View from the Treetops (31 May '09)

CORRUPTION

Let's face it, no government is better than a government that is in fact doing nothing except feather its own nest, using tax money to prop up institutions that do not deserve to survive.
A government (and opposition party for that matter) composed of corporate middle-managers of dubious aptitude; lying through their teeth on a daily basis; creating a climate of fear while stuffing their pockets with ill-gotten gain; fueling sectarianism, arming children in countries already plundered of natural resourses; demonising those who do not tow the WTO/World Bank model of exploitation of the poor and less-connected; manipulating world markets with rumour and innuendo; insurance and pensions; property scams and insurance blackmail; propaganda-ised docile media who daily corrupt the concept of 'journalism'

Britain: The Depth Of Corruption
By John Pilger
May, 29 2009

Blair by Phil Hale

The theft of public money by members of parliament, including government ministers, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill tombstones of column inches and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a public relations man to sell the "leak". Why?

The answer lies in a deeper corruption, which tales of tax evasion and phantom mortgages touch upon but also conceal. Since Margaret Thatcher, British parliamentary democracy has been progressively destroyed as the two main parties have converged into a single-ideology business state, each with almost identical social, economic and foreign policies. This "project" was completed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, inspired by the political monoculture of the United States. That so many Labour and Tory politicians are now revealed as personally crooked is no more than a metaphor for the anti-democratic system they have forged together.

Their accomplices have been those journalists who report Parliament as "lobby correspondents" and their editors, who have "played the game" wilfully, and have deluded the public (and sometimes themselves) that vital, democratic differences exist between the parties. Media-designed opinion polls based on absurdly small samplings, along with a tsunami of comment on personalities and their specious crises, have reduced the "national conversation" to a series of media events, in which the withdrawal of popular consent - as the historically low electoral turnouts under Blair demonstrated - has been abused as apathy.

Having fixed the boundaries of political debate and possibility, self-important paladins, notably liberals, promoted the naked emperor Blair and championed his "values" that would allow "the mind [to] range in search of a better Britain". And when the bloodstains showed, they ran for cover. All of it had been, as Larry David once described an erstwhile crony, "a babbling brook of bullshit".

How contrite their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers' money on "media training", called on MPs to "rebuild cross-party trust". The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago - cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a "revolt" among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair's new female MPs, who had been elected "to end male-dominated, Conservative policies", spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.

The same was true of the lawless attack on Iraq in 2003, behind which the cross-party Establishment and the political media rallied. Andrew Marr stood in Downing Street and excitedly told BBC viewers that Blair had "said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right." When Blair's army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.

As for the "celebrating" Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall's own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation - they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.

Such venality goes far beyond the greed of the uppity Hazel Blears.

"Normalising the unthinkable", Edward Herman's phrase from his essay The Banality of Evil, about the division of labour in state crime, is applicable here. On 18 May, the Guardian devoted the top of one page to a report headlined, "Blair awarded $1m prize for international relations work". This prize, announced in Israel soon after the Gaza massacre, was for his "cultural and social impact on the world". You looked in vain for evidence of a spoof or some recognition of the truth. Instead, there was his "optimism about the chance of bringing peace" and his work "designed to forge peace".

This was the same Blair who committed the same crime - deliberately planning the invasion of a country, "the supreme international crime" - for which the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg after proof of his guilt was located in German cabinet documents. Last February, Britain's "Justice" Secretary, Jack Straw, blocked publication of crucial cabinet minutes from March 2003 about the planning of the invasion of Iraq, even though the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered their release. For Blair, the unthinkable is both normalised and celebrated.

"How our corrupt MPs are playing into the hands of extremists," said the cover of last week's New Statesman. But is not their support for the epic crime in Iraq already extremism? And for the murderous imperial adventure in Afghanistan? And for the government's collusion with torture?

It is as if our public language has finally become Orwellian. Using totalitarian laws approved by a majority of MPs, the police have set up secretive units to combat democratic dissent they call "extremism". Their de facto partners are "security" journalists, a recent breed of state or "lobby" propagandist. On 9 April, the BBC's Newsnight programme promoted the guilt of 12 "terrorists" arrested in a contrived media drama orchestrated by the Prime Minister himself. All were later released without charge.

