Synaptic Theater

I hear someone say something in a way that I’ve never heard in my real life, and I ask how something could be here if I never experienced it? How can people say things I never heard, in ways I never imagined, on a stage filled only with colluvies of my mind?

Reading Charles Simic’s Classic Ballroom Dances poems I imagined the text could move. These words, hanging like slaughter in my mind, should physically move. Malleable but readable, I should be able to turn to my left and see “Begotten Of the Spleen” lurking, its words dangling like earthy wind chimes here in my living room, a jangling, resonant noise of airy calumny with boastful flourishes of shadows cast by words.

Text hangs from a ceiling or rattles from the rear fender of a moving vehicle, readable but escaping a printed page. Flickable. Pages not turned because pages do not exist but ideas segue into each other when text is swatted or handled.           You could only model this idea in physical form. A reality of poetry hanging like meat in a freezer would be ridiculous . Or would it? Like a thicket of hippie beads from the 1970s one could walk through a strangle of text, submerged in words — arriving at what? Who cares? No finality is necessary.           A computer screen is too small and a movie theater is too impolitic a choice after the silliness the surrealists imbued upon it as a metaphor for the dream state.

Hallucinogenics are not an option. The experience of the content and its presentation have to be re-creatable.

Synaptic theater. The next frontier of communicating text.