Brian George
"Autumnal Fallout," my surreal memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, was posted a few days ago on Metapsychosis. I also did a reading to accompany the piece. (Pat Madigan, who was the sound tech for the reading, has offered to help me record a number of other pieces, which I plan to do.) Here is an excerpt from the piece:
We knew too much, by
far, without knowing that we knew anything. Just recently, we had decided to
take our powers out of storage, and our ignorance was a danger to the cosmos as
a whole. In our toy ships, with shovels in hand, we would set sail from our
sandbox! With our miniaturized brains, we would boldly go where no man had gone
before! The path was not a straight one, however, and the arc of our discovery
bent towards the Abyss. We had stepped into the last act of a drama that had
been set in motion years before our births, in the springtime of the world.
Then, war was a game that the omnipotent seers played; death was an adventure,
and the ocean was a vast but comprehensible text. Not only could we read the glyphs
inside each atom, we could also read the emptiness on which they had been
written. The gods were our contraptions. We had little respect for the
authorities that would bar our access to “junk” DNA. We were living mirrors,
from whose backs the mercury had not yet been removed. An oath prompted us to
throw away almost everything we had, recklessly, and to cover our tracks by
destroying the horizon. How infinitely strange it was to be a leaf that somehow
did not know that it was hanging from a tree. At last, we had tied the year
into a perfect figure eight. October, as predicted, had arrived.
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