iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Amitava Kumar

eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories – Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. -Muriel Rukeyser #everynightapoem [Carel Willink, Bad Tidings, 1932]

[Carel Willink, Bad Tidings, 1932 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam] Tempera on linen. A man in suit and hat in right foreground, walking away; a woman in white blouse and brown skirt, running up the street to reach him. Stately pink mansion and tree-lined street form the picture, ominous dark clouds overhead.

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.

-Muriel Rukeyser, “I lived in the first century of world wars”

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