news anchor was in mid scream about rioting in the streets.
It appears the System of Exchange has been assaulted.
The means of scanning for purchase power once so exalted
has been irreversibly exhausted...

The boy turned and looked at me as I rested on his scanner...
In God We Trust..., judging by his face I guess he had the answer.
A bright light overcame me for an instant...
he stuffed me in his pocket as my first sibling was printed.

A new, new world order was born.

----------

 ISTL Week 8 [Contendership] - "Veil of Ignorance"

Theory of Mystic Justice
The Veil of Ignorance

"...no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like." - John Rawls

---

Breathing deeply exceeding sufficient focus conditions.
Spinning on either side of me, silently combining each
element invoking implicit occult traditions. Let us seek
wisdom from Opus to Opus: molecular message peaked;
Systems controlling my hopes to get us connected to Gnosis.
The Stone is just another drop away: osmosis. The clock's display
is frozen for Time is only a constraint for those within limits of
conventional physics. Only respect for the distance between
ignorance and enlightenment. Action crafted in silent rifts.
Rawlsean veils exposed by the mystic's decree.
Restrictions: thinking linearly.
I insist: to proceed and process most efficiently
let the mental stretch with exponential logarithmic speed.
Potential bleeds from the vial, more errors in this trial
than perfect successes.
But only one needs to work to make it worth the investment.

Breathing heavily connecting each section to the next,
mixing acoustic mastery.
The music blasting free into collections of obsessed
citizens moving frantically.
Spinning on either side of me, a veneration of control...
They say the art is religious regeneration of the Soul.
Crack the wishbone: carefully extract the marrow.
Ambitions dripping acutely into industrial cauldrons.
Relax your grip though, it's the subtlest science.
The mission is truth seeking: the lushest indulgence.
Pungent environs,
the praxis is beyond just syntax and semiotics.
It's actually applying exactness when combining
enough passion to create impactful steady progress.
Enough potency to render the power in Heaven modest...

Pray accordingly,
this much precision we should be worshiping.
Blending the micro-filaments with diligence in ordering.
Output various like instrumental chords from strings.
Break the plastic: fervently replace the needle.
Sufficient this mythic truth seeping love from the auspice
of ancient madness, it's a wondrous triumph.
Pythagorean spheres spinning with abundance exhausted.
Sacred neolithic scripting etched on the masks of pharaohs.
Cast the mended Arrow toward the frantic raving excitement:
Sound from the loudest of amplification devices.
Fluid from the Grand Elixir creating infinite Youth.
Drum, bass, rhythm
rhyme, flow, charisma
Coal, gold, platinum,
all that exists is the Truth.

----------

ISTL Week 7 - "Lift Off"

"Lift Off"

Meteorology is a strange science.
He packed his death-machine in anticipation of rain.
Triumph was only a couple train-trips away.
Silence conveyed as pockets of hate dripped disdain.
Capitulating dismay by proxy through perfect trajectory.
No allusions: just simple deeds working effectively.
Beyond the scope of life and death, his mind would bend
matter and temporal flux, as if purpose could end a dream.
No predictions or challenges, no statistics to shout amiss,
no retroactive out of practice conditioned analysis,
just a simple click to send a miniscule sound adrift
across a chasm of Mind. This grand gap in our lives is
redefined simply as a man caste by a lot
wreaks havoc to stop sagacity's climb up the hazardous ladder of Time.
No praxis, no syntactical signs.
No exactness of science could capture the Why.
Just a simple madness refined by the craftsmen of passion.
Humors contrasted because a man has to decide
whether or not our measurements stand the passage of...

Could it be the hive approaching? His eye just a fashioned design,
fastened precisely to deliver Fate in a hand basket divinely woven?
I suppose... but imagine when Time's exposed as the illusion it might be.
A decision to act could be revisited eliciting a union of likely
scenarios. Potential externalities and impregnated confusions.
If time weaves its baritone voice we could placate the movement
of mere matter, appease the Gods of disaster and make haste to induce trust.

