With wrinkled fingers I dial the faucet open. A hot beam of quartz rushes out and ruptures the plane of tepid bath water, a sound so loud the dead T.V in the corner of the tub wouldn’t be heard, even if it was switched on – though not so loud to drown out thoughts. I let the hot water run until wrists burn, until a heart resists in thuds. Dialing the water off the crystal flow snaps shut to silence, except for an occasional drip. My time is approaching. Rising steam curls in knots wreathing the mirror on my right. It floats up the off-white walls, past lemony buzzing lights, to pool in the ceiling. A goatish pupil stares back at me from an economy sized television. I’ve boxed myself in. She is my T.V: a lantern without flame, a bloodless body without spirit. She rests in a cove I hollowed out for her in the corner out of the yellow stained drywall. The landlord will be furious when he sees it, I think, not that he’ll be able to charge me for it once he does (nevermind, he has the damage deposit). Since I caved in the drywall months ago a black fungus has fed on the moisture and darkness, creeping along the walls from the fringes of the hole in tiny blue black bolts of breathing circuits, spores I have inhaled as I tried to scrub them off, to no avail. That is until I had given up. I’m curious how far those snakes of mold will reach if I’m left undiscovered long enough. In the meantime, other fingers draw me back to old aches, aches liquifying and pouring from my soul, flowing in one undeniable direction.
‘Drip’ [Down!]
If we deify people we meet God everyday; I used to think – like a child. You and I were witnesses with similar eyes – once. At seven years old we peered through windows of a moving vehicle as nature and culture sprawled and scraped by, musing to music that penetrated our trance, missing our friends. On a road trip our fantasies danced along the unfurling landscape: of Martians, or if we could ever sprint as fast as those yellow lines blurring into one, we dreamed of kissing future lovers, or imagined marriage, or maybe we wondered of our own death, even. The means between us are different. The end is the same. The fruits may taste different, the roots are the same. The eyes are different, what we witness is the same. Sold, one of many, so are you, even all the way back then, and it’s getting harder everyday to feel it, to feel and say nothing. A pressure is building up, in me, and in you. I know you feel it too, a pressure in your chest, a raised fist gripping your heart. Is it crazy to hide such a thought. Is it crazy to bury your feelings?
I’ve hit depths – as low as possible. If we go deep enough, we find something we all share, don’t we? We all dreamt of what it would be to love, how it would feel to succeed, naive about what it would take from us because pleasure is the adolescence of love. How were we to know, even after the lessons were forced down our throat? There is no God? Everyone seems so much more of a judge these days than even He. Without mercy and reflection, ours is a society without consideration – unless it can fit between a decadent advertisement. Now nostalgia is just another emotional vector for more clicks, more sales. If it bleeds it leads, they say, whether it’s another dying God or human being. Whether it is culture on fire or our nature ablaze. And they, whoever they are, must be onto something, because we love to watch, almost addicted, despite the stupid commercials.
‘Drip’
Is it crazy to hide your craziness from other people? Is it crazy to tell your friends how you feel? Is it crazy to tell them what you think? They aren’t as free as they thought. Can you be half-free? Nonplussed they’ll point, incredulous, to their mortgage(s) and leases as arguments to meet your conspiratorial ramblings. Freedom has become choosing what you want, and buying it (on credit). Is it crazy to tell them who you are and what you really think about it all, possibly for fear of letting them down, for fear of pulling apart the almost normal apparition in their mind that lives in your place. They’ll say: ‘who knew he was so upset, so unhinged’, won’t they? They knew nothing, they’ll say, or they’ll say they knew everything as they pop another Paxil and move back onto more pixelated feelings. A burden is what I never wanted to become. I wanted to be there for people, some stupid grandiose reason to live my own life, I wanted to be for people, because there was nothing to be for myself. But between us all lies a wall, invulnerable, projecting our shattered selves elsewhere, onto some distant screen or window pane deep in the past or the future, or some C.O.G bunker presently. No one talks about the pain, the chaos, the hurricane of events that preside inside them. Everyone acts impenetrable, unassailable, while I am pathetic, weak and vulnerable. So many cool folks eating their food with their phones, and devouring smiles while with terrified eyes they hope you stare and need you to care. Nothing left is raw, alive and beating; where that innate human loneliness drips off like water or blood and we realize through each other that the nature of being human isn’t suffering in solitude but reaching for companionship – that the meaning of life is the red and full-bodied relationship between its constituents. Is it crazy…
‘Drip’ [No.]
…
Sorrow was woven in as I grew up. Each thread slithered inside me and died, a string of skeletons fossilized into place. You can relate, even if you don’t yet know it. Everyone has their fair share of pain, even if they don’t winge about it like this to strangers. There’s no monopoly on sadness. Especially when it’s applied so liberally. A snake coiled around my bedroom, residing everywhere but my toy box, my box of escape. In that rectangular frame of plastic and color I could feel in some conjured dream a safety and security, because in that place I held control. Back then the snake of sorrows swung mostly in my periphery, yet loomed always, hovering above my underdeveloped consciousness, slithering, hissing out of view; till it shed its skin and spread out as an inescapable storm: torrents of voices gusting and bolting the fringes of my understanding, raining with lightning strikes as words: adoption, foster-home, hungry, homelessness, boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, husband? abortion, abuse, hungry, alone and lonely – upon my underdeveloped heart. My mother was my God once, dismantled to a hallucinating husk – still a child herself, morally uncertain, eventually exploding in shards and falling in fragments – all she could provide my brother and I was the mystery of love bobbing upon a plane of absurdity; a suffering sprinkled with drunken cheer and the sounds of worn bed springs pounding out a new rhythm every weekend; or a test of patience as we waited with the dawning Sun in dripping gold suspense if she would, in fact, come home, safe and unscathed. She loved us for sure, but were we safe? That was my main question then, it was a child’s question, and a prayer. I grew up ossified into an abnormal mess, prognosis mostly helpless, I’m told. Just ask this screen now, where you can, ‘Are we safe?’
‘Drip’ [No.]
…
Love is a flame but it’s easy to confuse it with a fire. Mom hadn’t learned that a person cannot love those they abuse. No matter how much they say ‘I love you’ to your shivering heap upon the floor. Something even a child can understand and yet something easily forgotten by the time they become an adult. She squinted around for love like they were a lost pair of glasses, already resting on her head. I grew up like her to find it too can be nice to burn in a blazing lack of dignity when someone’s around to enjoy the heat and light. The blaze kills the loneliness, even while you crackle in torment and split apart. We connect to fire, hunching over it as it licks up and scalds, charring our layers as we peel away burnt skin inch by searing inch, removing what clings too tightly so others might see and know you; even if it all just amounts to some sadism granted for the trouble and time. Your pain can be an offering, tricked into pleasing someone with suffering because you are fooled into thinking it is helping the best of them and not just feeding the worst. Your pain can be a sacrifice to believe you have some value, a rabbit laying down and spreading wide before a wolf, because the wolf needs to survive too, right? If I am light, I am dimming. If I am light, my lantern is buried in a tomb. If I am lit it’s only because I’m still burning myself alive. A flame is a symbol but a fire can be company.
‘Drip’ [Static]
…?
Possibly it’s human nature to focus so strongly on survival that the modern mind, in its cage of ego, fed on a Television diet, cannot discern survival on its continuum all the way to greed. We can be greedy for safety: a child’s greed. With so much distance from starvation certain people feel an entitlement because they have enough time to work at devouring everyone around them. Being a pathetic loser – you learn how to feed them, but even that can become a bore when it dawns on you that they don’t even eat your flesh or values, they just swallow your screams. Hungry for God as a teenager, faith gnawed at emptiness. Before it grew to a seductive hiss my conscience was a halting whisper; that these voices are the same I could never be sure. My faith twisted around propaganda. God never existed but good government did, I was told, at least here but not over there, right? Right? (My) simple arithmetical politics infused slowly into everything; something priceless had been traded in for certainty. Misled, I grew up thinking we were all free. Barriers built by stupid totalitarians are the ones you can perceive and can breach or climb, their presence immediately calls for rebellion, revolution; at least attention, you’d think. There are barriers you can build between people that cannot be seen. Beliefs can layer limits inside that can never be traversed, as I’ve spent my life smashing my head and heart into one in particular. Misled, I thought my beliefs were my own, rather than another monkey trap with a morsel left inside a cage, transmuting into an identity I clutched like a starving animal. In this cage we find that we slowly consume ourselves, because ultimately it is ourselves we are served. If only there was a way to utilize the prison to free the prisoners. If there was, it would have to be bloodied, wild and full of entertaining pyrotechnics.
‘Drip’ [A snare is more dangerous…]
Huh?
