| from Angle of Yaw
THE FIRST GAMING SYSTEM was the domesticated flame. Contemporary
video games allow you to select the angle from which you view
the action, inspiring a rash of high school massacres. Newer games,
with their use of small strokes to simulate reflected light, are
all but unintelligible to older players. We have abstracted airplanes
from our simulators in the hope of manipulating flight as such.
Game cheats, special codes that make your character invincible
or rich, alter weather conditions or allow you to bypass a narrative
stage, stand in relation to video games as prayer to reality.
Children, if pushed, will attempt to inflict game cheats on the
phenomenal world. Enter up, down, up, down, left, right, left,
right, a, b, a, to tear open the sky. Left, left, b, b, to keep
warm.
____________
NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put
it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment
that has not been inside a child's mouth. However, the object
responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults
as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every
American choked to death on a red balloon.
____________
TALK ME DOWN, MAN, TALK ME DOWN.
Obsessive repetition of meaningless gestures. A dangerous level
of light in the blood. The caller claims to have discovered the
imprint of a trilobite embedded in the sky. It’s the kind
of thing, he says, that makes you pray to God. That you might
live forever. In these several states of shock. At what point
in the conversation did you realize her breathing had stopped?
When I kissed her. But there’s no time for this. The black
helicopters are upon us. Our daughters flee from the house, weeping,
crazy with joy.
____________
WHEN WE SAW THE PATTERN, we took
the kids out of school. Broke out the special water. Two churches
linked by a sudden alley through the corn. As the Hopi myth foretells.
A massive loss of technology. A spider leaves a string between
two points. Think about it. From the duster it appears a thing
of glory. Makes you reconsider the whole idea of property. Stems
inside formations have blown nodes. Explain that, Mr. T.V. Part
of the confusion involves words. We wake up with mud on our feet.
The other part is just the way we are. Scared of the new when
it’s thousands of years old. If you have never seen a sleeping
toddler crawl beyond the lip of porch light, zip it. If the meaning
is clear, it’s already too late. For God’s sake, people. Open
your hearts.
—Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner is
the author of The Lichtenberg Figures and the forthcoming
Angle of Yaw. He co-founded and co-edits No: A Journal
of the Arts. |
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