A poem for the "Feeling Digital Project"
By Beatriz Herrera
If a tree falls to the ground
and there is no one to see it
–no one to listen
did it really fall?
The pulse behind
my scribbling is alive,
the text falls
word by word
shaping the archive
of my desire;
as leaves find their way to the ground,
signs find a place to rest
in the memory of a naked pulse.
Once more
the infinite sound of leaves
awakes my hand moving through the empty page
signs fall in the text
as blood fills my brain.
If I draw a smile
–and there is no one to see it
did I ever smile?
Would you ever count
how many leaves fall
from a tree? But you would
keep a record of my heartbeat
of my emotions as numbers,
as bytes,
that rise and fall-
is it not enough to experience
the contraction of the muscles
and the desire for a smile?
Would you ever come
as flesh, as sweat,
beside me,
like the tree patiently staring
at other trees
grounded in presence?
Would you come to share
the air
traveling from my lungs
to the tree, to your lungs
the echo of time
and place connecting
our presence
through air.
Yet air will not fulfill my desire
as colours, lights,
sounds, as smiles do.
I don’t demand your attention
but the possibility
of reacting, of transforming
air
beyond a breathable substance
into an expanding force
surrounding my body,
your body,
trapped in the landscape of shining screens.
The screen makes me feel
almost an authentic desire,
am I an artifact? Is my essence
artificial?
I know vulnerability
to light, to sounds
to any single byte
that resembles a desire
yet the constellation of pixels
may not be an innocent hologram
–I might even fall in love with–
but another attempt
to capture my life
in numbers, feeding
the dark machinery
of extractivism.
Yet I will not stop
the pervasive will of transforming
signs around me
exhaling air into sound
and the power to hear it
to smile at it;
a desire to be seen
and felt
a pause in the eternal solipsism.
Special thanks to Subhashini Goda.
