Thursday, August 31, 2006

Morrison's New Language?


I return to the screen to scream, to the keyboard to scrawl my name in chalk, praying the rain doesn’t come too soon to erase it. I listen to Jim Morrison’s “An American Prayer”, words flowing in and out, streaming like video on the net, images in sudden fits and starts, pixelized and unclear. I need to offer a sacrifice to get a faster connection. How would Morrison have liked the Net? He’d have loved it, a new media in which to rule, to mold into a shape of his will. I wonder at times if he has somehow transformed his soul into code, streams through the network of wires, across the phone lines of the country, dipping into this chip and that circuit, carrying stock quotes to business men and news of births to grandparents and postings of dream interpretations to newsgroups. He has become the primal electronic scream of modems crying out to each other from livingrooms and dens across America. Is this the new language he envisioned, this cybernetic screech? Can music be made of this? Can poetry? Like the priest on the pulpit, Morrison intones:
“…Soft driven, slow and mad
Like some new language,
Reaching your hand with the cold,
sudden fury of a divine messenger.”

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