So my hope died last, well, almost. It was all spent hoping for something bad not to happen rather than something good. Hope has fled, the hope needed to reconstruct my life, once it was gone everything abandoned me with it, everything but that hiss, everything but Her. I’m sure once the hope for heroism finally dies our culture will be no different. We will descend to the abyss unless there are enough individual fingers to grip the precipice. And save the rest… I won’t stall to be its witness. Even though I’m one of the cowards to bring about its fall.
[… when you do not know it is there.] ‘Drip’
What’s that?
Our culture is T.V, it is in our nature to see, symbols call to us from our own antiquity. Our culture is our consciousness congealed over generations, built by instincts, dreams and their myths, the ancestral memories floating in our howling blood. Humans once had some semblance of control over their consciousness. Now it’s all pushed down or given up to an authority that talks to us like a selfish step-parent we should all ignore if not undermine. Gratitude to platitude, or not, the cycle whirls. The wheel of our civilization with its sacred spokes – we have almost stricken loose too many. While think-tanks and more machine bolstered authority spoked a new wheel to roll on ahead of us while manufacturing attitudes against the old one. Who can move forward, who doesn’t need to stop, who doesn’t also need to move backward? We just keep pressing onward on some plastic and heavily logo’d rainbow road never noticing when it’s all rolling downward. Never noticing the symbols serving something. All for an authority we should all ignore if not undermine, because we no longer need them and now we know we never did. Haven’t we witnessed how modern society generates the wounded and vulnerable (as though self-destruction was intended by the authority). The secret mongers and money launderers keep us back on our heels until we roll to our doom. They fund our poverty, our weakness, and our fear. Does it matter where we smash when we plummet to our death? Does it matter who they are when they push us off a cliff?
[No.]
Our deepest insecurity and the only security we can have comes from exactly the same place. Easily controlled, we all assist in controlling each other, massed and herded – wounded in the same ways so we can be provided the help at the lowest cost, so the help always remains industrial rather than individual. For if we are not weak and wounded how can something provide safety and protection, even healing – like a (step) parent who knows no other way to raise their child up then first beating them into the carpet. How easy is it to become the good guy in public, to the ignorant and confused, after you’ve been the bad guy in secret? Who abuses power doesn’t understand its true nature nearly as much as those who that power is foisted upon. Now in a congregation of raised fists our progressive and modern culture has become a sacrificial altar. Not in a way where we recognize it, where we feel the bindings spoken into place by our dutiful and obedient friends and family, where we notice being carried to it by our politicized neighbors and fevered interlocutors or who the lunatic priest is and why his flock is smiling so. Only until we recognize the clean gleam of steel do we see our place in the sacred drama, and then all that’s left for us to do is bleat in terror at their sneers with as much humanity we have remaining. These folks are the ‘decent’, on the right side of history? At least that’s what they always need to tell you loudly, with more emotion than logic, when they are trying to convince themselves. Premature death is a waste of the priceless, but it saves land, resources, and it can serve someone. Suicide can serve something, just like homicide and genocide are always in service to something. Just ask those who make war sacred or at least a reliable revenue stream. Who knew there was anything sacred to begin with? I can’t deny that the loss of my own life isn’t interesting, but it’s only interesting because all life has value, if only because hopes and natures dreams are packaged in our lives. I had those, they too will decompose behind my frozen eyes reflecting a semi-circle of laughing folks who wave goodbye with one hand while the other checks their digital wallet, for even more security. The dead know the truth about insecurity.
‘Drip’ [Ignorance is enforced.]
What? Did I think that?
“Damn!” Looking around I thought I had cleaned the bathroom completely; brushed the floors, the walls, the baseboards, I cleaned the toilet and windexed the mirrors as they squeaked and polished the sink to a silver sheen and dragged chemicals across the shower floor, scrubbing them into my eyes and lungs till both were blood red, I thought I had cleaned everything, except the inside of this bathtub – because, what would be the point? In all that frenzied terminal cleaning and final scrubbing I forgot to clean her screen, My T.V – she’s dusty. I am so lost, my life so meaningless, it’s not so bad that I don’t have answers, it’s not even that I know the questions to ask, I forget the reason why I would ask any in the first place, it’s always ‘Why bother?’ Which has ceased to be a real question and has become my bleating unoriginal litany.
‘Drip’ [Ignorance is enforced.]
What is that? I look around the shiny bathroom, I ask the buzzing lights, the ocean of steam above, feeding the mold even more. A wave of doom seems to always be coming, what rests in its wake? The specks of water mired to dust gives the screen brown splotches and smudges that I call myself a loser for leaving, for missing, though being a valueless loser isn’t a new belief and suddenly I get the impression that I’m being watched, once again.
“GO AWAY!” I howl to nothing as the anxiety rises from my lower half in a pressured flow, hydraulic, like it’s a pleasure, almost, but if my partner waiting in the boudoir of soul was a slithering monster or even a floating angel and all promise was replaced by an oncoming fear or rank inadequacy – one crest and the other trough, like one is my past and the other my inevitable future. There must be an eye on me, observing the inside of my chest or observing from it, because the feeling of it crawls up and through and out of me.
‘Drip’ [It rushes upward.]
Huh?
Am I thinking that?
Am I… hearing that?
I begin to shake. I stare at the dead T.V.
Stares say a lot, don’t they? Being coveted feels like something, whether the thing loves you, wants to lay or eat you, take your wallet, or even what’s left of your self-esteem. By the time you notice a glint of it wavering in the periphery, you turn and – whoosh – it’s already gone, a predator evading detection to flank you. But still you feel the dread gaze that something is interested in you. This is how a jaw unlocks and devours you gradually when you don’t pay attention to it, how you consume yourself when you are inattentive and irresponsible. The eyes, her eyes, my eyes, yours, just picture them, visualize staring into those eyes: round glistening whites with black pits fringed in perfect hoops of mottled emerald, sapphire, jasper, maybe even ruby, flickering, sparkling, bespeckled with light, or not, smiling somehow, without lips, or not. Now, the person you picture is dead and their eyes reflect it. See it. See what I mean about what can be said through a stare.
‘Drip’ [Ignorance is enforced.]
That is one way to meet the specter of death before dying, to encounter death as you live. You can picture it harvesting you in a sweet release of fruit being shorn from chaff. And when you do this enough, when you call on Her enough, eventually, she whispers back. At first it’s a gruesome surprise. She’s taken personal interest in your insecurity. Soon there she is, with you at work, over your shoulder, telling you it’s better this way, seducing with the vision that escape is better not only for you but everyone who knows you, nay, everyone who ever could. You cry silently at your desk, you shiver, you sweat, you shake, thankful only a spreadsheet on a screen stares back, while she slithers up your spine, over your shoulder and tightly around your adam’s apple and whispers in a sultry hiss that, yesss, yesss dear, you are worthlesss. And after a while you can’t help but listen, especially when it’s spoken so often and so softly, like a jingle, like a slogan, like a helpful heavily made-up millionaire bobbling his or her head behind a pointless desk on T.V.
‘Drip’ [Ignorance is enforced.]
“Enough!”
What’s – who is that?
[…]
We are free to give up. Nothing is sweeter than giving in. To the lover you need more than you love when they are very wrong and quite certain, to your friends when they are ignorant but sure you are an idiot, to your duvet on winter morning; to your familiar fear, to your friendly comforting weaknesses. To your entire existence.
‘Give up’. She once whispered, my hissing conscience, my slithering death wish. And so I have listened, almost. Be my witness, just don’t laugh at me, actually, the laughter makes it easier. There’s nothing left, there’s no point so go ahead, mock me. I deserve the mockery.
“I give up, I commit. There is nothing left, nothing worth the pain and effort.” A nihilitany.
I hear neighbor children shouting and playing in an apartment nearby, their joy and excitement for life bleeding through the cheap walls to my pounding head. The parents shout, I don’t make it out, but it’s probably ‘go back to bed!’
In a tantrum, I splash the hot water around to drown it all out, to watch the water wave back at me, reacting as one unit, rising up, baptizing the dead T.V screen with a tiny splash. The water rises over the porcelain rim and collects the clean new blade and draws it down under the surface. The steel should be hot anyway. As much as I have tried to sail off this course, tributaries always seem to carry me back to the self-destructive delta. Depression is death almost everywhere in nature but here, right here I give it life at least for a little longer – I know I’m not the only one. From birth, my nature was to be a loser, forgotten, forsaken. Now, my nature is to die. Depression’s soon-to-be hero, if not just her lowly broken herald, whining a tune about…
[The blank television crackles with static, popping, snapping as it begins to shake.]
What was that? Oh… God…
[The silence of the dusty screen is slashed apart by a crow’s caw. Uncanny eyes emerge from darkness, glowing yellow. Zooming in an owl’s gaze is displayed among a tangle of branches – flashing for a moment. Rising above to the canopy and set against the darkening sky. A jackal cackles out of view. Glowing in the violet embers of twilight the high and haunting laugh fades back to silence as the screen fades back to black.]
