Good News: You Seem to Exist

"That there is something is the first, most obvious, and best known thing conceived by our intellect and all the rest follows" --Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus 

"I think; therefore, I am"--a bit self-centered,
Rene. "It is, even if it's not what it seems

or seems different depending who or what
records the seeming"--awfully inelegant--
but better? Here's the thing:

something exists. Can I I be more specific?
Can the something? The questions answer
yes implicitly, being more specific themselves.

Here is a word: exits. Exits exist, or seem so to you
and so they do, and therefore so do you, so take one

to a fine and rational place.


hans ostrom 2018

Happeningness

The happeningness
of reality never pauses,
"is" being a fiction,
a slice of approximation
imagined to be there
between "was" and "will be."
No wonder wonder
sometimes tires me.


hans ostrom 2013

The Organoids

I enjoy how science hunts down philosophy
like a big cat on a plain:

the clever bastards now make
organoids--
yes, that's right, brains
in vats, the old
thought-experiment.

Yes, of course, maybe
it's a case of brains in vats
imagining
they're making brains in vats;
and of

other brains in vats imagining
they're reading and writing
about same. Alas, not likely.
Occam's Razor slices a leak
in vats of that sort.

I do hope there is a neo-funk-
rock-digital-punk-post-sexual
band out there now named
"The Organoids." That,

by the way, is something my
brain thought, some meager
morsel a big cat might snack on.


hans ostrom 2013

This Digitation

An ant on a twig in a flood
can't conceptualize all that wet
force, nor can I even fake-imagine,
that is to say bullshit my way through,
what this digitation of being-human
is-or-means. My eyes and hands

sometimes attach themselves
(they are mammalian)
to that screen or this, and
this touch-screen or that
keyboard are twigs in the
something, which is of a something
else inside a whatever it may be,
which is purveyed retailishly.  

I'm no more than a furloughed
extra in one of coding's lesser
dreams. Maybe you're an electric
fruit-fly, nothing personal. Maybe
we're real holograms, or holygrams,
merely faking ironic asides on
shit they call social media.

Perhaps most happenings now
pour forth frothily from corporate
virtualizers. That G to the P to the S
can pin my point doesn't mean
I'm being or that I'm found.


Hans Ostrom, 2012

Alive, I Am Allowed

Alive, I am allowed
to perceive large pieces
of whatever this stuff
is we call the world.

Today (what is today?)
I feel the arrangement
to be such a strange
and temporary contract,
one I never signed
but one I greedily fulfill.

Sunlight comes under
blinds, a jet plane high
sounds like an air-duct's
mumble, and  later I must
go collect some things to eat.


Hans Ostrom, 2012