"It's all the same to me", "city dreams" and some news

Hello! So I must admit there has been a decline in output of my writing recently. I've just started graduate school, so I am a little overwhelmed by the constant staccato rhythm of assignments, and I don't have too much time to write. I have managed to start another blog, which you can find at http://themolecularbasis.com/

It's more of a personal blog, filled with lots of idle recollections and philosophical nonsense that I churn out as I navigate through the beginnings of my life in science. I am almost sure to update that far more regularly than this blog, but expect to see stuff here eventually.

As for writing, I've been working on a couple of things. One is my story about the physicist that I constantly allude to, but never produce. The other is a new story about death and the nature of memory. I'll finish them someday, I hope! For now, I present two poems, the first is "It's all the same to me", which I wrote on my experiences in NYC thus far. The second is "city dreams", which is more or less about the intrusion of this place on my subconscious. I hope you enjoy them.

"It's all the same to me"


We wandered in the waning daylight world
Within the always warbling, gaslight sky
Before the sun finally stole away
And hid from us
And died

We entered recklessly the first of three
A bar in midtown, lit with sullen tones
With the most beautiful, perfect men
And all their girls
And I

Where the songs are fewer than just ten
And all the people dress like mannequins
They come fresh, clean, and lively from the store
And there I am
Alive at last

A panoply of colored lights and sounds
Reminds me of the place in east SoHo
Which was exactly like the little place downtown
Or was it not?
I’ve got no clue

And I am laden with the burden of
Three twenties and a core of rushing blood
Which curses me for what I do to it
To find a way
To be myself

And I will never get to know your name
A fact more hidden than the strangest, deadly truth
Of who built Stonehenge, who shot JFK
Because I hide
I am afraid

We leave again before I reach the point
Where anguish overcomes my need for love
The rumbling bass is nothing on the wind
A cloud of smoke
A pretty face

Then hours spent gliding within the night
In blackness, trapped, inside an empty car
Which with a certainty moves back and forth
And so do I
Never quite home

I close my eyes, still lonely, on my bed
With swirling worlds of alcoholic grief
Still screaming for the solemn touch of flesh
And there I am
Alive at last


"city dreams"

i take to bed ragged
and fall with haste to naught
to swim the oceans of my madness
in this cold forgetful place
where i am nothing among you
even less within myself
deep sleeping restlessness
will bring me to your space
to crowded listless cityscapes
and walks that touch my base
jumbled figures, empty streets
that glisten in the tired night
the path from here to nothing
or elsewhere in your embrace
burn out the thoughts of green
and turn them all to grey
solid iron and the smell of blood
heavy eyes when i awake

notes on our inevitable doom

we
humans
are swimming
bodies floating underwater
our heads are sinking slowly
as the ocean drinks us up
we are made of plastic
that we made from
the oil and gas and stone and shale
that was made from
all the dead things
that sank and rotted
a million years ago
and we ate with glee
that which was not dead
and we built ourselves of it
as they built themselves of us
and what we threw away
now we are choking
on the poison we expel
merely as a result of our existence
we cannot avoid it
save by guilt or mercy
as the reaction proceeds
past the looming arrow on the chalk board
we hope for equilibrium
but we are doomed to expand
because that is what we do
when the sun burns
and we make ourselves of the plants
that make themselves of the sun
forgive us lord
we know not
what we
do

Megaupload and Autumn Ghosts

I realized the other day that Megaupload might be completely impenetrable to the uninitiated, so I figured I would explain the process of downloading stuff from there. First, go to the URL I provide. Then, enter the captcha (the string of letters) in the box. Next, wait for the timer to run out, and then click free download. Once you've got the file, extract it. It should prompt you for a password, and it's safe to assume that the password will always be interface. Sorry about this rigamarole, but I don't have any hosting of my own.

With that tediousness out of the way, I'd like to comment a bit on Autumn Earth. Autumn Earth is essentially a personal narrative and a reflection on isolation and depression. For many years, I had a tremendous deal of difficulty envisioning myself as a human being, in human settings. I always felt somewhat estranged and out of place in many situations, and it caused me a fair amount of trouble. I used to feel like a ghost.