No…not this, not now, not you.
“Not now!”
[The screen hisses back aggressive static and flashes white in a steady pulse. The sound of a microphone being switched on spills out from the flashing white screen, a woman audibly clears her throat and speaks in a sultry voice – …am I howling to the void, delivering a message that never seems to arrive? Are you still alive?]
I scream in my own mind but when I close my eyes the flashing is still there, strobing behind my eyelids.
“I can’t escape… What are you?” I scream some more, banging the bottom of the tub with my fists, water splashes over the rim all over the polished floor. Even the steam bustles about the cheap yellow light. The neighbors grow quiet.
[A man’s chest flashes on the screen to the rhythmic thud in my ears, then bisected to display a human heart, beating.]
You don’t even exist.
[Beliefs, often incorrect, may keep them free from pain, for a while, but pain is their price. It comes due.]
I’m growing insane. Sanity is a ledge. Before the precipice there is the leap – or the nudge – from the edge. It’s not staring at a dead television, silent, at the corner of a bathtub. Sanity is a ledge. It’s genetic, you know, a product of one’s blood. May I plead with you and state none of this is my fault, it’s my mother’s and her mother’s, and then hers? I’m a victim of circumstance, a victim of chemical imbalance. It’s my blood.
Please.
[The screen flashing, pans out in sliced frames out from the heart to a young man in a loincloth, he is kneeling solemnly before a burgeoning fire, preparing for something, his hands are out of the frame. His hands are busy.]
Even that doesn’t work anymore. I know. The thirst to place blame faded gradually, not unlike my desire to play with toys dried out as I grew up.
Don’t trap me. [You already were, but not by me. If all you ever sought is escape, where must you be?]
We’ve all been in a spot that is uncomfortably high, looming over the pull of open air, a fall to certain death. A faint breeze, cool, whispers to tug you inches closer toward oblivion, “What’s that?” you ask the skyline, as you lean in to listen to the terrible face of her yawning space. It’s likely, like me, you swung back, a little sickened, at first, that the line between self-preservation and self-destruction could be so slick and so seductive; a cure to all pain, a free and forever painkiller, the final plummeting palliative. The liquidation of all your problems, oh, except one. But, after all that, safe in your bed or bathtub, some part of you still remembers, knows, you could be a killer, even though – it could only ever be of yourself. It’s so easy to see, so plain, while you imagine it, while you feel yourself falling, as the fragments of your life scream by and leave you behind from above, that there is no net, no chute or string to pull it, no sound even, just the silent tears in a priceless fabric that have crept like lines crawling a face, etching it to rip apart. Why survive? What is the meaning of existing? Survival, for what? There is too much suffering bubbling out of the gap between what I am and what I ought to have been.
[The young man is displayed, through flashing frames, carving crimson dripping meat from wet fur, his hands and forearms reddened up to his elbows, his expression bearded and stern. Meaning is nailed to sacrifice, suffering consciously for the sake of something else is an act of creation. It is an act of love. Just as thinking can be when it is for someone else, and clear.]
“Look around, there is no such thing as love, only power.”
I close my eyes and imagine my plot on the cement, so to speak, awaiting. The ego isn’t an illusion anymore than a wave in the ocean is an illusion. We are in our unconsciousness like a raft rocking upon a waving crest of sea. It’s coming, the ground of reality is spreading out wide and rapidly emerging into terrible focus. I know my own psychosis, it could take hold and “I” would cease, but my existence will never be an illusion as the wave flattens to rest on the ocean’s unruptured plane as if it was the tepid skin of bathwater.
I could be your echo, electrically – no wait, I mean, umbilically your shadow. Tell me what to do, what to say, I am your vessel – fill me – with something – inject me with some kind of purpose, that is not my own, which means something more, something more than nothing. Embrace me. Take from me my fears. I promise I won’t hold it over anyone else. I’ll live that way, I promise.
“Save me… from myself, or I’ll surely go through with this.”
[…]
We are all evil, I’ve been told, many times. Any idiot with an opinion seems to loathe humanity, it’s a safe position, believe me, especially when those who loathe, loathe more than they work on themselves and puff up like prophets when it doesn’t work out, for themselves. People want to give up on the human race, so do I. I’m doing my part, aren’t I? Dumb we all are, so am I. A waste of space – or breath, useless eaters, they say, that’s me too. I too eat and breathe and offer only waste. It’s only natural to see people give up first on others before themselves just as it’s quite a light step from useful idiot to dutiful slave. Can you be half a slave? There is nothing left to endeavor an adventure for besides a campaign of hate and fear, I’ve been told. The notion of freedom or liberty loses its punch when there are no true humans remaining and now an army of non-human intelligences approach us. Revolution now is forever sealed behind plastic wrap, reflection is taxed to death, rebellion is served up only to bolster the ratings – and to destroy what has been constructed upon the lands that can be purchased at a cheaper price, after they are first reduced to flaming rubble, by the poor for the rich. Mass culture seems to aim us all towards all that doesn’t matter as lonely targets, to bury our individual lives behind one bureaucracy or another, whether we work for it to feed ourselves or are fed to it by ourselves, our lovers, or friends or our neighbors. We sell ourselves to this soft indecision… because… because…
‘Drip’ [The smoke above the young man’s head rises up high into the canopy of the forest, past glowing eyes of birds and predators, and is sucked into leaves until it vanishes.]
Programs are free, it’s the box we are sold and sold to. Self-neutralized with a passion for faux television politics I have kept busy, sure, safely separated, unreachable, my lower emotions stirred for something, pacified. I’ve been perennially embittered with my ‘neighbor’, perennially embattled, while the face in my mirror disappears into dependence on everything that isn’t… My identity is just a position now. A dead future lies ahead. Behind us a digital wall is being installed, while I scream at my neighbor with raised fists and them at me self-righteously in prepackaged talking points pieced together and priced in a boardroom half a world away. Imprisonment looms with unseen bars promised to be comfortable and convenient, secure for sure. I’ve stared into the Television long enough to recognize their impatience, the mask being lifted off before the panopticon has fully clicked its digital bits, boops, bops and bars into place, but no one else seems to notice being sold or at least they don’t want to talk about it. It’s a big dirty secret, too big to be believed. A dead future lies ahead, so why not make the great escape? One part of me spiraling down this drain while the other more subtle part plummets to Hell – I’ve seen it through various layers of glass, feeling my way through the hot glow of some Satan or Sauron peeping through each of our purchased panes – through each we feel the glare, invisible, impenetrable, unassailable, and not yet immortal, behind some distance and binary code, gleefully in an awful grin feeding us with everything we want at a moments notice, usually at the expense of…I don’t remember… a one or a zero? For a principle of Evil to exist at all it must be able to perceive what is beautiful and Holy, otherwise it wouldn’t be effective, and Evil seems very effective. We can say “no” to that roaming eye or we acquiesce, but I’ve noticed that the thing that isn’t said much about Evil, is how generous it can be. Everything is free in Hell, I assure you. And everything there is definitely a one or a zero.
[The flashing stops abruptly. After lacing entire lives with narcotics, evil’s minions stole a march in the night, while lives slept, and slept. The scene on the screen of trees under a gibbous moon cackles in feminine sounding static.]
I once thought I was an enlightened thinker, so courageous too, who dispensed with the bugaboo of a God who stared through everything, through my very heart and my precious privacy. And yet right after He departed from my insides I accepted a different peeping beast with five-eyes. The world shrunk while I disregarded the notion of the sacred and had it sucked out of my life to flourish in a culture which seeks to rule over me like a mystical eye in the sky, or merely with a mechanical one. If I cared enough I’d assume the satellite above can thermally image me naked in this porcelain grail: the chalice that holds life, for now. I was trained to accept it all without question, we all were fattened up as adults while we were fluoridated as children, now I see I am being trained to forget the reason for questioning anything at all. My attention slashed to bits daily, morsels growing smaller as I cannibalize myself with deadening eyes. The second last question left to ask the sky is whether I would rather my God file away the image of my meager genitals, or my Government?
[A feminine mouth emerges from the black screen, all bright white teeth with no lips. All white teeth and no eyes. What if humans had intrinsic value?]
I have only intrinsic interests.
[What if humans followed them?]
That would have taken more faith than I’ve known. Does the fact that I am saying this and you are responding mean it is already too late for me?
[…]
Should I pull you into the bath?
[A woman’s eyes playfully emerge out of darkness on the screen, they are familiar. Well, sure, dear, but I am not plugged in.]
But you are working?
