Naked and spectacular

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2013-08-30

She took with her

When my mother took her life, she took the life she had helped me build with her.  Everything that was bright and exciting in my life was built on the steady foundation of her support and encouragement.

I do not know why she thought her death was a positive decision.  Did she not have faith in me, as I had faith in her?  Did she not believe that a mother and son are always such?

I struggle now for a heart to expose myself to, and find only indifference, sex, philosophy, vapid suggestions, poetry and an impenetrable apathy and nihilism.

What we call hope in this world is willful denial, blind adherence to preordained goals in an ever-changing and complex world.

What we call faith is a blind and violent destruction of everything truthful and real, a raising up of banalities and plastic figurines in defiance of the Supreme Divinity forever visible to those those brave enough to look.

What we call love hesitantly peeks through the routines of convenience and humour, terrified of the intensity and perversity and filthy nudity of a love that penetrates us everywhere - fiercely in a single shared moment - and doesn't necessarily result in contracts and domestic arrangements.

We fill our sadness with objects - not too beautiful, not too sexy - pathetic in their limits.  Not to remind us of our best moments - exuberant, dangerous - authority and culture forgotten!

Before paranoia, before the ugliness and violence of the world became so unavoidably central, before fear of the world, I had a mother who believed in me, who knew what I knew, though our irrelevant thoughts were different.  I had a life that stretched out into a future, out into a world - out into a world that would be breathless and impressed in my presence.

Now there is a pervasive silence and endless empty streets in identical cities all over the planet.  Nowhere to go when everywhere is the same.  Familiarity in the most extreme.  No one to be shocked.  No one to hold me unselfishly.  No one I would go to unselfishly myself.

She made her decision, sucked her life out via the portal of a common poison.  So common we all spew it out into the atmosphere every day.  We all kill ourselves and each other little by little daily, pretending we're alive.

The world is dying and my mother told me with her own death.

She gave me life, love, hope, and then she cursed me with a lifetime in knowledge that we're all dead.

I can never forgive her, cos she's not here to forgive; I cannot resent her cos she's not here to resent.

There are seven billion humans on this planet and not one of them is my mother.

My father is a teenager.  My best friends are all infants and I am supposed to pretend to be an adult.

I am an unweaned baby with no breast to suckle on.

The religions and entertainments my countrymen suckle make me sick.  The dairy industry my nation is built on is not a viable source of nutrition.  Eating and fasting make me feel equally disgusting.  The houses I was raised in make me feel weak and humiliated.

She's dead and the son she knew is dead.  There's a man sitting here, writing.  A man she will never know.


2013-08-22

To be free, unchained, naked, together, alive.

I have tried, in my way, to be free, unchained.

I expanded out from the cities, created the suburbs, where I could possess my own estate, deep in the ocean of nuclear families, their backyards and their lockable rooms.  I paid no landlord, I owned my own home, though the bank submerged me in debt for decades of my short lifetime.  Their arbitrary authority was sold to me like a noble charity; the charity of the hardworking.  I am the Lord God of my own nation-state, numbered and geometrically mapped by city planners.  My hands stink not of dirt and grease, but of disinfectant.

I feel an all-encompassing love for everyone around me, but it is heavily encumbered with the futility of my financial culture.  Everything I want is obscured by the price tags on objects to clutter and confuse my life.  I fill my life with these objects, hoping to uncover the pristine peace and emptiness beneath them, but I always need more.

I fill my lonely soul with philosophies that sicken me like too much candy, and the cynicism I am left with causes me to nihilistically accept the secular materialism that advertising bludgeons me with.  I am told there is no God/dess and I have no soul.  The contradiction in my experience of the world is a shameful secret.

I walk in nature and strive to wander until the traffic is inaudible, but when I reemerge into what they facetiously call the Real World, its bland perversity sends me into a repressed fit of despair.  I read revolutionary texts, but it makes me feel too sad and I yearn for the mind-numbing entertainment specifically manufactured to drown out this Real World that its presence unambiguously perpetuates.

I glance through the glass-pained window and notice the moon is full.  I try to project myself into a world where this monthly celebratory moment has some significance, but the rhythms and cycles of television programming do not take the moon into account.  Natural phenomena are not considered relevant in this Real World I inhabit.  They are quaint symbols of dead religions at best, like faded and chipped Coca-Cola logos on long-abandoned convenience stores.

I can get naked and dance around the backyard with my family watching, amused, but it will be a travesty.  This will be no shared experience, I won't feel the breathing earth underneath the concrete, there will be no fire to get sweaty around and no natural body of water to dive into subsequently.  I won't feel the thrill of life coursing through my body, it will be a display for the attendants and assistants and employees I live with.

At best they will appreciate it as an expression of my personality, what distinguishes me from them, like a birthmark or a homosexuality, as acceptable and irrelevant as an outbreak of acne.  All diversity is accepted and assimilated in Capitalism's Democracy pageant.  Every flavour, every colour of the rainbow is represented and available for purchase.

The only exception is the illegal and the illegal is, by definition, necessary to marginalise and eradicate by otherwise abhorrent means.  The illegal is the very problem we face here in the Real World of the Legal, sanctioned, culturally-defined, personality-diverse extravaganza of materialistic accumulation.

I scorn that within the world and within myself that I feel powerless to transform.  I resent that I do not know how to change what I hate, and I resent more my fear or unwillingness to change what I know precisely how to change.  Too much clarity, too much sensitivity and empathy is dangerous in the Real World.

To see things through my own eyes, rather than the eyes prescribed by the media, is painfully revealing, like being exposed naked in front of the whole school, like those dreams I used to have that my clothes, my personality, my cultural veneer, vanished, and I was left, naked, together, alive.