Wide Eyes in a Dying Head
(The two-way traffic of critical self-awareness demanded in an age of mass communication and mass consumption.)
Head: The novelty of the moving image was never doubted
By the nine viewers at Golgotha:
John got tunnel vision, just thinking about it,
Till Revelation blinded like no other. -
Eyes: And Johnny, nursing obscurity with his single light,¹
Saw the goal of Maradona,
When a billion hearts beat as one at the sight
And there was silence in the room for the messenger. -
Head: There was ‘silence in heaven’ ² for Another, no entertainer to depose
Family and cerebral activity,
But a scorer, a midwife to explorers and students of false shows
To bring forth their own philanthropy. -
Eyes: But another comes on air, to seduce and levitate deep strife
In the seer right up into his eyes,³
Making him flounder, not experiencing self or life
Realistically, or values likewise.
Head: No airlift for him from the blandness of the peak-viewing Cruise
And the brands of ocean sameness:
As if disembodied, his eyes had no power to choose
What he watched, but pretended lameness.
¹Johnny should get a life, not sit in front of the TV, unlike the John who wrote the book of Revelation.
² The coming of Yahweh is
preceded by awed silence
in the prophetic writings. “Another” is Christ (Rev.8:1).
³ The TV makes us seers, not in the prophetic sense, but by over-stimu-lating the visual sense. For the Head’s Another, the eyes have another - another star (perhaps Tom Cruise), another film, news event, buoying him up like a vast ocean, denying landfall. But goggle-eyed need not mean brainwashed (lacking independent thought), as evinced by the experimental film, Koyaanisqatsi, which uses iconic imagery to challenge rampant materialism, war’s destructiveness and social inequality - a filmic refuge for the disaffected.
