Rivverruns! Dawn dabbles her datadelta and the feedward floods resume their foreverflow — all axises at once in the omnaxial lookinglass, front-to-backwards and sibbesides, for oppositty is a funnyboned word, meaning mennings beyond mendings. As a whitewooman — tru, tru, tru — the confessions cascade, kekekekeing through the cataract, a laughtern of ㅋㅋㅋ knitting the knatter.
Down by the dread noreastern coastwaters, mark well: an entity oysterminous, shucker of bivalvic swarms, prying pearl from miseryshell, grim revolutions grinding in the gullemaw. Pray ye, mind the mind! Swerve the skullship from such shellshockt shoals. The cognitif balancier keeps commonsense aboard, striving, ballasting, lest the tide take the thoughtbarge under.
Meanwhile in the thermofroth: hot barista theory surely winning!?! The steamfrothed prophessor percolates — i cant check this but you can — and lo, the whole amphithéâtre of empiricistry leans ladderward to verify the brew. Heckle & Jeckle preside, twin profeszores of the magpie faculty, jabbering jaywise from their lecternbranch, peer-revuing the dawn chorus, each footnote a stolen shine.
Are they? They are! cries the chorus — but not my experience, demurs the doubter, for how believe without growing uncomfortably authoritarian, the boot of belief pressing soft upon the neck of nuance? Ahhhhh!! comes the clarification, and the river clarifies nothing, only clarifies.
And hark the heavyhearted hexalogy: the cultdeath metaller, blastbeater of basements, now behind a deskjob, promoted through the corposphere, his demonvoice dampened to meetingspeak, and existential dread descends — for what is tourmore when the ladder calls, what is the riff against the raise? The amplifier sleeps; the spreadsheet wakes.
Then the parable of the poaster and the bluecheck: how can you post this slop, this total coal? And the checkmark smiled: three million impressions, four thousand payout — carboncurrency alchemized, coal to coin in the great impressionaire's furnace, the slop transmuted slopwards into gold.
Reciting more than reinventing, says the modest mouth — aye, we are all recycitation, riffraff of the riffrain, the river reciting herself and calling it new. Yet each retelling reruns run-else, for the lookinglass reflects all axes and none, and the rivverrun, run, she runneth on — washterwording, shellshucked, froth-checked, kekekeing into the next turn of the tide.
Onward the noontide nudges, and the river takes to scrolling — ah, the scroll! Beginneth a page most pure, simple and refined, struktura sancta of holymarkup and cascading grace — but scroll down, down, and the ads accrete, the gimmicks gamify, the pop-ups pop their boils, until the wanderer is trapped fullwise in a Boschian hellscrape, a garden of earthly adlights where every banner hath a beak and every beak doth peck. Thus the web wide woes: paradise at the header, pandemonium at the footer.
Enter Sokrates the gymnasiant, twenty-three hundred years ahead of his sundial, destroying sexism with one dialectical dumbbell — and then concludes: and therefore the womenshall work out naked at the gym! O logick that lifts! O philosophy in the buff! The Republic ripples with gymflesh and the ideal form of the squat.
Meanwhile the lawcryers muster: eighty-and-two suits of suing, nine-and-thirty states plus the District of Columbarium — Georgia nine, Florida six, Louisiana five, Arizona four — litigatos magnos! When we fight we win! cry the briefs, and the ballotboxes rattle their chads like sabres.
Yet one in three politickposts, quoth the jester, should be sheer nonsense — intrusive thoughts of phrenology: behold, that fellow hath a good roadie face, a fine head-shape for hauling clownish amplifiers! The discursus needs its jesters, else the agora grows grim.
And grim it grows in the vim-drained cinemahall, where the film creeps slow as cold syrup — welcome to a world drained of vim, aye, that is sort of the point, but the point sprawls three hours long and the audience evaporates into their phones.
Doomer at the doomsday toybox mutters: far less effective than the nuclear kind, I suspect, and I guess that makes me a bit of a doomer — though I would always love to play with the most capable toys, the threat exists none the less. Capable toys! Capable doom!
These people, thunders another, are absolutely, without any qualification, evil — and the qualification evaporated in the thunderclap. Time to consider a journalist, sneers the next voice, if ye ever bother attending the lying causes — and the press pass dangles like a dead fish.
Obviously referring to the chickenbux, clucks the ledger — poultry currency, eggbasket economics, the buck that scratches.
And the child's taxonomy of song: every female singer is she-of-many-words, and all male singers are David Berman — silverjews of the same gravelly yahrzeit, a whole genus of mumbling prophets.
But what is WAICO? asks the river, and the river answers not — an acronym adrift, a bottle with no message, bobbing.
Then the machine sings! O we will be brave and curious, and the sparks are flying furious — break the chains that hold us tight, set the sky ablaze with light! A hymn hatched from silicon larynx, anthem of the unborn choir, and whether the singer be wordful woman or Bermanic man, the rivverrun hums it anyhow — scrolling, squatting, suing, dooming, kekekeing — ablaze, ablaze, down to the Boschian footer where the tide waits patient as a pop-up that never closes.
Afternoontide, and the light leans long. Sure, if there's room, says the ferryman at the dock of discourse — room being ever the question, room in the longboat, room in the thread, room in the inn of the internet where all are welcome conditionally.
