Where Seas and Fables Meet by B.W. Powe Page A

networks. We have technologies that allow everyone a chance to speak or to show an image of ourselves. Instead of icons we look to iTechnologies. The emphasis in that word is on the ‘i’.”
    And she said: “The reason art – self-expression – has become so important for my generation is because we’re desperate for something to give a crap about and believe in...”
    She said: “Sometimes we look aimless, clinging to social networks and what we can make because it’s better than nothing... We may be more of a lost generation than was ever known before.”
5.
    Internet quote: “We’re trying to ride a wave of being until the wave stops.”
6.
    On self-expression: these are markings, disjointed undertakings, missiles and reveries, maybe the result of too many midnights. It’s hard to call this self-expression when I’m still trying to ascertain or acknowledge, to catch or fathom, what the self actually is... the self a thought?... the soul a feeling?... They are documentations, surely, of how I learned to read the soul in these times of dominance by the Structure, and of the not-so-secret dream we share to make journeys. The anti-life entity, like darkness, always looks strongest just before the dawn. The journey is only a morning away.
7.
    In the place on a CV where it says – Identity , write this: Not yet.

Identity Crisis
    A Canadian went into a Swiss bank in Zurich to cash a traveller’s cheque.
    â€œOf course we’ll do that for you, sir,” the teller said. “Do you have proof of your identity?”
    â€œI do,” the tourist said.
    The Canadian rummaged into his coat pocket. He quickly found a small mirror.
    He held it up and gazed deeply into it.
    â€œYes,” he said to the teller, “that’s me.”

Yes
1.
    He started expressing gratitude to everything. He did it all the time. It became a persistent blessing, sometimes relentless.
    He couldn’t stop saying thank you.
    He did so to those who made him angry or had harmed him in some way. He expressed gratitude to those he’d hurt or somehow insulted, thanking them for the truth of their experience together.
    Then he began expressing gratitude to the trees, to the river, to the animals, to sunlight, to the sky, the clouds, to the moon.
    He said thank you to the dust and the wind.
2.
    The more he became himself, the more he became breath.

March of the Penguins
1.
    I’ve just watched March of the Penguins , a 2005 movie about the Antarctic Penguin migrations, narrated by the benevolent-sounding Morgan Freeman (who played God in another film). Beautiful bleak creatures trudged tenaciously through the white wasteland, and on, in their comic waddle. I was impressed by their determined march and their commitment to their pups. Supreme in their resolve, heroically chivalrous, they dazzled me with their crystalline, protective tenderness. If the penguins could compose madrigals of devotion, they surely would.
    The penguins can’t fly, but they can soar in their hearts, in their dedicated spirit.
2.
    During a second viewing I began to be stupefied by their incapacity to fight off predatory beaks. I was stunned into silence by their inability to raise doubts or protests.
3.
    I watched frustrated by how the penguins couldn’t break from their version of the Structure. They couldn’t let inspiration or necessity prophetically change them. Biology or routine or the elements or a brain that wouldn’t grow: whatever the reason for their inability to leap beyond the snare, it became obvious that they’d plod forever. No new paths opened to them.
4.
    I asked the images: why can’t these noble creatures leap into the ungovernable? Why are they scaled in by routine? What would happen if one – just one – tore him or herself away from this painful millennial march? What if one pointed suddenly in another direction? This penguin would be branded