This started out as a 30 minute warm-up exercise, expanding on a ‘yesterday thought’ of a supplanted phone device culture, where non-verbal chromatic displays, with icons and emojis projected around our bodies replace the majority of spoken communication. The implications of this are many, but I think we will become less human and more data-driven than even now if the medium of our communications increasingly shifts and evolves from the aural to the visual. I just hope the personal finally displaces the commercial in any future post-capitalist world.
From a writer’s perspective, such a world makes emotional ‘shows versus tells’ almost indistinguishable for the majority of the points of view which may be utilised. In fact, this fusion would become a necessity, since traditional verbal dialogue would be reduced to the bare minimum between any created pro- or ant- tagonists.
Ensuring a story was told in its full richness and/or reached its intended audience, particularly within the young adult market, would entail new forms of visual language being adopted and propagated by authors. Think turbocharged GIF memes interbred with kanji characters. Books with legacy words would die, or at least be hybrids of both. I agree it’s a difficult concept to grapple with, but not to be dismissed out of hand. Try looking at a TikTokking teenager’s phone messaging apps (if you’re allowed to enter their private vault) if you don’t believe we’re not already veering towards this.
As usual, the piece ended up much longer than planned, as I temporarily diverted my thought-flow onto the screen. It also surprised me with its insistence on taking a poetic prose form - or perhaps even a ‘tum-te-tum-te-tum’ beat poem, given a reworked line format.
But you be the judge. Go with the flow and enjoy.
When the slenderest of neuron-inveigled laces catches your innermost thoughts, you’ll be able to dispense with all that slow talk, communicating with light to assign visual meaning to what you’re feeling, show becoming tell as you flash flickering mandalas around your head. It could be your amygdalian emotions captured and emblazoned as projected auras in simple blue, green or red. Or the more subtle contrivances of the higher (hah!) brain, painting your exterior in patterned hues to reflect what and who you choose, what to say. Before you know it yourself, you’ll give it away. Like octopus skin, you will signal your emotions, your desires, the sins that are yours. All viewed by those about you, as they tell you theirs. The hairs on your neck tingling with the head-webs you weave, now only the truth in graphics, according to your beliefs. Still taught and conditioned, it’s not necessarily real, your human reaction to the world’s action, you may not even care what you feel.
We’ve come to this pretty, technicolour pass as a consequence of humanity sealing a pact on how to continue, after it finally recognised its sick past. Of all the world’s people being captured by a few dominions, for monetisation of their fears and hopes, their immodest successes, their ills and wants, their overt desperation. All sucked into channels for pleasuring dominant consumption and its satiation.
Now we will all be the trespassers and the trespassed against. No privacy, no secrets, no deception, no lies. In public, within families, for business, in court, even in bed. All fear, all hate, shame and broken hearts vanquished instead. To conceal is to be criminal, to suppress is to deny, to mask is to hide, these acts will be known before you can try. A blank, a visual silence is no excuse. Controlling to confound is frowned upon. Release is to ease, to share is to care, to vent is more welcome than pent up emotions that destroy the notion of harmony at work, in the home, your body inside.
No more painful waiting for the mating game, of random rolls of the dice. Always now kindled attraction both can trust, with a focused signal of synchronised blue giving mutual welcome to a first touch of lips, shifting to erubescent auras blending in harmonious lust. No deceit of praise possible for the size and the shape. If it’s shown then it’s true, if it’s not then it ain’t. Wave a green flag of assistance for the slip and slide inside. Pace as pulsations of passionate purple, the timing of needs so easy to read. Mutual cries of multi-coloured insistence, kaleidoscopes colliding as reward for persistence. Then after, avoid the false ‘see you laters’ and loving hug lies, by glowing a tell-tale logo of ‘only quite nice’. An act simplified, reduced to colour transitions, with no false pity possible for any colour blind vision.
Our colours will say what we found so hard, accepted as icons for emotionally charged interaction, no distraction from words that convey only half, now gleaning all meaning from our shoulders as stages for dances of glyphs and icons that leave nothing to chance. More than content with augmented reality that brooks no deceit, political and legal conceits will be laid bare, contractual intent at last equalling customer care. No-one will heed the right from the wrong, we will only be innocent as, after first aberrant thought, our act is known as fact, not criminal conjecture. Our intent allayed by the collective prefecture of all citizens alert to the chance of a bruise-coloured bad apple in our harmonious dance, quenching any wrong thought, without doubt or indecision, only accepting the taught, objective precision of what should be thought when all thoughts we can view.
So we will be more with our adorning colours to forge the new way of less, accepting the merging of showing and telling as best. Our minds are only judged sound when, with our thoughts on display, our readers decide if it’s worth them being swayed.