[…not on electricity. She winks]
I press my eyes closed to see hers still staring at me, speaking through a stare. It once was so easy to run, to hide, you just close your eyes, turn your head, shift your shoulders – and leave, or cower. You close your eyes because when you are hunted open eyes are seen. Wrought of thick carpets of depression and heavy dreamless sleep, surrender is rendered easy. Running is easy. Hiding is easiest. I once made grandiose life changing choices, just words no symbols, facing my bedroom mirror and saying things out loud to it, how silly, like ‘you will get out of debt, apologize, win, succeed, change, grow, or… kill yourself’; well now you know how all that turned out as the image in the mirror has vanished into whatever is scrolling behind the next screen.
‘Drip’ [I am to help you.]
Sure? A typical thought, I thought, mirrored in my television nestled in the corner by the faucet: “you are here to help?”. “I wish I had never been born”. Did I hold tight to the umbilical cord as the maternal world tried to suck me out through that pinprick of light?
[Her teeth disappear. She blinks slowly, curiously, softly.]
Does humanity have an archetype, an ideal? Puppies raised by cats seem more humane than we. Once I had faith that we penetrate the confines of our self, achieve a uniqueness, and a paradox emerges that through this deep uniqueness we are at once reaching the place that contains all of the human race and more. Uniqueness leads to oneness, what a paradox? In risking death, and/or madness, we seek not what others approve of but discover what we really are instead, and in the deepest direct way find a treasure which is the storehouse for others, another paradox. This can only be shared by how we live, and not what we say about it. Instead though I spent my life, so far, pretending. Pretending to sleep as an incoming monster with five-eyes trampled through a shrinking place, leaving giant craters as footprints, did I not think it wouldn’t eventually step on me too as our society ignores everything above its bent knees? The wasted land – that’s me – I am waste, I am wasted, the human environment already sacrificed to a simulacra wielded upon us for money, nay, power. I can see, but mostly choose not to, the speaking screen replete with logos and the safest ideas, easy sex and meaningless violence makes for better pablum. I’ll die but at least I will be entertained. What to do with those of us who support the digital Devil by sleepwalking everyone else to Hell? If I’m already heading there, why not rush the trip? Weeeeeeeeeee
“Wouldn’t you agree?”
[Anything that remains unconscious is incorrigible, uncontrollable.]
I spit into my own bathtub with disgust. “What does that even mean? How is that helpful?”
‘Drip’
I’m still turning over new leaves like warm pillows, so I can fall back asleep a little less guiltily. I make the hard choices and do the opposite of what needs to be done to complete them. Before I had even fully committed to myself I had fallen into this, acquiescing to defeat before making a serious attempt to succeed. But it’s too late now, isn’t it? The pit to climb out of is too slick, too deep, and I’ve let myself become too weak, all that’s left is a few slices of pain and power, a bit of dumb courage that flows, fades into warmth like red becoming white, like white freezing into blue. A living moment ossified into a dead eternity.
[The image flickers back to different smoke rising in a canopy of a forest.
Commitment and sacrifice are the same.]
I was afraid that I would become the “father figures” that I watched cycle through the doors, destructive, insensitive, selfish. That I would become what I hate. I thought the beatings would stain me and cycle through me at some future date – that the price to be paid for violence and hate was more of the same, the same fate. They didn’t, not in the way I feared. Self-destruction is a nasty addiction, the drug is free and you are always its generous dealer – high on your own supply. And always holding.
‘Drip’
I watched my mother slip, she fell, possibly nudged by the force of my exit, taking thirteen years or so for my cord to start to drag her down. It’s genetic, you know, a product of the blood – betraying her and I, rebelling for emancipation. A fifth column of D.N.A. and like she had, many times under this cellular duress I fantasized about slitting my wrists. I have felt a sordid and scrambled identity ignite in this thought, all soon to be eulogized and soon to be consigned to the purity of stone and soil. Freedom from a prison of volitional meat and universal pressure, escaping a world of jingles and slogans in long scarlet streaming gushes, painting and contaminating pristine icy curves of porcelain until all of my loathsome essence flushes down that drain into the sewage flow ebbing below. Carbon into carbon, waste into waste. Within the frame of eternity our destiny is in the energetic interplay of compost, so what is the difference, why not rush the chemistry? I’ll leave a note to cremate me.
[But she did not do it, did she? The smoke turns to rain and falls to earth, a rhizome of roots blooms a white rose in the rain, the image is gradually superimposed into a scene of Christ being crucified.]
“Not a Christian!” I sneer at the corner of my bathtub. “But no, no, she didn’t.”
I spoke to her yesterday morning. She asked how I was. I said ‘good’.
How we corrupt ourselves – oh, how do we allow it? We watch the fingers of blue and black fungus spread, longer and larger, we ignore it of course, till it consumes our corpse, through our eyes, in a bathtub, leaving a red white and blue – open mouthed – tableau frozen in the colors of liberty. I wasted the better part of my adult life; it was an addiction to fear, as well. Fear of living, fear of others, fear of judgment, fear of being a fool, which is always realized inevitably. I was forsaken, early. I tried to recapitulate a childhood enshrined in the innocent peace I never had and as such I was of no use to anyone, living without dreams, living for a fantasy that couldn’t be realized because it was dead, long dead. Faith suffocates everyday your prayers aren’t answered, especially when you desperately need them to be.
[Out of the screen my own voice booms in a thunder clap over a suffering crucified triad of recognizable men: God didn’t even save his own son!]
Taught to only receive, now how do I give? I have nothing left to offer anyone, save confusion, maybe insanity, a funeral bill, a cringy long-winded whining object of mockery.
‘Drip’
[The screen flickers black and white and back to a vividly animated forest. Green, blue, red, pink and yellow, as the color contrast is cranked up. Smoke rises from a camp situated in the middle of a clearing, a figure, a man standing in the foreground of a semicircle of elderly trees. He stands before an object of fascination. Bloodied up to his elbows and up past his bare chest to his neck.]
So many years mistress T.V, in the wasted land, drowning, bobbing up and down, gasping for air – before dipping down below the surface for more years of meaningless work – living paycheque to paycheque, game to game, novelty to novelty, nihilism to nihilism, wasting my opportunities, trying to recapture a pocket of air in a bubble that had popped a good long time ago. How prevalent that meaninglessness was and is and how it’s pressed down in our rapidly disintegrating culture, a culture of confusion, of waste. I lived meaninglessness to the fullest, trying to hold air in my hands; trying to reach into the past during onward marches into a bleak future, trying to recapture my innocence through practiced ignorance. Believing that others’ progress was my own too, as they march with raised fists to the sound of millions of keystrokes by those ensconced in security, preaching diversity as long as it’s of looks and not of lives and ideas; an industrial diversity. So many wars of the pre-hobbled and wounded, mistress T.V, a revolution led by millionaires for billionaires designed by trillionaires; grass roots only if the roots grew in castles. Seeing what should have been my own life, I safely pranced behind some glass instead. And now, it’s too late, isn’t it?
[She speaks again: It was as if Abel worked with a particular knowledge of God, observation communicates our own intimate relationship to reality…
The man, Abel, stoops low before a fire, his eyes wet and ardent as the golden flames flicker in them, he purses his lips to blow into the smoke rising before him, shrouding his other features except a glowing stare as he wordlessly mouths a prayer.]
Oh I see, I must be Cain then, in this drama?
Eventually I became comfortable feeling like a loser, and blind – the fear that it was true bubbled up from the ancient spirit we all share, desperately wanting more clarity and courage than comfort and safety, it was furious and horrified that that was all I would amount to until I killed myself, that is if I can speak for it. No amount of shrouding yourself in comfort or security dispenses with the pure unbridled suffering of existence. Comfort just makes the pain throb even brighter after the glee and gleam fades by the morning glare, on the way to work, rumbling on a dilapidated train mired with condensation as everyone has a different skin color but the same despondent lowered stare.
A posture of security just invites your enemies in.
‘Drip’
Just ask Abel.
[His eyes are displayed – staring ahead, searching, becoming familiar, becoming my own.]
Don’t do this, I won’t look.
I close my eyes but still see the scene, like she has a chip fused to my occipital lobe.
[Between a relationship to existence, intention is one important layer.
He is – I am, shown as a child, sitting at the base of an ancient tree with a full green canopy under a swept blue sky, singing, his heart is glowing in red and white, his song attracts an accumulation of tiny colored birds who attend the boy in silence, brown squirrels join them, red foxes and russet deer and dirty wild dogs, yellow and black bees buzz in the branches. A wolf lays down in approval, in the distance.
Even animals respond to beauty and Spirit. By instinct alone. What if higher order entities respond in similar ways? What if you do as well? What if what you think and feel is a wave, like one embraced to rise and then rest in the ocean.
The image of the boy and the audible song fade to black and silence.]
Have I been unloved and vulnerable so that there was some way to offer me some love and for others to offer me some healing? Is that why I was harmed, by my own hand too, so that something that is not “me” could provide some help. Is fatherhood itself hobbled for the health of – for the strength of the mob? Is it a lot easier to raise your fists when you aren’t raising kids? Is it easier to hate your real friends who tell you in a grimace what hurts and what you fear than to discover your real enemy who smiles through everything you wanted to hear? Is it harder to hear something new instead of what you thought you already knew?
