Rebuke
The sun has been active, releasing six strong solar flares in the first days of this month. It is a new year. I seem to have developed a limp.
Crunch crunch munchie wunch Jim masticated cereal into a coarse pulp which then slid into his gullet as a result of the miraculously choreographed movements of his esophagus and tongue, arching and pushing, thoughtlessly satisfying sensation sliding down. Automatic, the autonomic system, digesting, breathing, beating. With similar automatic compulsion, Jim, in a predictable sequence, clicked through news app, other news app, messages, emails, scroll scroll scroll. Perhaps the autonomic system has expanded, reached into the outside world, thoughtlessly feeding Jim the latest death figures and economic trends, media masticated and slid into his eyemouths, slid into his confounded numb brain, slightly less than satisfying compared with that mush of whole grain and berries. He pictures wheat squares off an assembly line in Battlecreak Michigan tumbling into a plastic bag and sealed in a box depicting them joyfully plunging into a refreshing pool of pristine milk, destined to clatter unceremoniously into my bowl. In the kitchen of my childhood I silently procured for myself the nourishment of cold brittle corn flakes, dusted with sweet sugar frosting, poured the milk into the bowl on the floor, as I was not tall enough to reach, and then carried it to a table at which I would sit, splish splashing milk along my path. In the passenger seat staring out the window at the low sun, enduring the pain as a game in my momentary boredom, holding a yellow-gold hashbrown in a paper sleeve. Strange memory of the truck driver and the happy meal, what was that toy? I realized it not long ago, then promptly forgot again. Jim’s eyes absently pass over the ninth headline down in today’s news: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists today set the doomsday clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the theoretical point of annihilation. The Earth is closer than it’s ever been to destruction.
You can sense the impending catastrophe, do not deny it. Life has become industrialized with efficiency obsessively creeping into every nook and cranny. The exponential productivity gains from technological innovations were supposed to free everyone to work less and enjoy more of what they care about in life, but innovation has rather been a tool for the wealthy to more efficiently enrich themselves, to get more productivity for the same pay with fewer people, to capitalize as much as possible on the unthinking whims of the masses while systematically removing any opportunity to take back the power which they were continuously ceding under the guise of progress. But what progress is being promised by the actions taking place? We have the largest incarcerated population in the world and our current priority is to expand it. Nuclear treaties are expiring. The economy is turning away from human beings. Peel-n-reseal packaging is proliferating.
Jim pulled into the gas station. The pump relinquished its nozzle, permitting it to be thrust into the car’s metal orifice. Jim squeezed the trigger and the pump protested for a moment, then reluctantly gave forth its precious fuel after a few more abortive squeezes. The flow ran sure and steady and the pump displayed its increasing numbers, incrementing with the absurd precision of thousandths of dollars and gallons. Jim was noticing the ants on the pavement around the pump, around the trash can. Wonder if they have any sense that somethings wrong, that they’re living in the wrong world. Crawling on the concrete sipping puddles of oil and gasoline, getting stuck in chewed up bubble gum. No, they have no idea, the poor bastards. They’ve never seen a blade of grass and don’t know any better. The flow halted with a sudden thud. Jim patiently stood by for a moment, anticipating the pump’s last vengeful protest, its last dribble of gasoline that would leak out lazily. Oh, you didn’t want that? Ha ha ha.
Jim, my body, is on his way to a protest. He’s never been to a protest, but he’s lately been overcome by a feeling of powerlessness and has decided he must do something, or at least yell about it with some people. It is not a new powerlessness, and not even unique to me. All of humanity is encountering a crisis of efficacy, a society composed largely of ineffectual cynics, a bunch of Ivans abandoning their father to his fate. Yet their actions betray them. Each person is ashamed at the thought of their non-life: they defensively strive for an image of the fullest possible life, while isolating themselves and alienating those around them. They carefully curate their possessions, pets, clothes, jobs, relationships, to produce the maximum effect. They collect their travels and experiences like tokens to be redeemed for the right to claim that they are alive. They are stunned to find themselves getting nowhere, sadder, emptier, further away.
Do I claim that my body abandoned me? Left me. It might have been me who withdrew, or perhaps a wordless divorce, know that it is confounding and painful for both of us. Life was growing and moving, living, and then somehow I began to lose grasp of it. It wasn’t apparent to me in real time, I simply found myself increasingly looking for something. I was looking for clues. Searching the eyes in my mirror for signs of life. My handwriting no longer familiar to me, my legs unsure of how to walk. I seem to have lost the ability to predict what my body will do, it disobeys me. I would speak, but my throat is no longer mine. Strange sounds like laughter are ejected from my mouth against my will, my eyes submit to something beyond me and move away from my loves, my arms folded and ineffectual despite my immense need for action. Familiar strangers pass around me. I’ve become separated from myself and an impossible abyss envelops me, yet at once I am elsewhere. I must be. The breeze and the hard earth are clues to my existence. Stumbling steps, I must be moving. I cannot account for my actions, but I appear to be alive.
