Winter 2017 - Cell
Then take the hard right where blue river reeds
obscure the bank, waist-high, where the dock,
that dumb, clean monk, has lost its red habit
to the current, limbs scoured by microbeads.
“It really ain’t that hard, you just loop the line
loose around the sticky bait, drip the knot in
your mouth, and cinch, trap wire for yellow
perch, that what your mouth is for,” he grinned.
And that was what he said. What this shored mind fills in.
Reaching back, my hand is fishing for the true
weight of his knife, warm, yellowed, and finds
a phone, no bars, the hollowed waters
parting. Hungry go those who long after fish long
after fish are gone, still, scale-silt, umber.
Commencement 2013
Until the moth takes
wing light on dark
on your dark eye
I cannot express.
Hold up a flashlight
to things themselves;
separate the body
into day and night.
Across your screen
the moth wings
are many and pressings
wrinkled hands cupping
and dropping the dark.
Overhead a light
aurora performs its
handless weavings.
These are our angels:
the luminous who sing
in light of things
as they truly are.
That your dark eye
wing light on dark
might tear a part
for the daytime
I reach overhead.
I caress the mothlight
and with its dust
I mark my breath.
Winter 2017 - Cell
Night yawns its dark
door left ajar,
and I declare nothing
but this white intention
to say goodnight
clearly. This is clearly
a manner of speaking
against but regrettably
through this break-black,
over-interpretative reek,
through this way of speaking,
where *break* is consonant
with *bleak*, through all
that’s left for us. Along
with this goodnight,
which reminds me,
there was no snow,
is no snow this year.
We cannot forget
to consult the pond.
Not unlike your dreams,
the pond is a magic,
the mirror of what’s
fair, of creatures, of water
cohering with water, as all
above my head is how
tonight now feels.
Acrid clouds a black
shade of bleak. I shift
my footing a tad
and hope things change,
and already
you’re fast asleep.
Commencement 2013
*Read the full blog post at [Notes from 21 South Street](http://theadvocateblog.net/2013/09/20/i-wont-watch-no-reruns/).*
After the box office success of their 1999 film The Matrix, the Wachowski siblings released in 2003 The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and plunged their moviegoers into short-lived existential crisis. That same year, British philosopher Nick Bostrom carried The Matrix‘s threat out of movie theaters and into philosophy departments, publishing “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Looking at the past growth of computing power, Bostrom raises the possibility that we are living in a simulated universe generated by an extremely powerful computer, which in turn might itself exist within yet another simulation, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. This skeptical worry along with a few related variations have come to be known as “simulation arguments.”
Philosophers often compare Bostrom to Descartes, arguing that the simulation argument is simply the dream argument — “Are we living in a dream?” — outfitted in the silicon trappings of the computer age. The similarity, certainly, is difficult to overlook. In a similar vein, we can view Dan Ashwood’s Repeat Viewings as a nineties-era refashioning of Bostrom’s skeptical worry. RV records the simulation argument with a camcorder and plays the tape over and over again until the video itself becomes damaged by the VCR. The acts of re-collection, re-membering, and re-vision are themselves caustic, slowly corroding what they attempt to preserve. In Ashwood’s animation, the anxiety underlying Bostrom’s simulation argument deteriorates and falls away. The characters’ existential angst lies not in the fact that they live in a simulated reality, but rather in a general question of nostalgia: Is it worth satisfying? Is our wistful affection for the past an act of violence that we should avoid? Or are the lines of static that gradually obfuscate our favorite videos like green lines of code, shimmering with the promise of meaning?
2025