‘Drip’ I grip the razor tightly and slide it across my chest, it slithers easily into the skin, itching a thin little bite, no stitches, yet yielding so much, opening me up and leaving a rivulet of red behind it. The blade is sharp, it hurts a lot less than I thought it would. Who knew this pain would be as satisfying as eating? Pain has meaning, doesn’t it? This will be easy. Maybe follow me to Hell? Oh wait, you already were, more than likely.
[To aim at the good is to have a chance to reach the target, but also, so that the target can mysteriously and magnetically reach you. What happens when you aim at the awful?
Awul is as ever present and as easy to succumb to as gravity.
A familiar figure is shown flying in black empty space, then falling, plummeting through smoke and steam. Screaming in a familiar and hideous voice.]
By ruminating on all those who hate and never knew, I ruminate hate. Anger rises though, instead. The T.V, the media, makes me want to hate new people I never knew. But it’s easier to scream and rend apart about how I never had a chance when I hone my lonely target on the auntie who said I simply wasn’t smart enough, the uncles who manipulated us out of money, and food, fixating on the father who boasted about his manhood and how he raised his fists successfully, (instead of me) and called from over a thousand miles away to tell a teenager to huddle up with his call in the basement, on that peach and ancient rotary phone, surrounded by paperwork and old pictures of Jesus and my mother’s family, away from prying ears, in the dark, just to say this was his last call, he wanted nothing to do with me; it was my fault. And so it was as it is written and will always be, sir.
Falling is easier when you know it’s not only expected but there’s no one at the bottom to break your landing, when there is no one there that has to deal with your crashing weakness, when there are not many of you who care enough to disappoint. It’s the climb back up that burdens those who project their own weaknesses onto you. Their words claw and grip at you, sure, that’s just inertia manifest into decaying flesh. They strive to live down there, with you if possible, at the bottom. To see you climb out is to see all that they don’t want to have to do and would never risk, especially when blind hate is the news media. Anger can pull you up because it is sighted, hate is blind and as easy to succumb to as gravity. Maybe I’m not smart enough. intelligence is superfluous anyway, intelligence is everywhere. Between countless ones and zeros you are peering through it to my naked stupidity. All nature has ever asked of us is honesty and effort, faith and courage, which happen to be the same things that our (real) burgeoning culture desperately wants to affirm, and in that way nature and culture are interposed. Can I – can we have truth, can we work, can we courageously risk faith – can I? Jesus, can we even raise a family?
‘Drip’ [The screaming snaps shut to silence as smoke and steam begin to rise out of the television into the bathroom – curling in cartoonish black-gray knots and pooling into a thunderhead above a bathtub that still holds life.
I close my eyes and watch myself fall into my own consequences.
The plummeting man lands softly upon a throng of a crowd as he changes into a woman – the crowd hoists her up and carries her above the throng, onward.
My vision pans ahead of the crowd to a deep hole dug out of yellowed grass, it zooms out to view the scene from further above. The greening yellow grass around is marked by patches of dirty ice, winter’s fleeing forces against the encroaching warmth of spring. Filthy men and women in tattered rags begin to drag large stones to the center of the screen, they form a circle around the hole. They leave quietly and solemnly return to fill the circle with tinder and kindling. They light it with a shard of flint in one hand and a bit of quartz in the other. Pausing to rub and warm their hands. A man before the throng, the priest leading it, proudly holds high and blesses a large pole which looks like wood but shines like metal and then steps forward, driving its pointed end into the hole. A filthy hunched over man hands him a torch and shuffles away faster than is comfortable for him. The pole is taller than a person. Others rush in to fill the emptiness left in the hole with fine gravel. A little whisper of smoke climbs the pole. The leading man is wreathed in a halo of hatred he thinks is his righteousness, his flock cannot see it, or the black zeros hanging over themselves. He has my fathers eyes, no, now my own. He is dressed in rich red and soft white raiment.
Opening my eyes I see the clouds thickening and churning angrily above. I sink deeper into the cooling bathwater, terrified.
‘Drip’ “I didn’t ask for this.”
“You wanted to die, did you not?” The gurgling feminine voice crawls out of the hole that used to hold my economy sized television, which has vanished. Her long darkened fingers and dirty yellowed fingernails reach through – gripping the rim of the hole, her pale bones glow through stretched translucent blue skin and sinew as they playfully caress the black fungus and point and curl at me to come in.
Despite fear pouring off me in radiating sheets, she is somehow seductive. This is what I wanted, isn’t it? I grip the razor in a raised trembling fist, everything above my wrist disappears into the thunderhead churning at the ceiling of my mostly polished bathroom.
Puking body-warmed beef soup into cold pink bathwater, the brown cloud spreads under the surface, as the black clouds above mirror it.
“You whispered, you told me to… ”
Her hands grip and draw the fungus in like rope, the black and blue circuits retract violently and after a moment two snakes unfurl out, white and black and wet, slithering up into the smoke and cloud, disappearing. Maybe I will get my damage deposit back.
“You want me to die.”
“Yesss, it’s true, I want sso much of you to die, but not your body. Fool!”
I close my eyes and lower my hand back into the water.
My vision locks upon the lady coming into the screen, the scene of my mind, she calls out to me above, she sees me. She is fastened to the pole by the mob without struggle. She is staring into my eyes, up at me, from below. Smoke rises from far beneath her feet, rising up past her grinning face, flowing up, to me. The smoke burns and dries my closed eyes so I open them to find the black and white snakes swirled together into a staff of alternating shades, spiraling into the steam and smoke pooling above. A cloudfront that casts shadows rolling across the water.
Closing my eyes again I am now in her place upon the pyre facing the sentiment of the crowd which is somewhere between worship and laughter. The priest leading the mocking flock looks like me as though I am staring into a mirror. And in a female voice I feel the timbre of words cascade from a hoarse throat and breathless chest, which is my own.
“You want power but do not know its price, you want love but avoid its price.” I hear myself say in a feminine voice with defiance, a fury, I have never known.
An old milk-eyed crone in the crowd steps forward and spits onto the ground before tossing a small vial of oil onto the kindling, breaking it apart, the man leading this congregation of hate steps forward.
“And what is that price, dear?” He tosses his torch towards my feet. I do not look down but know with its heat at my feet that it landed true.
“Pain, it is pain.”
Crackling is heard below.
“Then you’ll show us much love and power.” Sniggering lilts up and down among the throng.
Insinuations of smoke lift to assault a bound and clenched calm. It won’t last, it can not, this isn’t real, it’s all in my head. Whispers, mocking, judgment cut through the ones leering in pairs of expectant eyes ensconced by grins stretched upward on stilts of tipped toes. I close my eyes, undeserving of their thrown disgust and shame, to them I am different, to me they are all the same. The shame should not be mine but regardless it colors the fluid up and down my spine.
Behind clamped eyelids and a chained up terror I witness what was once myself in the safe and wet bathtub, but now this man is different, and new – he has ardent eyes, glowing green, and is cleanly long bearded and corded with muscle from honest labor.
Bursting down from the thunderhead above him, spears of lightning repeatedly strike the same inch of his chest that shields his heart, crashing into him in wracking blasts of bright white, blue, purple, again and again, red and yellow bolts that leave arcs of fiery sparks, unwavering and accurate sharp arrows of yellow and green pierce him, all light up the storm darkened bathroom in hues of hot plasma, a flashing cosmos of colors reflecting off the water, linoleum and porcelain.
Gripping the rims of the bathtub to hold on to his life, the electrified water crashes back and forth, sloshing around the new man as long slick snakes spiral up before him in a black and white staff wriggling between violence and dance. I am boxed in. There is no escape. I feel heat stab feet I shouldn’t have. I open my eyes.
The peering crowd points to my curling toes and seizing soles. Some bite their lips. Others lick an old taste from the corners of their mouth. No one blinks.
I shut my throat, clench my teeth, fight, squirm over it, holding it back, down, deep within, suppressing an instinct and terrible urge. The priest steps forward with the blind crone in his left arm as waves of heat distort them in the spring sunshine.
Giving in, I hear a loud and terrible scream torn out of me, drawing out some yellow and broken smiles and some filthy hands shrouding a few sweating faces. All the dark halos vibrate above their heads, black crowns bouncing like children upon thrones that are not there.
“This is quite a power you have, do you yet love those that judge you.” The priest mocks as he gesticulates from me to them and back.
“Their love is… their power is…judge-ment is…”
“Yes?” The crone speaks wetly as she steps forward to hear. “Tell us!”
“Is… is… rel – ahhh – tive”
“Speak!” The crowd demands: “Our judgment is… relative… to what, fool?”