A schism has afflicted me. If my mind is a sewer, it must have a cover. Heavy and hard to open. Secrets, captured and subdued, beat at the insides of their coffins, rumbling the soil beneath my feat. What happens when you lose the ability to peel back your own mask, fused hard to your flesh? Lost to yourself and afraid to see what you’ve become. Like a fruit left in a drawer ages ago, softly decaying mush with strange creatures burrowing. Let’s not open it. Some day you may find your house full of such drawers, at which point you may decide it’s easier to simply leave.
Jim’s life became like a laboratory, stark and silent. Without a self to be. He positively avoided talking to anyone and lived without any purpose, each day collapsing like a black hole into an impossibly small cataclysm of nothingness. All of my life and experiences lay before me in a darkened shed, collecting dust, decaying and vanishing with the fragility of a memory. My reproaches and lamentations echoed silent in a lost cave, Jim’s face stared ahead passive. Perhaps he was silently gestating, forming his new functional consciousness, accumulating energy and unbearable restlessness. I would’ve signed up for anything. I would’ve consented to being blasted off the face of the earth to live out my days among the timeless craters of the moon. So I took the job.
I was sequestered away without a care for the pathetic stupidity of human progress, which is really a misnomer as we’ve surely gone past some kind of apex and embarked on a downward spiral of hideous degeneration. The meaninglessness of my body’s chosen path was therefor immaterial to me. I was so sure of things, beyond all utility or usefulness, that I hardly flinched when a stranger appeared in my home. Unspeaking and implacable, sitting in my chair, sleeping in my bed. An awful comfort lulled me into a state of silent acquiescence in the face of innumerable passing days and years, slipping away without protest, unaware of the ground I was ceding. I was awakened by the sound of my body being stolen from me: two representatives from the personnel department announced that my body is being retained indefinitely and that any contract signed was only a minimum. Evidently there is no maximum and I should prepare to find my body still conscripted in the afterlife. Ten years have passed. One more and I can no longer count them on my two hands. Enough.
I awoke and found myself outside in a strange new form. I was determined to take back my life with unstoppable force and ferocity. But my progress has been painfully slow. I walk with a limp and don’t know why. A sickness takes hold of my stomach, surely a plague has arrived. Perhaps I am hungry. Things have changed since I was here last. Somewhere along the way the world became oppressive, administering beatings which I must accept, as I am powerless. I find myself exercising absurd resistance against anything, inanimate objects, signs, people I don’t know. Proxies in the war to restore myself.
Jim found himself out of place at the protest with his “ICE Gestapo” sign, complete with an artfully placed swastika. Granted they hadn’t yet infamously murdered citizens at the time of this protest, but still there was something disappointing in the ineffectual slogans and references to idiotic internet memes. The futility is palpable. A leech is in my skeleton sucking my soul out of my increasingly pale form and something in the trees tells me I’m living the wrong life. The twigs and branches conspicuously keep secrets from me, whispering among themselves in a language I can’t quite understand, but their shapes and swaying movements tell me something. It occurs to me that all these things, the schism, the lost feeling, the ever shifting goal posts of happiness, these are merely symptoms of our domination by a process. A process not unlike that which occurs in nature, governed by hunger, strength, weakness, lust, gravity, disease, molecular attractions and repulsions, atoms, heat. The basic laws of nature give rise over time to fractal variations, compounding upon each other, generating the unfathomed complexity of the universe and all its parts. Our nature has been transmogrified over time into this absurd process we see before us. The rules of our nature were written into our dna in a world of scarcity and insecurity, then written likewise into our laws and economy, giving rise to a hideous society dominated by indulgence, abundance, and security above all else. I don’t think people know where they’re going. Our aim seems to have been abstracted and long forgotten. We’re each feverishly pulling at oars in a rudderless plundering machine, pushed here and there by the winds until we shipwreck on some unseen rocks. A massive pirate ship complete with goons ready to whip those who stop rowing and ask too many questions. Our country claims to be democratic, freedom loving, just. In reality no person can walk down the street without breaking the law. The police can find a reason to arrest anyone anytime doing anything. The authorities will detain anyone at odds with their vision and defend it not because it is right, but because it is technically legal. So long as anything is technically legal, it must be accepted and permitted, you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains.
