I’ve just been informed that the chair I’m sitting on contains nuclear winters, radiation, the slaughter of millions of Japanese in the flash of artificial morning. Pulverized, incinerated, transcendentalized death flows from my kitchen tap. I bow at the altar of oppression when I turn on lights, lock my door, make a phone call, pay with a credit card, enjoy a movie, bank. I can’t help it. Loving my life, I perpetually reinforce my lively prison walls.
But don’t wanna be a good consumer. Don’t wanna live within my custom-postered apartment of imprisonment. Apartment: there’s a word: apart/ment. You are set apart from me when we rent our separate apart/ments. Don’t bother me with your action movies. I set myself apart from you and your football games on big-screen television, from your whooping warcry video games. Don’t come down here into my apart/ment. You wouldn’t like the silence and unstoppered criticism in which I choose to spend my days. You don’t want to taste my vegetarian meals or hear my ideas about the rot of industry. Apart. Partition. These walls have been set between us by societal engineers for good reason. You know that they know best and know what they are doing. It’s all for the best.
But don’t wanna live apart. I’m your inseperable, insufferable, suffering, sensitive little brother, living on beans and trickle-down wages. I’ve been a good dog, I have. Eaten from Master’s hand, wagged my tail at all the right white moments, salivated when they rang that bell. I stood up and recited the pledge of allegiance with hand on my heart (but my heart stayed silent in protest, shunned). I stunted my thoughts, followed lesson plans. I danced to the static in that square way you requested, caught the buzz words and drank them down like Coca-Cola.
I found out that don’t refresh.
I learn to talk my own jive. I tune out. Tuning out, I open windows onto the desert of the real, invite weeds and oily rivers into my heart, which revives with wonder. I bake my own bread, using the least toxic ingredients I can gather using the dollar bills I’ve been handed down. I begin to refuse to cut my grass, my hair, my opinions, trusting my own eyes to open when I am rested, and not subjecting my profound dreams to the abuse of alarm clocks.
I’d like to take down a clock. I’ll start by strangling the ones in my apart/ment, drowning them in timeless yet polluted bathwater. I’ll play White Rabbit while I do it, touch the destructive sparks and taste deadly laughter that comes before dawn. But I won’t clean up your mess.
The you in this address has committed genocide and crimes against planetary common sense and goodness. This you has boxed up imaginations, intellects, and passions, then buried them under the foundations of sky-punching factories. This you has policed and brutalized people of color, people who refuse to say that pledge of allegiance, and youth and children the world over. The jails of this you are expansive and hungry, insatiable, black holes of cheap production and punishment. This you mocks rehabilitation, mocks work, mocks life, shreds even a thought of justice, smothers and stifles love with authority.
We are not this you. This you is not human. This you is industry, is misguided progress, is expansion and Manifest Destiny, is the Divine Right of Kings. It is enclosure and imprisonment; restlessness, panic, and insomnia; it is anxious about living, screaming that life is an abomination that must be squashed to be transcended. It is inhuman and inhumane, lapping abstraction and vacancy and removal at the ankles of its high-maintenance idols. The idols are colossal and defy destruction; more correctly, they have obtained a monopoly on destruction through purchase and violence, and will not hesitate to liquidate their shareholders’ assets in order to survive to consume one more day. The open mouth gnashes, rends, destroys, never closes to rest or digest.
Advice to the living: sell your shares in the colossal idols. Empty them out and resist; resisting, deny these automated authorities their next wasteful mouthful, their next meals, and the next and the next. Forcefully seal their mouths. Or forcefully feed the mouth the polluted pieces of itself. The appetite of the profane, mechanized black hole, turned on itself, will cause an implosion: poof.
And the fertile valley of the real will begin to bear fruit after the mechanical winter. Spring brings rain that rusts machines and renews living beings.
We are inescapably bound to our ecology.
Rediscover the rain dances.
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