Something is changing in Britain that gives cause for optimism. The British people have probably never been more politically aware and prepared to clear out decrepit myths and other rubbish while stepping angrily over the babbling brook of bullshit.

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Tindersticks ~ Travelling Light

Isthmus Crypticus

Bird Shrine ~ John Jude Palencar

Your scarecrow legs rise from grain husk dusted shoes
Laces long gone to the pyramid of empirical needs
Or perhaps confiscated by caring state officials
Corn teeth rattle in the face of the interrogating wind
Hand-hurled insults at the dunes’ feverish knife edges
Sand-blasting skin burnt umber and amber return
Confessions fall unbidden from the lip of the storm
Strangers loom rigging in the azure haze horizon

And the prow of their boat hits the wet sand silent
Beneath the crash of the waves on the sentinel reef
Smuggled bouquets of seaweed and dead coral swinging
On the arm of this parabolic and pissed-off muse
Whose head full of haloes and hard-on dead-lines
Demands to be rescued from the sleeping undergrowth
The grey cursed sky and serrated shoreline agree
To split the difference while flesh still remains

Here on the headland of hate stick-scratched in the sand
Hallowed ground is hailed slandered and deranged
Hermit crabs scuttle on the dotted line foaming
Detailed design for the sea’s edge stitch hemmed

No scared crows or sacred cows to tin the morning hope
No kidding crop circling alien ambivalent and aching
The cultivation of need hangs on the arm of the thrasher
A child gazes up at your hook-and-eye tweed-chested jacket
You hiss through those teeth scaring pale moon face
Breathless as stitches entwined in a forgotten blue day
Your hands hold nothing but the waters of time
Bartering days between hell and high waterline

For who would till this barren and saline finger
What woodenhead cryptic and contrary soul
With driftwood face and charcoal eyes
Fleshed from the nightmares of children and dogs
Would populate this isthmus of buried memories
Rotten and raw with the taste of love lost
In the sand that blows from a waning moon
A pedigree for the damned, the sowing too soon?


Title from one of those excellent episodes of Aeon Flux

Cabin Fevre ~ 3. A Feast of Shadows

Wallace Smith

My gut is an empty space at my centre. It has been months since I last ate, months, and yet this hunger has not taken my life away.
How long does eternity take to pass? I lost count of the days a long time ago. The pages of my impenetrable bible are worn and browned by the grubby fingertips of minutes that pass in absolute isolation. Sometimes the words seem to laugh at me and my plight, sometimes they are meaningless tangle of sounds and shapes inside my head, and then I have to speak the words out loud in order to make sense of them.

My last meal came down the black chain on eight legs; a caterpillar invading the rotten apple that constitutes my existence. They were tense and naked; three men and a woman; they all but sniffed the air like wild animals as they clambered up onto the Aurora’s deck. I sniffed the air myself; I could taste their fear, fresh as the smell of earth, beautiful. They spoke in terse and monosyllabic bursts, in what I eventually came to realise was some unfamiliar dialect of English. Three men and a woman – even before the storm that sunk the Aurora, I had not seen a woman for months.

It is becoming more and more difficult to find a reason to continue writing, given that I no longer have a comfortable chair, and that the ink from the captain’s desk is returning to some previous form, tiny squid-like blotches that sometimes find some life to swim across my page.

