“What is obvious is misconstrued,
true mysteries are left to the noisy unaware
and the subjectivity of the softly subjunctive.”
Should I venture an opinion?
In Efedrina’s study of terrestrials,
I was merely an experimental subject.
I chose simplicity.
“I’m going to the supermarket.
We’re out of cat food.”
“We have a cat?”
~/~
I sat before the internet shrine
wondering what to click,
while Efedrina searched for the cat.
“No cat.”
“It may be imaginary.”
Efedrina was sharply unimpressed.
“You might have mentioned its irreality.”
“Nothing’s more real than imagination.
When I gaze into your disparate eyes,
colored with the jungle and the ocean,
when I admire your prolific lack of hair,
what I see are symbols, my mind’s inventions
of your alienness.
“Your truth is forever hidden from me.”
She considered my opining.
“The philosophy of a potato.
Let’s see what the picnickers are up to
at Wilderless Park”
“Perfect. I’m thinking symbolic
smoked sardines, hypothetical haloumi,
and two bottles of allegorical Rosé.”
about
Efedrina appears here and here.
artwork
Concrete Reality, from an original photograph of Boral Cement Works at Berrima, courtesy Mark Freeman. Made less concrete with the visual evo engine and CYNDE, cyclic nonlinear desaturation.
I really like the idea of nothing being more real than imagination. Last night, I had a dream within a dream within a dream and struggled to wake up IN (not from) each one. It was an entertaining (albeit somewhat unsettling) reminder of the mind creating its own reality.
“What I see are symbols, my mind’s inventions of your alienness.” The protagonist’s self-awareness is commendable, but he was being a bit mean to make Efedrina worry about the imaginary cat. 🙂
Thanks, Magarisa. Dreams can provide endless variety if we can recall them. I did read a scifi story where one unlucky character was trapped in an infinite sequence of recursive dreams and never came back to reality.🙀
I prefer to think the protagonist was simply uncertain, at least initially. There’s a stray cat that spends a lot of time in my yard. I’ve seen stacks of feathers, and once I saw it wander off with an enormous pigeon in its jaws. I suspect it’s feral, and I wouldn’t feed it.
I enjoyed this whimsical exploration of the nature of reality. We are what we think. Subjectivity is all. The previous comment referred to dreams within dreams. I think that may be a form of lucid dreaming when we are aware we are in a dream and have some control. But it can also be quite frightening. My favourite line in your piece is ‘ …disparate eyes, colored with the jungle and the ocean.’ Wonderful blend of industrial detail and fantasy in your illustration.
Thank you, Nikita. Yes, like everything else 😸, I have theory about what’s inside us and what’s outside, probably wrote about it somewhere. Most of us moderate our internal world with external reality, but if there’s a severe mismatch, it’s like the surface of a lake when it’s fully reflective. I’ve met people who literally do not hear comments that conflict with their inner world.