Time is always against us

Way

Of course Lorca intones blood-tingling and lush

on the art of grimly exhilarating

struggle, surging dark engagement Yes!

Energy! But haven’t we been brutal

enough to the world and each other and isn’t resistance

just some obsolete masculine stance

that keeps on screwing us up?

Besides, when we take this question or these questions

head on—how to think, that is,

about death or time or body or fate—

we get ourselves always

into such an idiot twist. Everything we say

contradicts everything we just

said, we get stuck in this squirming devolving

vanishing point of

incompatible

metaphors and choices,

and language and the mind

seize up

or sort of gooily shatter.

So I’ll just say, instead, what holy mortal gladness it is

the precise moment when the train, in The Matrix, in scene number xxx,

WHOOOOOSH!!!!

unexpectedly blasts into the picture.

And

· the ringing phone

· the sleepy-eyed drunk on the bench

· the heroine whispering to the hero, AT THAT VERY INSTANT:

I don’t know what

is going to happen next…

Maybe nobody is ultimately

outside of anything, nobody can get

outside of anything, the movie is shlock, eXistenZ

knocks the socks off

The Matrix, there’s no boatload of rebels sui juris, any outside

is always still an inside, and that evil twit what’s his name,

the traitor we loathe,

is correct after all. Chewing on his succulent

illusory forkful of meat, choosing the REALITY

of illusion, the little fucker’s right…

But at that other, exact middle moment—

phone booth

drunk

woman pronouncing her words

) and the crying unstoppable heart-stopping Train ( —

at that moment, at least, the characters, the human

characters are virtually

extraterrestrial. Free, anyway, of what anyone

can predict.

So how will he

start? How will he issue or commence all anew, what course

of action will our hero

choose? When

or where or how

can he be

will he be

should he be

must he be

A short time later, when Neo’s in a right bloody twist,

down for the count and beaten to a pulp

and we of course hear the train

portentously approaching yet again…

it’s that word

inevitable

that snaps him sharply back. The thing that he

despises

brings him back to life!

He spits

his new name

into the face of his nemesis, THE MACHINE MAN,

and then

WHOOOOSH!!!!

somersaults free of the tracks.

But is that resisting?

or is that just getting

out of the way.