13 | June | 2014 | The Poesie of Igor Goldkind

LONG RULE THE NETWORK OF NETWORKS!

I realised today, just now in fact, what an accelerated, roller coaster rapid, high impact that network media has made on my life, to my work and on the shifting sands of my very sense of self. In the past 6 months mainly, but glimmering on the event horizon more than a year ago and then before then, a five year trajectory of exploration and criticism.

I hated Facebook when I just joined it and in fact, I only joined Facebook to show it up. To prove that it was merely a passing trend, a blip on the horizontal line, a useless waste of time for those who had too much time to spend.

And then I was wrong.

Then I began to see into the Matrix. Not just what it was but what it was crystal-like growing into; emerging as something different, something we couldn’t even fully imagine it to be and yet we would be using it everyday, we would be the willing participants in this mad experiment in meshed communications: tight 24/7 connectivity.

We are all of us, each others audience.

We are a great, wide, awesomely scalable scope of human interaction through word, through emotion, through opinion, through compassion, through malice, through the simple exchange of our thoughts we become more than the sum.

There is a third colour pill and it’s green.

Network media brought my words, my work to the attention of a publisher.

In the conceiving of my work, I have set up several Facebook pages each dedicated either to a work in progress like THE DARK CLOUD in which invited participants to enter into a kind of crowd sourced edit, openly talking about the stanzas and giving their opinion as to stanzas to include or exclude. The final edit was compleed in a recording stuido in New York once the music was added, but the crowd source edit was an important stage in the creative process. Likewise, I have had ample support and respect from those 25K or so new visitors to my poem FB pages who are now aware of my book IS SHE AVAILABLE? and have sampled some of the contents including my poems, the images produced by some exceptionally gifted artists both established and relatively unknown who have honoured me by each rendering a visual interpretation of one of my words.

(There are also two comics strip stories I have done illustrated one by David Lloyd of ‘V’ and Occupy mask fame and an old story about Jack Kerouac painted by Glenn Fabry.)

With words we conjure pictures, so why have an artist do anything?

Because it is not the artist’s job to invoke new imagery, but rather to allow their imagery to invoke new words!

We are a networked society now.

A grand interconnected matrix of systems, protocols, computations and output formats that are desinged to make administering to our social and conumser means more efficient and more profitable. We are what our machines are here to serve. If you do not tell the machine what to do it continues to seek instructions and will continue to do so until either you, someone else or something else tells it what it needs to know to do what it needs to do.

If you don’t vote, someone else casts your vote for you.

If you don’t pay attention, the world passes you by and changes into something that you didn’t notice it was changing into, leaving you lost and feeling out of date and pathetic and remorseful and sad. So you sit down and have a little cry and then switch on the TV to see if there’s someone else’s life you could pretend to be part of;, rather than your own which is sad and miserable and can you last remember when you weren’t lonely?

I wonder if you still have her number and whether or not she would fancy a surprise call on a Sunday morning

after so long?

After so many years.

She’d have the police onto you.

Again.

Why do I have the kind of face that people like to see arrested?

Why does everyone always call the police on me, even when I haven’t broken any laws?

Which the police are always very quick to point out to my complainer. People seem to like to call the police on me because I don’t act the way that they do. I don’t speak like they do and I’m rather adament and insistent that certain rules of common decency, not to mention the rule of law, be obeyed.

Actually, I insist on principle over rule. I think people should actually try and understand the rules and the reasoning for the rules that they choose to live or work by. I like police officers (most I’ve met), they have a hard job and are constrained by strict procedures and laws. I like that. Those are my laws, the laws of a society that prescribe the parameters of our human interactions.

Cops, by the way, both British and American tend to like me; even when I’m being arrested them.

I act respectfully, I know my rights and I’m described by one sergeant as “a reasonable and articulate man”.

(I quite like being called a ‘man’ by a uniformed officer; it feels somewhat like accreditation.)

Unfortunately, “reasonable and articulate” can upset some other people’s whole way of being.

I’m very glad that it does.

Don’t go sailing if don’t like your boat being upset a few times. It’s bound to happen.

Following the rules is easy btw, any Nazi can do that; understanding the rules that are laid down and testing them against reality, improving upon, refining rules through the appropriate channels is also something I like to do. People think of me as a big complainer, but I actually do allot of things behind the scenes, through the proper channels, to get things done. To improve on what is already in place.

You can do that too. It feels great!

This network of networks, this web of Friends has furthered, changed he trajectory of my career and for this I will be eternally grateful and I promise my readers this:

If you support me, if you buy my books, read my blog, comment on my FB pages…

I promise to continue telling you the Truth, as I know it and only I can know it but that I can share with you.

I promise to keep my inegrity over all other considerations, to explore, to provoke, say uncomfortable things, to say unpopular things; to make you feel and to make you think; those are my twin tasks.