LVIII

But since Blavatsky’s day, there have been scientific leaps

And strides in terms of harnassing violet properties,

Not for spiritualistic purposes, but for material gains,

Or at least, as a source for new escapism from material strains

Into a newly engineered mode of capturing the imagination

In tubes of cathode rays projecting moving images on

Reflective screens –a new-fangled, wood-framed contraption

Of shadow-and-light-trick theatre piloted in posher homes

From the mid-Thirties onwards, every bit as apparently

Implausible, almost-magical, near-miraculous as the then

More commonplace gramaphones, telephones, wirelesses

And transmitter radios had seemed in their greener days –

All electricity-conducting commodities, by the Thirties,

Accepted accomplishments of man’s ingenious replication

Of Mother Nature’s mottled sea-shell amplifications –

Tele-vision, so-called, was the latest invention, or revelation,

To cultivate light waves for consumer distraction from

The drabness of reality under dirty sunlights –a true

Violet violation which would enrapture future generations

In ever more manipulating ways; but more, would come

To implant indelible images in human brains that could

Come to be confused with actual memories, commingled

With the mind’s sacred dreamscapes (for some minds, less

Resilient in filtering such things, the more graphic or

Violent pictures could be misconstrued as phantasms,

Conscious awakenings to dark cravings, repressed desires,

Egodystonic charades inducing panic and anxiety

At their continual repeating without recourse to an off-switch,

As with the actual television –that cathode tube, a tombola

Of obsessions and compulsions); a muddying of the streams

Of inner-vision; and would, as well, hypnotise the masses

For over four hours an evening, and subject them to ingestion

Of artificial light, dulling thoughts and senses, until such

Dysphemisms as “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “The Gogglebox”

Would surface from sceptical tongues –far cries from poet

Anne Waldman’s lycanthropic metaphor of the ‘surrogate moon’ –

Tropes to depict the pitiful spectacle of millions of households

Crouching round flickering sets, like so many cavemen

Mesmerised by simple light-tricks playing in shadows –

But in dimly-lit ‘living’ rooms; inducing in viewers a sense

Of mental mushiness, zombie-like numbness, torpor, acedia,

Nausea, irritability and twitching limbs, all caused by

Bodily absorption of ‘phosphors glow’ from the light projected

Into us, cancerously so in some cases, deep into our cellular

Networks and endocrine systems, generated by ‘cathode-ray

Guns’ as TV-sceptic and advertising apostate Jerry Mander

Coined it in his Four Arguments for the Ellimation of Television,

Chapter IX –‘The Ingestion of Artificial Light’ (1977)…