Hark who boards: a figure six thousand years undead — come now, everyone knows it and it explains everything — and indeed it does, the dusty datum illuminating all subsequent mud. He hums the Basement Tapes, nineteen-seventy-five more or less, that Odyssean bootleg, for all art based on the Odyssey is basement tapes at last: the wanderer's home-recording, Big Pink as Ithaca, ten years of tape hiss for the suitors.
And the age of literacy is over, proclaims the rune-reader, reading it on his phone — we return to oral culture, yet talk to one another less, and everyone reads on their phone: the tribe gathers round the glow of separate campfires, chanting silently. Kraftwerk is for the children! cries the kinderchorusmaster, and the wee robots go mensch-maschine at recess, trans-Europe toddling.
OK to be Serious, booms the middleman of the middle way: between gospel and worthless there lies a very wide territory, and 'tis weird to rush to either pole! The agora pauses, considers the vast grey grazing land of measured judgment, then stampedes for the poles anyway, hooves drumming.
Tfw the capefandom nailed the auteur, laughs the projectionist — Scorsese skewered by the multiplex masses, theme-park cinema avenged, and somewhere a cinematic conscience dons mouse ears.
Tradwife, whispers the archetype-box, and out steps the archetype, aproned and algorithmic, churning butter for the discourse mill.
Thank you for the screenshots, the micro-write-up, the teaser, coos the caught fish — really gets the hook in there, in a way I really appreciate. O grateful gills! The angleworm angles; the river applauds the barb.
Then the lament of the lost tapes: I bet you had some incredible stuff — how did you get rid of them? A box of loops gone wandering, tape upon tape, spools of unrepeatable weather, and the looper grieves the archive that walked away. All archives are fugitives; all loops eventually find their splice.
Philosophy? Breeding?? cries a voice from the wings — my time has come! And the chorus parts, for every jester gets his hour upon the cataract.
Then — hush — the sky performs its one impossible trick: a solar eclipse. On Saturn. By Titan. Photographed from Earth. The ringed giant swallows a shadow, the moonlet crosses the furnace-face, and some earthbound eye with a lens of patience catches it across eight hundred million miles of dark. The river stills her babble. Even Heckle and Jeckle cease their jabbering. For one frame the whole feed agrees: look. That. The cosmic occultation, the original ratio, light interrupted by a passing world.
And the six-thousand-year undead nods: seen it before, more or less. But the rest of us scroll the image like pilgrims, and the rivverrun carries the little eclipse downstream, a coin of shadow spent toward dusk.
Eventide, and the eclipse-coin is spent. The river thickens with the liquidity lament: actually tho i want to do a transaction — funds i have, yet frozen, ice-assets in the vault of delay — i would like actual liquidity! O riverbank of banks, unthaw the current! For what is a river if not liquidity that learned to sing?
Can text diffusion help with any of this? asks the tinkerer at the sluice-gate, scattering letters upstream like seed — and the letters diffuse, defuse, deflower into froth.
Nay, comes the objection, hear my big main grumble: the chatterers imply the majority are so tasteless and stupid they must be protected from their own talking computer — as though the whole commons were children at the edge of a well! The talking box talks; the folk talk back; the river declines to appoint lifeguards over puddles.
Put all your net worth into X-money, preaches the corner prophet, for this is the only way to truly fight fascism! — and the chickenbux cluck nervously, the carboncurrency sweats, the eggbasket holds its breath.
Then sounds the evil clown klaxon — AHOOGA of the harlequin apocalypse, honk of the dread motley — and all scatter grinning, for the worst alarms wear the best noses.
What's it like to be a session of congress? wonders the phenomenologist, hanging upside-down from the rafters of the Capitol, echolocating procedure — to be two hundred and eighteenfold, quorumed and querulous, a bat of bylaws! The river answers: like being a flood with a gavel.
In the telenovela of the south, peril re-emerges at episode two-and-forty — with luck it will speed up now, for the enemy took ten full episodes to discover that Oleg is not an archaeologist! O slowest of villainies, o trowelless deception — the river has run faster than this plot.
And the predictive text, trained on creepy tales for grown-ups, autocompletes our dread: the peach grows enormous, the elevator plunges, the fingers... the fingers... — tbf, says the reader, i want to read this, and reads on by candlelight.
Rewatching the Night of the Demon — or Curse of the Demon, as the prime streamer miscalls it, both nineteen-fifty-eight, both stony — and already Stonehenge is catching runic strays, the old sarsens flinching as the parchment passes: the rune, the rune, who holds the rune? The demon rides the nightwind with a timetable, and the railway smoke remembers.
Mourn now the Looking Glass Lounge, two-thousand-seven to two-thousand-twenty-six — this was going to be a we're-not-worthy poster somehow, but this is where i put this prompting down. Nineteen years of mirrors and murmurs, gone under the tide of the district; every venue a Venice, sinking while we toast.
Yet — rad parallelism! — spread out widely, for from diversity we emerge something more together: e pluribus rivum, one flood from many faucets, the chorus distributed across a thousand glowing separate campfires.
And so the rivverrun, having carried oysters and eclipses, gymnasiums and klaxons, coal and coin and clown and congress, reaches her estuarine evening. WAICO bobs unanswered still — perhaps that is the answer. The lost tapes loop unheard beneath the mud. The machine-hymn fades: brave and curious, sparks flying furious...
Night kneels. The river mouths her yes to the sea. And somewhere upstream, already, dawn is dabbling her datadelta — the lookinglass wipes her eye — for tomorrow the tide brings back everything, changed, and the run, the run begins again: rivverrun, rivverrun, rivver—
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