The crone steps closer, curious despite the heat singing her long gray flowing hair.
“Yes girl, tell me, ‘twill be over… soon.” She whispers with false sweetness.
“Their… their…” I moan, my thoughts swirling, spiraling up and down into and out of flooding agony.
“Yes?”
“Ignorr-aaannce!” With a taut back arched like a bow, a lyre, the scraped blue sky receives my howl below the pyre.
The crones milk-eyes lower to search the dirt as the crowd behind her explodes out in laughter.
Sheets of smoke and waves of heat obscure her old melting form as she shuffles back to the priest with my own face. They lock arms again in silence and suckle on the spectacle.
Amber light rises up embracing and darkening all before and around like stars above a neon city night.
Hosts of animals in unwavering growling waves of searing pain crawl up my legs, starving for my pain, they devour my calves, my knees as they fill like two blisters, until they pop to feed them all. A twisting charring grip, so tight, turns icy as blood oozes out and sizzles through boiling splitting skin. My nerves are ending. The smell of blood and skin cooking submerges my sense of smell in something sickeningly familiar.
Screaming is shorn from me again and again as I witness my own body seize and writhe from a place over my shoulder. Fighting the shame of showing my pain to them, teeth in the back of my mouth crack and are quickly swallowed in jagged gulps as I fail to clench the agony through my jaw.
Through the crowd I can see the fire is intensifying. Their black vibrating zeros glow and eat up the sight of me trying to flee my fate. Agony, mine, I can see it rise in orange hate in all the pairs of eyes peering back. Orange panes of glowing loathing glee, in the darkening scene. A congregation of predators hiding deep behind invisible trees in the gathering night. They watch their prey squirm, shake and split into two. Divided by a spring horizon as shadows stretch a little on the ground, by a single degree. Ash and death below, smoke, steam and screams above; my water spills down and their flame pushes up; fingers of fire licking higher as rivulets of searing blood trickle below.
The only reports in the landscape being screaming and laughter, crackling and sizzling.
The pain that was once my knees rises to my thighs, tugging me almost completely out of my wracked body. Twisting violently, writhing in paroxysms that will not stretch or tear the bindings, I moan, desperately. Soon enough high pitched screams shatter me in fragments until my larynx splits and the screaming snaps shut to coughing gurgles, rasping silence. The sound of it all seems to fall from somewhere above, but I am not above, I am tied to a pole, dying, burning alive.
I close my eyes again, to see the man in the bathtub, the lightning strikes once more and stops. The snakes have vanished. A beam of sunlight sneaks through and down to water that looks like frozen rose quartz, the beam of light grazes up to the man’s chest. Thunder cracks in the hidden ceiling of the bathroom and rain, precious cold extinguishing rain begins to fall in relieving sheets, the sound is deafening, exactly like a raging fire.
But there is no relief.
Excruciating pain excoriates further up, burning up, rising up, eating me in a bite that never ends. Trapped I panic anew, the bindings will hold. I cannot escape. I did this to myself, I am guilty. I will burn to death. I will die. Through the mirth of the crowd, and my own strangled rasps I hear the man in the bathtub speak into my mind. But I cannot or will not understand, pain has my senses, a prison of pain.
The embracing monster of flame unlocks its jaw to slither and swallow me up to my stomach. The food inside churns and boils, burning me from inside, it flows down like lava as dignity spills out of me in steaming brown rushes I can smell cooking, with the sweet blood, savory skin and bone. So can they. Some wretch. My lower half freezes to nothing as the fire climbs higher. Chestnut hair melts into my shoulders, emblazoning my neck and adds to the scent of my death.
My head snaps up and down, left and right, back and forth as my eyelids ignite and my lips finish melting away. Remaining teeth glow white hot and fuse into melting gums. Without eyelids I no longer close my eyes, forced to watch the crowd’s frivolous laughter slowly die out to pity and a terminal disgust. Fire crackles up at me, as blood trickles down. The last thing I see is my buckling contorted form reflected in glowing eyes, before my own burst and melt back into my brain, boiling my mind to its end.
Flesh melted, fell off to the pile of charred and molten amber ash below; a spirit was kindled to rise – a unity divided into two – as the spirit fell to the bright blue sky, its former flesh floated back to earth.
Consciousness remained, not entirely painless, as a one floating inside another, nested in another endlessly – I was an atom of carbon in a cell of smoke, wisping up out of this dangerous forest inside myself. Just as the pain of this internal death is succeeded, most agony subsides, opening and closing my eyes makes no difference as they no longer exist, the man’s soft voice is now heard clearly, like he has never not been speaking to me but I am hearing it for the first time, in full. As a single solitary cell of ash floating in the blue sky, the sonorous voice carries me aloft, higher, I listen to the man, falling even higher.
“She grows beautifully, if necessary, brutally. She loves us, birthed us in bodies framed by limitations, precious barriers maturing those who welcome them. Granting the ability to destroy, she creates creation. Power whenever relinquished may flourish with love. She dispenses and dissolves in you, ebbing, flowing, flooding, drowning. Granting herself, seeking herself beloved, in you, speaking through a fire she has stoked, with you. Objective flint and subjective quartz striking to make a spark, she is two into one and one into two. A blue crystal bolt of lightning striking dead wood to form a spark: a flame, a love, a light, an itch, a pain begins to crawl up her own flesh. Sacrificing pieces for your whole. The flame of consciousness sparked between the striking of the subjective one upon the objective all. With her power we may give her love, worship her, or destroy her, and ourselves. The only things that are unnatural about us is the desire to be superior to her, and the fear that we are inferior.
Consciousness imperfect locks us between things we wish and do not, knowing through opposites. Instincts, conscience, feelings, myths and dreams; lost and found, hide and seek, flint and quartz, destroyed and reformed, collisions from two come one spark. Self-knowledge is her self-loving in chasms bridged with love fused to power. Two become one, another branch of her blood splits into a future flowing from the past.
Dreaming is to play the game of hiding from yourself what reveals value. In dreams we burn and dance around a fire that was stoked by another, unsure who is the dancer and who is the fire. Awash with sleep the one is played into two, a unity is split into an objective world that is not subjective until you wake.
Tend to your roots, extending back in branches of bright red blood, we run through all our parents – through their roots too. A river of life pushes and pulls the crimson currents of our love and power, our bones are her stones, our blood is her spirit made crystal; flint and quartz igniting more than the fire in ourselves, to spread a new spark.”
And as the man spoke in a soft, resonant voice, familiar and yet different, my single solitary cell of carbon congealed into a drop of rain which fell, which fell to land where I started.
Before I had decided to – I woke up. Alone, cold, wet and shivering. No smoke, no storm, no snakes, no rain, no T.V, just a filthy bathtub in a moldy bathroom in a nondescript apartment building, boxing me in somewhere between my death wish and conscience. The water lays flat, dirtied with puke, bile, blood and dignity. Yet, looking around, I’m relieved, and in immense pain.
‘Drip’ And alive.
Gripping the handle I fold in the blade carefully, the dangerous edge is embraced away, as it should be. Tossing it across the bathroom, it kareens down a corner of stained drywall into an empty garbage. What was ripped out and devoured slowly by irresponsibility floods back in force, in full. I shiver, I shudder, I shake, the flat plane of cold water disturbed by my wracking body, by my stupid sobs. We can’t escape ourselves. As long as we are alive, fears and dreams will grow, our nature pushes us on, into true confrontation. Something in us rises when we are flattened and paved over. We live by ideas, ideals, wants and needs, are they ours? Wherever there is life there will be a predator. Humans just still haven’t evolved past cannibalism. We live by a heart, but is it ours? It takes less effort for the predator to convince the prey to commit suicide rather than to have to chase it down, even if the chase is a riot sometimes. Human predation has grown so sophisticated that the prey is convinced to lead the pack back to its nest, relieved, the poor soul bares its young to a fanged and salivating idea or utopia that’s never been tried before.
The water is cold, filthy, the rim of the bathtub is bloody, shaking, I grip the lip of this porcelain grail to pull myself up and out. I stop, almost fainting. Easing back into the water and my wonder I ask the hole – where the T.V once was: who did this common grail serve before, what purpose did it almost serve? Is there a holy grail out there, in this wasteland, how to find it? I ask for an image to revere, a reason, that question is age-old, answered often by a myth. Filthy, bloody, tired and alive I hear whispering back, that the one and only way to discover the holiest grail is by being it – it will forever remain undiscovered, and undiscoverable, except by becoming it. The only way to know is to try it. I’m told that it has been tried before.