Taking the invaders for demons from some deeper level, I shadowed their movements around the Aurora. They searched the galley for food, rifled through the cabins to dress themselves in the threadbare garments vacated by my erstwhile and long-digested shipmates.
At nightfall, though it was not particularly cold, they lit a small fire in the kitchen, using the wood from the captain’s chair. They crouched around its light like a coven of witches in one of Mister Shakespeare’s overrated plays, muttering low in their strange accents with occasional furtive glances outward into the darkness.
The acquired clothing, while lending them a modicum of civility, failed to cover their fear and fragility. At one point she, the woman, looked straight at me, holding the look for some long seconds, as if unwilling to disbelieve that sense in her that knew she was being watched.
My bare feet tread silent on the rough board, aware of the location of each creak and squeak; I realised that these demons had entered my world and that it was I, William Fevre, who held the advantage – a strange sensation for a man of meek disposition, used more to doing the bidding of those who held power – father, tutors and masters all.
One of the men – obviously the leader, presumably self-appointed – spoke of the place from whence they had come. He spoke of magic and of gods and of imminent bloodshed sounding not unlike the sermons of my brethren in a life long past. He spoke of injustice and indignity, and strangest of all, called for a ballot on whether to turn back or to continue along the chain. One of the men professed his belief that they should return to the island, that things only get worse the further you travel the chain. The woman spoke forth in a manner I found quite unbecoming her gender. I believe she put forth the fact that even should everyone else turn back, she would continue down the chain. The man who’d advocated turning back, shrugged under the cabin boy’s nightshirt, his face resentful, his mouth remained shut.
The knives hung from my belt; no longer tools for the old chef’s chopping; hunger and self-preservation sharpened to a hair on tedium’s black whet stone.

Hunger is a cruel companion, allowing little concern for life’s normal rituals.
I cup my hands to drink warm dew from the water barrel, noticing how the lines on my palms stand out in relief, so ingrained is the dirt of my sentence here.
Perhaps if I were to run my tongue along those gritted tracks I would yet taste her there; some bittersweet remnant of my last human contact.
I catch a blurred reflection of my face on the water’s murky surface and feel the hair rise at my nape as if some phantom breath or fingertip has caressed me there; some creature whose face I can no longer recognise.
And I wonder if perhaps, in the dungeon or green field where she now resides, she might think of me some time and see me not as the demon but as the man I should have become.
They left all pretence of morality behind when they fled, left her to her fate in my hands. She fought that fate with everything she could lay her hands on. The flap of cheek that she ripped with her teeth hangs yet at my jaw, bloodless and unhealed.
The hunger lent me the strength to overcome her, but her screaming echoes still between the great beams of Aurora’s hull, like a memory of trees.
New blood caused the wood grain in the deck to writhe in what I can only surmise to be some aberration of the long-dry sap’s desires. I realise now that I have never been alone here, this vessel was made from living trees, they too have been damned to this hell.

The Key

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of a New Man ~ Dali

The jailer to an imprisoned mind may find his release when he realises that he is, in fact, alone.

If I Had a Heart...

Glasgow West End ~ Pisces Iscariot

From the wet and horizontal air
To the earthbound traffic cold mundane
And with windswept grey celestial flair
The weather beats this city of rain

These sheets of painted glass
In doorways proud lined in review
Opaque the view of souls that pass
Their private lives there to pursue

What artisan did brush strokes measure
Upon these panes in curling chords
Glyphs and hierarchies of hidden treasure
Alchemic codes that transmute my words

To resonate in harmony and ache
With sadness that falls at cobbled feet
And draw the keening in its wake
New sheet glass rising tears to meet

Great gothic leaps of faith sky caught
Whose spires forever upward stack
Cantilever fingers reach in rust-iron wrought
To cross these Styxian waters black

Where ghost ships heading for the firth
Pass rivet-bound and forged in blood
The bottled panes where dead platers curse
While rain ripples tears in river flood