Eventually these feelings became so oppressive and intolerable that I decided to give voice to them through writing. A story about a lonely ghost is incredibly trite at this point, so I reversed the situation, and made my protagonist the only human in a city of ghosts. The inaccessible nature of his environment enforces feelings of isolation and loneliness, and most of the story is his coming to terms with those emotions.

But there is another side to this story that is played out in the protagonist's attempts to rejoin society. He uses art, in his case poetry and music, to reach out, not only to the ghosts, but also within himself. At the same time, this is the same goal of the author. Both are united in their desire to interface with society through their work, at the same time recognizing the flawed nature of that reasoning and the imperfect nature of their work. The ghosts are not redeemed, but the protagonist is satisfied because he at least attempted to communicated with them, and in doing so realized the power of artistic work to redeem the self. The title of this blog is a reference to that idea.

As for future stories, I'm working on another that I call Corona Radiata. It is the story of a heliophysicist that gains the ability to understand all of causality and his struggles with that knowledge. Hopefully it will be finished in a timely manner.

Thanks for reading, and be prepared for more here at the Interface.

Autumn Earth

Envision an empty city, but one that thrums with activity. Envision a society of the dead, where the ghosts of this earth roam freely, accomplishing their petty tasks. Envision the hollowness of an August cold front, and the impending collapse of fall. Now imagine you are the only one left alive. This is the central aesthetic of Autumn Earth, the first short story I wrote when I began writing last year. I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=PGTS4VC5

You'll need an archiving program like WinRAR to open this file, and the password is "interface". Comments and criticisms are always appreciated.


Autumn Earth by Michael Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Vessel Commentary

I'm about to post another story that I wrote almost a year and a half ago, but first, I'd like to comment on Vessel.

A few years ago, I was thinking a lot about romance, especially as it pertains to the young. I saw love as a rush to uncover as much about another person as possible--to dig into the strata of another human being in part out of curiosity, but also to fulfill perceived emptinesses within oneself. I wondered if such digging might uncover not the desired feeling of fullness, but might uncover a deeper emptiness.

Recently, I was mulling over those same thoughts, when I envisioned two people meeting each other on a crowded street. They are strangers, but within moments of seeing each other, they feel a deep connection. They rush through a crowd to meet one another, but, as they embrace, they recoil from one another, sensing something wrong. This is the central image of Vessel. When we fall in love, we not only expose or strengths to each other, but also our weaknesses. Perhaps beyond the inevitable posturing of being some two will find nothing.

But this is also a story about the flaws in our perceptions of others. It has been theorized that the human brain has a limited capacity to recognize other humans as people--that beyond a certain number of close friends and relatives, all others will be perceived as an indistinguishable rabble. This is an inevitable vanity of humanity, and it is one that has been often discussed in fiction (For an excellent treatment of the subject, read Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions). My intention in Vessel was to create a dichotomy between human and non-human, but also to betray that dichotomy in order to expose the foolishness of the whole thing. We are all human. To attempt to separate the sheep from the shepherds, the unaware from the awakened, is vanity. We all suffer.

Vessel

I finally finished Vessel. I don't consider this a final draft, but it's as close to done as it is getting for the foreseeable future. That being said, here it is! Sorry about using megaupload, but I couldn't figure out a better way to do this this time around.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2J33BBNP

You'll need a rar extractor like WinRAR to download this, and the password on the file is "interface" sans quotation marks. Let me know what you think. Also, I've decided that this story and anything else I publish here will be under a Creative Commons license.


Vessel by Michael Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Flesh

The surface of the Earth is marred with holes and scars
Of all its injuries it bears still bleeding marks
Which drip with blood in pace with time

The Earth has veins to carry forth
A viscous sludge that warms and cures
From inside all is boiling, all is wretched


The Earth is a ball of flesh
That festers with gangrenous life
And is hurled through a dark embrace
Which cares not for all the little signs of infestation

We are cast from the same dank matter
Each and all
And that which is the basis
For all our inconsequential reactivity
Is made of flesh as well

Unified we stand
An army of rot
Born aloft on our moldering vessel
We live, then die
Together