‘Drip’
The screen was a mirror, as all drugs are, reflecting my fear of life into another toy box sanctioned for adults. Something else is there in its place, an object, a glowing symbol. I know it is not material nor real in the sense that it is outside my mind, and yet I see it, glowing before a black hole rimmed with mold. Sinking back deeper, I chose not to look, for now, but I know now I can never really close my eyes again, not the way I used to. Had the screen been real and the programs on it too, it all would have been the business end of someone else’s thoughts and intentions anyway. Our mind is a tangible place with its own agencies and even its own rules. All is mind; to open your eyes is to simply see it manifest. All addictions feed only your dearth and none of your strength. Your addiction is the darkness your predator travels in. Ignorance of ourselves is enforced, we are bred to be bored and empty; boxed in layers of encasing notions so we are forced to struggle through some steep climbs just to achieve some truth, while our predators cajole at the bottom by saying there is no money in climbing out, or even truth. I open my eyes. Truth is an interesting idea when you can see what isn’t really there and can be convinced not to see what is.
‘Drip’
The arguments around truth are age-old, the conflicts in the market place never change, fundamentally. Someone is always pushing a free heaven or another secular utopia. In terms of false certainty, someone is always holding. Some of them are always bloodless and cold, ruthless, to which there is no evolution, only redemption, if you believe in that sort of thing, for them. The truth is being stripped of its definition, but that doesn’t change its form too much; lies crust around it, confusion billows out as smoke, but because of that the fire at the center of it all is made more plain. If it didn’t exist, if it was meaningless, why the duplicitousness? That truth is guarded or covered or doused with water at times should make its practical value gleam. If they didn’t believe and had proof that there was no truth, or even free-will, then their words meant nothing and no one was speaking them anyway. Wherever a lie is uncovered in the cold marketplace it is because the truth is gold to some or fire to others. But I guess if you think there is no truth you can lie yourself out of your own individual life. Because the truth hurts, as they say, and lies are as free as can be.
I uncork the porcelain grail and let the filth spiral downward, snaking through branches of pipe into the sewage flow below as I lurch out and up and dry myself off, staggering to the refractive white sink, calling my landlord on speakerphone (hoping for voicemail) to see if he can cover the hole and deal with the mold i’ve been inhaling for months. It’s quite early but he answers the call. Shit, I squint, waiting for conflict. A Russian man, a Hebrew, asks in friendly tones if my gentile-ass would reconsider buying the unit from him and his wife, his laugh is jolly and warm; his wife asks if I’m hungry in the background.
“No sir, I don’t think so, I’m broke, no ma’am, no thank you.”
They’ll be over in a few hours, with breakfast, I’ll have enough time to finish cleaning the bathtub. Surprised, there will be no conflict, a spark of confidence is struck.
Fatherlessness starved me of self-confidence, freezing me in place for years by the belief that I needed something more than I already had; tossing me down to the roots of my nature through the pit of our decaying culture, plummeting into myself with no tools, only jingles, slogans, electrified toys and drugs which became more and more digital. I tried to recapture what I lost with pleasure, thinking a posture of comfort was an act of self-love, following the new machinated culture away from the traditional. Progress, they said, God is dead, they said. And I believed them, ignorantly scoffing at it all because I was never helped by God in my limited foolish comprehension, as I breathed healthily, and my heart beat without issue and I was allowed to experience everything I chose to with no more pain and suffering than I deserved. Ungrateful, I thought I was discarded, forsaken, until I saw that the best thing my own father did was leave me alone.
A deep fear harbored in my pervasive uncertainty. I knew I was inferior, so sought, of course, to appear superior. Ugly inside, I sought to be proved attractive, outside. Feeling weak of spirit, I worked out, not for health which is why the motivation would never quite stick. Self-confidence became just a pose toward women, for some light and casual sex, seeking out only the image of being “attractive” as I was tricked into thinking that had more value than growth or that I lived inside a beer commercial with my guy friends who were more or less successful than me in playing a part framed by T.V. Secretly though I sought something in the soft and inviting embrace of women I did not have within: self-fulfillment, security, reassurance, confirmation of my own manhood – as though having sex with a woman was all it took to be a man. Pounding out a new rhythm every weekend seemed like I was doing something new, even though before and after it all felt sickeningly familiar.
Wiping up some blood and stretching a gray band of duct tape over my chest I call my brother, hoping he’ll pick up, I get voicemail and tell him I love him and I’ll call him later.
“Shit”, rummaging through the cabinet under the sink I realize I am out of razors, with a binge- weekend worth of stubble growth I fish in the garbage for the razor. It’s sharp enough, unlatching it I take it before the mirror and scrape it around my jaw in 30-degree angles.
Being a man is somewhere between the blade of power and the handle of love. We all have to miss out on something to be driven to go find it. We lose so we learn value. These sentiments of gratitude may ring like platitudes but in my experience they act on you more like magic than attitudes. I was deprived as a child, sure, that seems to be the norm of the day, and it’s getting worse every new day. Fatherlessness is as rampant and loud now as wealthy marxists and the capitalists that pay them. Appreciation was heat, starting my thaw. Confrontation with my own weakness and insanity finally unlatched the crimson lips of my death wish from the valves of my heart, a conscience flooded in to take its place, which hurt more than a blade eating my skin, but after felt a lot more satisfying then a session of cutting.
My mother hallucinated much except for the love she shared with us, no amount of her maternal nature could be stamped out by our schizophrenic culture. When the desire to hide dried, faith dewed. Truths of my failures, foolishness and weakness crawled through me and connected to other truths in the same place as if a guardian angel fashioned herself out of the body of a defeated beast. Defeat is only temporary of course, the confrontation never ends. If an eternally circling ouroboros was anything, it is defeat and victory, one and zero. Honoring the animal in me, the angel in me was honored too, because they are interposed. And allowing people back into my meager plot of life – certain people proved to be surprisingly empathetic, gardeners too who didn’t need any food from me but just wanted to watch something grow. I learned that the capacity to be vulnerable is connected to the capacity to be loved. It’s easy to forget the value of what you have already learned.
Collapsing the blade again I set it aside to wash my face, brush my teeth and rinse the sink after, leaving not a particle of hair for the landlord’s wife to notice.
I would never have a father or recapture what I lost – or what I wasted. A powerful freedom glows out of the realization of never achieving satisfaction completely, you aren’t meant to. What would life have been had I received everything I wanted – I’d be dead now, certainly. Instead I was forced to live, not as some hero, nor a loser as once defined by me or T.V, but as a modest carrier of my own despair, confronting it all the way down, before failure started aiming me up, because I targeted myself in that direction. In falling, we either lept or slip; in faith or into failure, however failure can be our worship, but only if it’s attentive. When you choose to aim your lonely target up you suddenly find you’ve been falling, tumbling, crumbling upwards ever since.
‘Drip’ I’ll ask them about the faucet too.
Using some vinegar and old rags from under the sink I work on cleaning the tub, while I stare into the pupil of the blue-black mold irised hole. Waiting for something to crawl out, waiting for an unbidden word, waiting for one snake or two. But there is only silence in there, only darkness that feels as worn and stifling as my childhood home.
One, and two, binary poles of thought are stretching us apart, internally and all around us, used against us in a degrading culture which is hard to notice when you are only trying to be a normal cog in it. Between the hegelian dialectic of God and the Devil there is still a labyrinth between the two, as we need two eyes to make one accurate image. The proper path out of nihilistic self-destruction is individual and, paradoxically, offers something to the collective humanity. It is never industrial, as nihilism can easily be. Meaning means we bring ourselves, whatever we are. Expecting someone or something to carry you out of yourself is to expect that you can nourish yourself without chewing, even that you would want to. Be wary about those who want to give pleasure to you in prison, when the commodities are ‘free’. Be wary of a parent who would chew your food for you when it isn’t necessary. Be wary of an authority who wants you tempted and ignorant. Be wary of thought leaders and machines who say they’ll save you, when all they say is in terms of power and never love.
‘Drip’ I miss my grandfather and not only because he could have fixed this faucet. I wonder what he would say now, flipping through alternating channels of rainbow dildo parades and poor people starving in their own fields.
Ignorance is a temptation. Technology has turned accurate information into clean fresh water. Technology has turned ethics into evolution, so sorry. Our power drags us back to the meaning of the individual, so sorry. “Either or, one of them or one of us, which are you?” You are often asked. It’s so easy to think like a computer, either-or, one or zero. “All the dead ever needed was power”, they said. Suicide, homicide, genocide, a few words that swirl around power. Is that all the dead needed, the capacity to ruin their enemy, first? Either they had power or it was used against them, they either were a one, or a hapless zero says another televised talking machine while they live for financial digits tickling them in secret everywhere under their raised – photographed – fists. Living like a zero for decades I can tell you I had all the power I ever wanted at times. For instance, all the pain my mother felt, my brother, the guilts of my father, the food and its waste, the life, my blood, my wealth or lack thereof, the effort of my ancestors – the potential of my descendants all could have been wiped clean with one, nay two, flicks of the wrist, what power, oh lets marvel at it shall we, “rest in power” the thrilled butcher says to a corpse, believing he’s been a skilled surgeon. Making something irrelevant is as easy and common as irreverence, machines easily do both.
