Tuesday, May 12, 2009
429. Poem Called "The Encroachment" (Similar to Creeping Development and Whatever's Left of the Wildwest, Unfinished Poems)
The Encroachment
(Affiliated with Poems Creeping Development /
Whatever's Left of the Wildwest)
By Victoria "Stokastika" 2009
So the ocean shifted
Into a swimming pool,
And the mountains wilted
Into my own backyard.
The more I knew Unknowing
Of-the non-human world,
The more I came to own
This world as very small.
I thought I'd find a treasure--
Creviced infinity--
That spanned the universe
Of stars and galaxies.
Wildwest's never in measure
'Till Known came encroaching
A creep of man's disruption
Mind's pave developing--
[Mind's construct intruding]
[of trespassing, of intruding, of invading]
Without slight detecting--
To a discomfort
of confinement.
I just realized that this poem is a continuation of my California Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) essay, which started with this journal entry:
Whatever's Left of the Wildwest:
“It’s strange to think—I look out to the Pacific Ocean, and all I perceive is an endless continuum of a slightly curvatured, blue-liquid landscape, partly breeched by an angled wall of shrub-coated solid rock of the Channel Islands. And to think—despite the intrinsic human tendencies to bound systems through somewhat concrete geologic and biological delineations—that there are arbitrary human-constructed lines of regimes slashing up and down upon this continuity of space to which I cannot see with my naked eye… it’s just daunting… as if I were seeing ghosts. But then again, maybe these invisible streaks of barbwire need to exist, simply because there are too many humans like myself gazing upon and intertangling their modes of existence with this seeming vastness of blue. And all the sharp, translucent prickles of barbwire at least attempt to keep these rhythms aligned and as disentangled as possible. Rendering the chronic accumulations of our individual meddlings now dramatically shrinks this infinite expanse of ocean into merely a giant backyard swimming pool.”
[Biologically Incorrect Journal Entry, January 2009]
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3 comments:
I need to include more information in the poem "Encroachment." I didn't explain well that the world had to become smaller because too many humans were using the land and we had to chop up the land such that all humans could co-exist with themselves and the resources. [hence, the barbwire metaphor]
I just talked with my father and told him about the point of the Encroachment poem.... So, the point was (1) the more I came to know the system, the smaller it became (2) I thought I wanted to study the non-human world because it seemed to hold the "treasure of infinity" (3) as soon as you overlay human constructs over these landscapes, especially in the domain of arbitrary institutions and management (too many people dealing with the nonhuan landscapes), the land becomes every small and confining, like a prison... which defeats the purpose of the joys of infinity....
I am not even sure if I clearly stated this mission statement....
"Whatever entity man comes to know, he also tends to desire to manicure it."
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