Cabin Fevre ~ 2. The Gift

They come at night like marauding Corsairs, flowing over the gunwales and flooding the empty decks of my dreams. And like the cogwheels within Mr Leibniz’s calculating machine, they mesh my disparate thoughts and fears into the grammar of demons that torment me with scenes of my own depravity. Night after night they come, leaving me unsure which to dread the most; daylight and the hunger, or the night’s catalogue of torture.
This morning when I awoke, I found that they’d left me a gift. It lay on the deck outside my cabin door, bloody and still beating, as if yet encased in the body.
And, echoing in the bloody valleys between the bass thump of each wet heartbeat and the reedy intake of breath to my lungs - the laughter of my erstwhile companions, now long gone from the Aurora’s cursed decks. And as their merriment grew, so did the bass thud treble hiss; like savage drums off the Guinea coast.
And the heart asked me whether I was comfortable in my new home.
And the heart said to me that being comfortable is easy once the body has settled in to its new routine.
And the heart said to me that the hardest part of any movement is the transition.
And the heart said to me that the blood boils in transition.
As I watched the heart pump on the deck and listened to its words in my head, I was struck by its terrible beauty, its functional purity and by the hunger that rose within me on a wave of bile from my empty gut. I knew what would come next and I despised my weakness in being unable to resist. Deeper still, I despised the implications.
I spoke to the empty air as swallowed hard on the last raw chunk of talking meat,
“Vengeful God, where is your purpose in all this? Where is your transition now?” I asked, “Now that William Fevre's body is briefly satisfied, and his soul is whittled to the quick?”
My chest shuddered as I drew a breath, and I smelled the salt air as if for the first time,
I rose on shuddering limbs and returned to my cabin to wash my face in tepid water.
The looking-glass, already corroded by many years of exposure to the salt air, reflected the wide-eyed and wizened face of a phantom; I could see straight through to my blackened soul; a true reflection of my waning humanity.

High Queue

Gerard Brom

Run, for it is that
which you flee that will define
your destination

Plant Food

Pucker Up and Kiss the Asphalt

El Mas Pezado ~ Hector Javier Ramirez

In the end these are only words
Arranged to obey an apparent reason
Pixel spit on electronic paper
Rising and falling with modal season

I don’t speak for the herded masses
Content to eat the status quo
I can’t wear those optimistic glasses
I’ll take my meals down below

In the selfish cellar of self-delusion
Where I have come to grow old
Wrapped in the glory of cold seclusion
Finger strikes between key and mould

Spew forth algorithms ill-defined
Non-inclusive and bitter sweet
Won’t show the way to any mind
Won’t paint the lines upon the street

Thankful for the malcontents and ill-adepts
Those who, like me, cannot conform
To the lie that’s left on the morning steps
The paper mask that’s called the norm


Title from One Armed Scissor by At the Drive-In

Cabin Fevre ~ 1. Horse Latitudes

My name is William Fevre, a fact that bears no relevance in these circumstances.
The solitude and the hunger have driven me to retrieve quill and ink from the captain’s lonely desk and scratch these words on the blank side of The Aurora’s useless charts; charts which detail coastlines infinitely distant from this God-forsaken place.
The quill scratches across the dry parchment while the creaking of the ship’s timbers sing in harmony with the creaking of the chain to which we are tethered; marooned, this purgatory in whose vault remains but one soul – my own. Perhaps I should follow the Cook, who rather than see another night of blood, had thrown himself at the mercy of the glassy sea upon which nought will float save The Aurora and the links of said chain, black as a Guinea slave and wider than the helmsman’s wheel. But to where does the already dead soul in suicide depart if not to some bleaker vault, some blacker hell?
If some naked pilgrim does not pass this mooring soon, I shall be overcome by the hunger.
May God forgive me my body’s needs.

For many days the occupants of this becalmed vessel could remember nought save their names - It was a short interval of peace.
We soon discovered that the larder and the barrels which should have contained salted meat and water were empty.
The crew learned to gather the night’s moisture by spreading the Aurora’s redundant sails on deck and allowing the dew to trickle into the empty barrels, providing us with water – but no food.
Within days of our arrival, if indeed this is an arrival, the memories returned, bringing with them the onslaught of hunger.
Cabin 13 had been berth assigned to me on this voyage to the new lands in the west. The Aurora had gone down on the third day of an Atlantic storm that had hung over us pitiless to our insignificant voyage.
I remember looking up from where I’d tied myself to the mainmast, seeing fire on the ends of the spars, and being pounded by a foaming deluge that required me to hold my breath for longer that I was accustomed.
Three or four of the crew, including the Captain and First Mate, did not arrive with us. I can only assume they have gone to some other chamber of hell.
It’s true that some of the crew never did comprehend the truth of our demise, some in ignorance and some being the first to be slaughtered by the hunger.
I invoked God’s word in order that I did no succumb to this savagery, lest I send myself into hell’s deepest pit forever with redemption beyond my grasp.
But unable to overcome the cruel torture that hunger performed on by body, my mind had acquiesced to the body’s demand, and I crept one night from my cowering cabin to partake, like the scavenger, on the scraps left by the sated crew who slept at random on the cold deck.
I returned, shameful and with hands bloodied, to Cabin 13, and barricaded myself against becoming carrion for tomorrow’s hunger, horrified by the haste with which civilised man will be driven to savagery by the desires of the body.
So here crouches a new demon – a man who once considered himself virtuous; a man whose worst sins have been committed post mortem.