Could it be robotics or nano? Or psychotics with ammo?
Or time robbing your ant-hole of any fine promises and hopes?
Time's locked in a damned trope, trivial, tautological.
A simple tick of the clock closing in on the often exhausted who
couldn't make a stand with defender's advantage.
We're just mere pretenders with language, Enders of Games.
No card carrying members, no extensions or breaks.
Just a carried out example of effortless rage.
They say a man with a shot is man on every stage
screaming out for any intelligence to mention his name.

These broken wings. These brittle bones of Kings.
Fossilized and bought for dimes.
We ask, how could the dark side of the moon even talk of shine.
And he answers, through the eye of the hawk drifting aloft with Time.
There are simply too many puzzles to sit and solve.
Unless there's nothing more than a single click involved...

And we've lifted off...

----------

ISTL Week 6 - "Nabatean Salve: 19xx"

Nabatean Salve: 19xx

The arid ruins reflected dawn like they manifested Heaven's balm,
lubricating perception.
Desolate but any angered spirit would instantly be rendered calm.
Upon approach his Mind would dance, his Muse exclaimed...
Forever lost are these ruined plains; as time advanced
the Nabateans witnessed legends brought to bear on Market Square
the rabble approached the Street Priest with awkward stares.
He'd scream "Peace! as prophesied since the Dawn of Time!"
Focused as if called by God though most agreed he'd lost his mind.
The truth is, through meditation he saw designs of ancient crypts,
and on an obelisk's spine displayed an escapist's script
with golden-glyphed messages comprising a salvation Myth.
His proud nation split thanks to religious rifts and civil war.
And he knew these visions writ of a simpler fix than glinting swords
slicing hordes of passionate zealots and revolutionaries.
Lies resounded confounding unconnected ideologies;
Until finally someone listened that wasn't a filthy pocket thief.
"The war's direction rarely seems to sway based on the executions."
Wary, the non-thief looked on, a "rebel" patch on his leather tunic:
"The Mages sent me to you, you claim to have been revealed an answer,
we are a smaller rebel order, the revolution feels in danger
for the last time we listened to a prophecy we were killed in anger."
The priest recoiled, never having been confronted by authentic doubt before.
He lived within his own truth, strife never having been accounted for.
So he set the rebel to task, to seek these mythic ruins.
To the Nabatean Petra. Assuming this isn't just some twit's delusion.
A single etching by an ancient sage to upset entire institutions?
But the non-thief believed in peace and swore he would live to prove it.

Within the Priest's chambers, a lazy shadow reflected stasis...
He sat lotus-like, controlled, precise in effortless meditation.
Visions flooded his cortex, at first numbers in an extended matrix
spilled out onto a canvas painting of a list of ten equations:
The first was a function of Time as it bends with space,
the last was an algorithm explaining genetic language.
Between were arguments for the existence of persistent life,
the priest: the vehicle for the computing system within his mind.
These combined created an image of the Mage's rebel,
a silhouette shifting from ether to flesh engraved in metal.
No aesthetic order, but the program seemed to sketch a border
within which man could act without fear of the gaze of devils.
A shadow on a cavern wall became blighted by the ridicule
of humanness, which only captures what is timely and predictable.
The priest imagined the non-thief deceased on the ruin halls,
then was struck out of his trance by rebel guards screaming "Move along!"
Truth is lost in the channels of sublimity,
"The river downward" could merely be the mind stuck in the annals of infinity.

---------

ISTL Week 5 - "Waiting"

Waiting

Patience is not a virtue.
At least that's what the boy had believed.
Despite being told the opposite he'd thought a bit,
understood reality moved regardless if he thought his choices were free.
The problem isn't cosmic drift, it's
the Grand Comic's bit about the universe expanding until apocalypse...
And he considers himself an optimist.
From a very young age he had questions regarding consciousness.
Waiting for answers weren't part of his parents' promises.
His father did not permit anything but an agnostic twist
to an age old argument: "No one can ever know, therefore, God exists."
Puzzled, the boy struggled, encroaching upon logic's limits,
consulted scholar after scholar, religious thinkers and scientists;
and concluded that even the world's foremost geniuses have extreme biases.
He wondered about Time's condition,
from atomic clocks that tick to Einstein's persistence,
that space conforms to Mind and perception is just petty acceptance of environment.
So the boy drafted a letter: "To the Children Who Wait..."
Entitled with a kind ellipse to capture the resilience of Fate.
In fact, that's the concept he started with:

"Fate is fascination with certain uncertainty. Not faith
just the acceptance that if we wait things will never work perfectly.
Purpose seems to buckle under the weight of philosophical urgency,
and conceptions of the End become brilliant obstacles and recurring themes.
Beauty and Goodness, Platonic forms and Promised War:
We wait regardless if they choose the pen and not the sword.
We wait for harvest, fruits of labor or Confucian favor,
or Buddhist wayward progression away from the abuse of flavor.
Pleasure without an epicenter where the youngest reside,
waiting like the Man who just turned one hundred to die.
Waiting like, for the bus, or a ride, to get plucked like a fly
and plunge from the sky... or the stubborn depressed
waiting for the comfort to cry.
Patience is not a virtue, I believe that's taught to hurt you
into thinking that if you wait for an answer it oughtn't curse you.
Patience is just another means to get caught in an awful circle
of thought we turn to only to struggle distraught:
there's enough love lost for one soul, not to mention an Earth full."

He dropped his pen to the floor, shaking as if in the purview of Proof
and still went about his life, in continued pursuit of the Truth.
Patience...

----------

ISTL Week 4 - "Divine Mirror"

Divine Mirror

Meritocracy hoisted and bolstered by divine will.
Shadows with voices. A controlled worth that time wields.
Valiant talents challenging choices. Prayers amounting to noises
-each rupturing the barrier between our doubts and their poignancy.
Skeptics are rounded up and caste by silence.
Acts of Mind nullified in favor of massive blindness.
The opiate of the collective disconnecting truth from the Praxis.
To see the ontological alive and breathing,
to feel the epistemic placed aside, vagrant lives completely
changed, their minds appeased for the Proof is in Madness.
That is, analogical to the problem of Who is this God we've accrued...
is the problem of Genius, from the Mind of belief,
is a Man of overwhelming power holding life at his breach.
That is, if you choose to let your Mind in his reach.
Picture a world of faith... governments controlled by religions and creeds.
Could an atheist exist in it free? Could he see the difference between
faith in the unknown and the prescriptive beliefs?
Or would he just become a shadow with a rhythmic speed?
Screaming out for freedom without a passage for delivery...
A message in perfect Time... where Time is actual infinity.
Could a nonbeliever truly exist in a universe of Divines?
I suppose the truth is certain for Minds without worldly concerns...
Or is truth just admiring the world as it turns?
Or is truth just retiring from the world as it burns?

or

Are the faithless just reflections of the faithful?
With no aesthetic or logical weapons to escape to...

Friday, March 9, 2012

Information

Could the universe simply be an aggregated system of information, both processing and processed in simultaneous fluctuations? It seems to me plausible, in light of the findings in disciplines such as mathematics, physics, genetics, among many others. Is it possible that all of reality can be reduced to information? If so, is information something a priori--before human perception... in the noumenal realm as Kant would call it, or is information merely a construction manifested by conscious perception itself? It doesn't seem to me very likely that, even though we have a word, and a concept for information, that information is merely a conscious contrivance. In fact, "mere" consciousness is a faulty reduction, for if indeed the universe is information, then it necessarily follows that consciousness itself is composed of information. Potentially fallacious, I suppose, is this determination, for it doesn't always follow that the because a part of the whole is composed of some property, that also the whole is composed of the same. However, the "universe" is an absolute of sorts -- and the Absolute, whether one conceives of it as God, or otherwise, must at least contain aspects of the varieties of substances contingent in its parts. Another way to say it is, even though the universe may not be only what we can conceive of as information, the reason we can even conceive of the universe is through the medium of information. Language is code. Code can be broken into simple bits. The simplest bits of any entity seems to me to be the building blocks that we call information. So at least what we perceive can be reduced to information. The question becomes then, and this is the million dollar inquiry, if we experience the universe through the medium of information, and everything in our consciousness can be reduced to information, does it follow that the universe is comprised of information at the most fundamental level? And if so, are we then potentially able to tap in to the very nature of reality, with our technologies -- or even just simply our consciousness--with enough effort--?