They could make up any rule. They could say there was some blurb when I signed up stating that my body falls under their possession and authority. We have a new policy allowing the surgical truncation of any limbs or appendages in such a way as to improve effectiveness at our discretion. Amputate my leg to save some weight. I’ll walk with a peg leg and make friends with all the wretched freaks and ghouls splattered onto society’s windshield. Upon the theater screen of my dreams is projected the image of a great trebuchet heaving all of those responsible to oblivion. All the fascists and their lackeys, the fools shrugging with their palms up and saying “it’s not our policy, we’re just doing our job”. Hired thugs enlisted to consolidate power and to protect the privilege of extreme abundance for those few in power. Peg leg. I imagine someone watching their amputated leg hop away on its own, plunging into the darkened distance blind.
I’m sometimes horrified at the sight of my body gliding naive through the world, vulnerable as a bug and erased from the earth just as easily. What a shame it is to be deprived of one another in this already fleeting instant of life! Shame overwhelms me and I confess I haven’t been fair. I was always a bit harsh. I hated my body’s needs, its hunger, its thirst. Perhaps it was bound to break out on its own, to develop an attenuated functional consciousness with which to provide for itself. But I can no longer bear this sundering with indifference.
I watch your uncertain steps and floundering movements, graceless in the dark. I watch from the window standing and shrieking silent, my words cannot escape my throat. All the eyes who peered in and ventured to see, gazed back at me, captured me. Spotted me. Ushered into life for a moment, resisting the hands pressed to my back yet silently bidding them continue. Wishing them to overcome me, hope at the demise of my own tyranny, alive life which spotted me for once. Gone. I regret that I left you like this. Hands in your pockets to keep them from falling away. Your stammering lips release reluctant words which you instantly disown, the illegitimate sons of your empty chest. I’m sorry you’ve been so alone. I’m sorry there seems to be no joy in life. There seems to be no one at all, not even yourself, but I remain impossibly alive. Even now my words reach you in the whispering breeze and your eyes are weeping.
Nameless forms pass around me and I am nameless. Tumbling like one rock among many in an avalanche, it is clear to me that I have only one hope. In my wandering I located my long abandoned self, my body, and I’ve been observing him, biding my time, following closely. Scavenging for scraps in abandoned buildings, watching through shattered windows, reluctantly subsisting. Stubbornly alive. Waiting for the courage to confront him, to reunite, to return from this wretched state. What will I say? I’m waiting for an epiphany. It’ll never come, I think to myself, having been awakened by the scurrying of rats. It’s a cold January day and I at last triumph over my resistance, accosting Jim in the street. “Listen! I was very sick as a child. Shivering and laid out on that hospital paper, blood leaving my face and a stubborn terror clinging to me. I didn’t know anyone in the room around me, the owners of all those shuffling steps and muffled voices. Muffled voices looking at a grainy incomprehensible monochrome image which seemed to be squirming and undulating on the monitor. I realized it was me they were talking about as I correlated the stopping and starting of the image with that device pushing over the surface of my torso on a layer of cold gelatin. I’m not really sure what happened, I can’t remember. Sometimes I think there was something there and they decided to just leave it, some kind of creature living in me and slowly stealing my life away from me, pulling even my personality back from my face until, at some point, I had no more self to be. I think people could tell when they looked at me as if I had no face at all–they knew. Do you ever feel like a ghost or a phantom trying to live a human life? Reaching and grasping at objects and your hands go right through them. I myself have found it quite difficult, in my formlessness and charmlessness, to find any way forward or any place at all in this vulgar ant heap that is society. Ah, but don’t turn away. Sir! Don’t you recognize me? Allow me a moment and I shall recount to you another episode from your youth so that you may be sure of who I am.Yes, I’m sure you’ll be quite glad of it, relieved even, to be at last reacquainted, as I surely am–” His hands have found themselves around my throat, fingers curling and tightening with an incredible strength I had never expected. I note a distance in his face. I’d like to explain to him our symbiotic potential and that it’s only natural for one to acquire a body, yet his eyes fixed back at me over the immense chasm seem to tell me that I have no right to live. In any case, I’m unable to form words through the choking. I feel a heat in my face and remember a dream in which my consciousness slipped out of the life it had known and into a completely incoherent timeless loop nightmare from which even death could offer no escape; a dream of monstrous fractal memories endlessly looping back and repeating forever, my consciousness lamenting its birth and doomed never to find the elusive oblivion from which it came. As my vision grays and closes into a tunnel, I hope to god it isn’t real.
yelling about buildings 