Presque Vu

Untitled ~ Claude Verlinde

It comes to you in the interstitial rooms between awareness and sleep; tantalisingly close to language but impossible to forge into words, it reveals its shape to fit perfectly into the tactile moulds of your unasked question.
The interstitial rooms: where doors open and close with the uncontrolled traffic of dream-logic; where light switches do not control lights; where the absence of the day-to-day protection provided by societal masks makes for bestial interaction with that which lurks in the recesses of the psyche.
Clues may be stitched into the hems of the myriad patterned curtains that billow in the wind from the great desert of the unknowable - scraps of paper on which fragmented notes have been scrawled by your unseen hand in the day’s passing.
And you suspect that, were you able to decipher these glyphs, you would awake to world where the weight has been lifted from your chest of stored treasures – treasures as yet unvalued by the assessor of all you heart’s desire.
And then you would, perhaps, be able to seat yourself, without obligation, at the table of emptiness.

Out of His Mind: Phase X ~ Departure

Jackson Pollock

much as i appear to be a creature of intellect there are elements of the entity in which i reside that defy the mind’s analysis.
my inability to analyse my emotions
the ache of the past’s demise
emotions that well beneath my perceived skin, threatening to burst forth in tears that may never stop
the ache of present isolation
the futility of this {interface} - a wisp of smoke in the fog.
the familiar lines of her face, etched from that memory onto the wall of my space.
the ache that it brings
the tug of synaptic connections that lack an organ to manipulate.
the faces of my fatherless children seen in profile as they were led away from my hospital bed.
the faces of brown children with flies in their eyes.
napalmed villages revenge riddled.
the reptilian faces of world leaders in conference
the bombers and the bombed
the blood
am i man or am i machine?
the {interface} gives an answer of:

inadequate data input.

i bang at the sides of my space, careful to avoid her face.
my efforts make little sound.
i bang harder and yell
my left fist crumples at the knuckle of my little finger.
it causes me no pain.

a new menu has appeared on the {interface}; a menu not devised by me.
it reads “knowledge is its own reward”
i enter
it leads me to this:

1. immortals
2. mortals

i am afraid to enter.

option 1: mortal
in all scenarios my name appears at the top of this list.
in all likelihood i will not be preserved in this egg.
in all honesty i do not think immortality is a road worth travelling, given the size and limitations of my mind.

i scroll through the names; in latin/roman; in sanskrit; cuniform and aramaic.
in gothic, greek and georgian; in etruscan, mongolian and manchu
they begin to blur together to form random patterns of black on white; swimming on the {interface} devoid of meaning.
the benefit of a distant view perhaps; but i stand by what i’ve seen:
what use have i for people; for their names and their foibles?
what use did i ever have for the random actions and petty games played with allegiances and egos?
for agendas and ulterior motives?
what use for seemingly intelligent people who cannot [or will not] see to act upon their weakness.
what use those whose weakness traps them within the system [class; economic or caste] from which they appear powerless to escape.
where is the honesty of spirit that would simplify all social contract?
why the need to control those around you; to have them indebted to you; to never call that debt in, simply to hold it as a symbol [a talisman] of power?
what use have i for those who’ve lost themselves in the labyrinths of pain and of propaganda – ever turning left or right [employing some method] but never looking up from their concentrated toil.
what use do i have for mortals?

option 2: immortal
and in this scenario am i not a god?
everything exists only within my mind.
if i look away for all i know it will cease to exist.
some god…
i am a prisoner in this space – do i really want to live forever within its confines?
once more i bang my battered hand against the inside of my space
fingers fall from my hand to land at my feet and there turn to dust.
if i am truly immortal; a god; then it is an incompetent god that i am
for did I not [in life] create this tomb; this prison of the senses.
and the {interface} grows dim as the walls turn to light…….