Scrubbing furiously I am racing against time as I don’t want the landlord to find my filthy bathtub stained brown with puke, red and yellow with blood. A sight standing out, in an otherwise polished apartment. As his wondering wife might wander around with sheepish eyes, terrified to find a flagrantly colored dildo I don’t own, possibly regretting feeding me her prized bagels and potato pancakes. I would imagine they feel at war with portions of society itself, these days. Morality has changed since they were my age, for better for sure in some ways and definitely for worse in others.
“Are you moral or immoral, do you think like me, or don’t you?” It’s that simple they all say.
It’s always simple with people trying to convince themselves with your ears, it’s always simple with people who live for everything other than themselves. I think to myself as I scrub myself out of this bathtub.
“Do you think like me, or don’t you? Beep, bop, boop, and if you don’t – well i’m sorry but the right side of history, the right side of history states that all you need is power to educate you and if that doesn’t cut it, in time these err beep, boop, bop err bars will eat you alive, righteous morality dictates it, sorry, it’s not me, it’s our new common decency. So sorry, but it’s so easy, isn’t it? Who needs freedom when everything is free? Just say the words and get in line and come along with me into the promise land of suicide, homicide and genocide where power flows like milk and honey – as long as you think like me. So sorry. Ignorance is out of the question, it doesn’t exist when we have machines, so don’t be tempted to think, when there is nothing to think about, anyway. Dying is always an option too, for you, and who needs thoughts when you have wrists and fists. If you don’t want to live here, just die. You have that power.”
Ignorance is enforced in our culture, to trip you over your own nature and never fully notice it calling to you from inside, even right now, even from me. The unconscious, that natural intelligence, however mysterious and dangerous, can serve as a beacon for others. Life, living, cries out from below your ego, and the less you listen the more it becomes a madness or a vector for pharmaceutical sales. But in our modern culture, even a little madness can inoculate you.
We can be touched, deeply, planted into what we are not aware of. That is nature, so sorry. Beep, boop, bop, bypassing our perception to deposit a notion directly into the soil of our psyche; an annoying seed, repeated, a seed that sprouts up through the psychic soil, to emotion, motivation, our impulses which we are soon forced to perceive. What we once were not aware of is breathed into what we want to buy and what we want to be. We relaxed our critical defenses not knowing that this is the basis for hypnosis. We relaxed into compliance and suddenly days or months later, what we ignored has become a raised fist that grips our imagination and concentration, as we bustle through lives looking to satiate an almost sexual desire for kettle cooked chips, a brand new car or even finding a freshly resented enemy, we never knew. You become the tool of what you wanted to enjoy, whether it was a morsel of simple pleasure or a bit of hatred married to comforting certainty. We are the plugged in and the tangled, the beep, boop, bop, brainwashed. We are the “sold” generation, but we bought it all, we normalized purchasing each other, whether it was next door or in Nepal, thus we sold ourselves through buying each other. Taught to hate – that self-love is found in the hands of the consumer only and oh, oh, oh, stop – stop – here comes the antidote: global grinning feudalism disguised as savior Communism to save the day from our dated Christian Capitalism. “Communism has never really been tried” they’ll say, sweeping the cannibalized bodies and bones aside like teenagers cleaning up after a successful house party, but Christ has failed and capitalism too; we tried those as intended didn’t we? Wait, am I starting to sound like an enemy? Here, let ignorance succor you, as I sweep away the full and labyrinthine reality of history, censored into another growling pyre or shadow-ban. Christ or Satan, Communism or Capitalism, is it really just one or the other, either-or? Are we just a good unit or a different one? Are humans waste anyway, are we a cancer without ingenuity to create anything new?
‘Drip’ That’s what the glorious new machines we invented will be for, I’m told.
We numb ourselves, no pain-no problem, and then we wonder where the excitement of feeling alive has vanished to, thinking another Paxil will bring the meaning back in a chemical gush. We grind out life in increments of plastic and digits and burgers, then we rest from the grind at home watching digitized plastic burger commercials. We mock and look down on the disenfranchised, the stupid, the weak while worshiping men and women enriching themselves on everyone else’s intellectual and emotional poverty. Debt is a condition of life here, and by that I mean almost everywhere, but the debt isn’t just of finances, currency comes in all types, as does power. Collectivity is affirmed over individuality because collectivity is inherent anyway and easily weaponized against you, the individual. Definitions are changed like hair color now so when you speak anything, you are forced to speak like…
Lacking power – we attach ourselves to the group or the idol for more – for a corrupted meaning. This is not new despite how progressive it seems. An easy enantiodromia of inferiority to superiority, so easy. Chaos is generated and furnished in thought factories from Bel-air to Bristol, while the order we are taught to expect drips down from above like Immortan Joe’s fresh bountiful water. We are disconnected from reality for a hyper dimensional eternal prison. But never forget that the beep, boop, bars are in fact just your own self, escape is as simple as opening the lock of your heart. If they want to enslave with hate and fear then what is love, what is faith and courage?
Finally finishing the tub, I glide my stare from dirty vinegar smelling rags to the corner of the bathtub, where the dead goat-like pupil stood. In its place lay a small pair of emerald rimmed glasses, glowing in my mind’s clear eye if not my own physical ones. Two panes of thin quartz between shining silver temples. Clarity and knowledge – If what you need to see is a trap, then clarity is protective, knowledge is prophylactic. They trick us to look for what we already have, yes and some never find it. And of course we waste our lives looking, (for a pair of glasses already hanging off our face) never stopping to notice, that wait, maybe we can see just fine, but the trick is to hold the palantir forever in your hands, so they can see into you, no, wait, so they can hold you, forever, while you are tricked to keep gazing into a funhouse mirror of yourself; that is, at everything, but the truth.
When ignorance is enforced by industrial authority, knowledge and attention become …
They need you to suffer and die, or course, to reveal to themselves their own power – but you never needed them to live. Hundreds of years, millions of men and women, billions of dollars poured down by trillionaires just to make you believe in a few lies, waste your time and to trick you into saying “yes”, once or twice in your life, when you should definitely be saying “no”.
‘Drip’
They have their own values embedded into us, over us implicitly, a pseudo and motherless matriarchy stamped down somewhere between the anima-abominated porn-star and the animus-abominated patriarchy. The idea of the hero was presented only to be subverted, for the glory of the villian. Femininity is everything but motherhood now. Crafting their own myth, they degenerated our culture to fit in, eroding our own values because those are what has kept them at bay, and always will. It’s a lot like vampires convincing you Christ never existed just so you put down the cross. They seek to associate themselves with the images and symbols of power, control, and dominance, while they make a bluff of competence and project a different collective enemy for us to despise, usually it’s our neighbors, it saves their resources. They suppress our simple nature to supplant it with a confusing culture. Watch how they will foist upon us all an archetypal leader who embodies both the hero and villain, another hegelian dialectic or simply just to hedge their bets. In the young, they are crafting a human into a mass-multimedia interface, to be only a social and political input rather than an individual human being. So these kids grow to be keyboards with the keys housed in a C.O.G bunker, or worse. Do you think we are now more likely or less as a global society to buy and sell human beings as we all become less human and more multimedia interface?
I get up, my bent knees almost frozen stiff, after reaching for the glasses that aren’t really there. I put them on knowing what it means and knowing I’ll be the only one to ever see them. Even staring into my bathroom mirror they aren’t in the reflection. I don’t feel them. But what is said in my private stare to myself is that soon, with gratitude, soon I will be fine.
‘Drip’
Soon – at the end of the fenced-in line, at the end of a very long line for bread, when you are older, you may stare ahead, tired in ways you never knew were possible. Finally, after hours waiting for your stale bread you’ll open your eye, bloodshot and half-lidded, which is no longer the window to your soul but the curse of code embedded to your digital and empty purse. Already “sold”, hair to heel, encased in digitized – electrified steel and despair, you’ll be scanned through your glazed eye by a scarlet machinated pin-pricked glare. See. See – soon – what can be said in a stare.
The tempting snake, whether you follow it for death or life, darkness or light, leads you deeper into yourself. And further in, when you find your end, you can discover where you began. And the snake was just the brightly or darkly glowing lure of the angel or monster you needed to find. You find it through confronting what you want. And there in the under-dark of yourself, you must cut from it the terrible glow (until the next time) and use it like a talisman or torch to light your way back out. Some of us need to breathe and grow in darkness rather than in the light, just like animals, just like flowers. In a culture that pushes us all down into ignorance and pathological pathos a shared myth of emergence will draw us up and out. If our modern culture is evil, our ancient nature will play the part of the good. Nature gave us the power to think because true love is thinking too.
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