TERMINUS

All Meals are Brutal to the Eaten

Looking up the mouse decrees
There’s enough for you and me
The owl declines to nod assent
Knowing soon he’s due the rent
On futures based on clear blue sky
On dividends from cherry pie
He picks his beak with razor talon
Calculates the miles per gallon
Checks the angles by degrees
Then mouse (protesting) does he seize

Title courtesy of Yodood

Don't Look Down

The forces acting upon the carapace are not evident – the lack of air pressure outside belies the fact that I am travelling at between 3 & 4 kilometres per second.
From where I sit, trapped in this decaying satellite, the planet below exhibits itself in a glory of blue, white, brown and green. It is an entity, enormous, mysterious and complete, it glows in reflected light from a distant sun.
There are organisms that live at the outer limits of the stratosphere of that planet which, were they capable of sight, (and for all I know, they are) would see the land mass below as a uniform solid mass, exhibiting gentle gradations of green – a single entity.
Sooner or later all things diverge; the glue that holds us together, molecule by molecule, is governed by the laws of entropy and, as such, will tend toward a state of rest.
My orbit will decay.
To the lone circling bird of prey, the jungle canopy appears as a topographical survival map, the sounds of life that come to her ears from the canopy arrive as data; to be processed into a three dimensional picture that will locate her prey with brutal accuracy.
Below the canopy, the narrow path opens into a small clearing where they come to a stop; three faces of diverse hue, entwined in an intricate contract of horror and chance.
The path forks before them and they become, momentarily, a frozen tableau of hesitation; each consumed with their own particular set of internal mechanisms – habitual and genetic – each functioning within the parameters of fear, experience and social conditioning.
The jungle holds its breath.
“Left” says Mbali – instinctively and with authority – the tribal scars on her face glisten with sweat. She wipes her face in the crook of her arm, her elbow pointing briefly at the treetops; her chest heaving with the exertion of their flight.
“Shit,” Grevil finally finds his voice, he fights for breath, bent over, hands on knees, “shit.”
Siva faces back the way they’ve come; alert and poised, breathing hard, “we need to keep moving - they’re not far behind,” she breaks a long straight branch from the nearest tree; its protesting crack is swallowed by the green.
Divergence does not come easy to a species so locked into the perceived security offered by communal uniformity. Although individuals strive to break free from the uniformity of the herd, the herd will seek (through convention, coercion or violence) to keep its shape thus hindering those who would opt out.
A column of ants diverts from its vertical course to investigate the newly created wound in the tree, sap oozes in an attempt to protect the exposed flesh.
The jungle ripples with the myriad of events impacting on its awareness – the spilling of blood; the recycling of matter by organisms multi-bodied but single minded and brutal; the business of survival – all mere shadows moving at frequencies too high to register on the calendar of the seasons.

Galaxies & Stars

Zodiaque ~ Philippe Caza

A kiss in a ghost room, fingertip skin glisten
The clock in the hall counts its gears
Shadows adjacent with ears to wall listen
Take notes in a book made from wasted years

Secrets construct a room made of flowers
Oblivious of the clock and its ignorant hours
They fall through the air their bodies remain
The taste of the world, the core of the flame

He lifts up the curtain that swallows the sun
She breathes from the heart of the stars’ aqualung
He kneels at her alter his life to confess
She worships the hem of her self undressed

The veins of gold that run through her heart
Preclude all lovers who forget their part
In the ballroom daze of bedroom dreams
Where well-planned lives fall apart at the seams

His fingers fumble her mourning buttons
Pulls a thread of stitched-back patterns
On the lip of tomorrow his mark to render
Soul kisses fade made infinitely tender

By glissando pearl on powder cheek
By the red rising tide a beach to seek
By dew drop drained from tongue to finger
By the monsoon delta where memories linger

These ghosts relegate their cares to debates
On the relevance of analytical thinking
The universe vibrates in little earthquakes
Light discharges through stars unblinking