I
In the event of revolution…
Let’s play a game of No Leaders—each of us imagines
ourselves as drops of water in a wave rising up, higher,
faster faster, rushing towards the old rusting castles on the
shore,
Their crumbling stones pitted by moss, bristling with ray guns
of Area 51 alien technology, shooting a blue light that
illuminates but doesn’t descend, a ghost or echo of light, a
TV picture, a transmission of a signal that carries a coded
picture of a picture of something real but that is only
acting out a story someone else wrote for us to think was
real and act out on our own.
They’re staring down the ocean as here we come—as the wave
of us rises towards them, unstoppable because they are so
immobile; they can’t run.
They can resist but that too will prove as useful as fleeing to
the hills dragging the stones of their battlements on their
backs, so they can rebuild facsimiles of their castles in the
mountains they long ago mined all the stones out of.
Each of us, none of us need to imagine or even think of the
whole wave; just remember we are particles of water,
each of us, and we are all always part of the sea.
Form what associations you will, break them apart or leave
them at will, but do so out of love for your own and each
other’s sovereignty, and always knowing we are all as
one—everyone acts together by each acting as one.
Who can they arrest when no one is above the crowd?
Who can they arrest when no one is anyone?
Who can they arrest when no one is responsible?
Who can they arrest when everyone is a supreme sovereign?
Who can they arrest when it’s everyone?
II
No idea what’s going to come, just writing letters spinning
Luciferian fantasies in attempt of vanity to restore some
life and wetness to the All-Enclosing ziggurat of Ahriman.
Just growing plants is a sure-fire way to keep the red-eyed
hound of Moloch away from baying at the door. Restore
some life, take fear from death, more life, less death!
And yet…
And yet…
The quest for eternal life met its fulfillment and its end when
they split the atom twice on the Japanese island.
Out along the Jornada del Muerto, by the White Sands desert
of New Mexico, the wizards in their starch white coats,
observing as spectators making the scene happen,
watching the death of Vishnu god of the Sun through
radiation-resistant goggles: who are they really and who
else is watching?
Could it be this is the price we pay for cheating and mauling
those of the old ways?
Our money-lust and free-market, boundary-less and
decontextualized in the service of endless money, endless
mountains of suffocating STUFF—
And this is the price we pay for the killing of those atoms—
This is the price we pay for the killing of those suns.
It seems the gods got very angry and decided to give us every
single thing we asked for, then stepped back to see how
we liked it.
They allowed us, in their graciousness, to experience the
illusion of rebellion—
Against everything and everyone,
Every creed and every tongue,
Every form and every crisis,
Every little twist of fate—
We sally after it like it were the stock exchange,
In hopes to pin it down
And make the moment stay.
III
There was a country whose people had always faced every
thing alone. Every invasion, famine, disaster,—they never
seemed to have friends outside their own to watch their
backs. The only thing at their backs was the sea, but all
around their swathe of ground a mountain range ringed
around of granite rock, steep and proud.
For a long time they were ruled by others who put them down,
forbade their language and their musical sounds, took the
young men of promise and gave them authority to govern,
but in a foreign city under foreign crown. The people
would sing in voices low and crooning; songs so soft only
the wind and the moon could hear.
But this was never enough to break the bands that held them
down for real—the weight of the grain and trees they
felled to feed the bellies of the foreign rulers—every sack
of grain a burden of their own blood, their own sweat,
their own hands.
After a very long time the foreign rulers disappeared, but in all
that time the world outside had changed: new forms of
fear and tyranny stalked the land, the oceans, even the air.
Black clouds now fouled the air, sweet air in many places,
and the people living there many times took to the streets,
and fires and running battles broke out, and waves of war
each more bombastic than the last broke upon their shores,
each with ten times more the force of the one before, ‘til
finally chance discovery was made of how to break the
back of the Sun and hurl its flame at another.
And so the gate was splayed, and fairy forces of a darker hue
than any flower crept through the new divide, and started
slipping mystic drugs in random drinks, to change as many
random minds to dream of how to break the spell, replace
the TV show now eating up mankind and outer space
combined.
The change moved at great speed, a wheel wobbled in elliptical
orbit, spun fast, halted, spun ‘round by invisible hands that
mankind fought so hard to control.
And all this time, this battered country gathered fresh-sheared
wool smelling of lanolin and lamb around itself to stay
warm and still move, while the storms whipped the
mountains with ice…
IV
What kind of history would look different from our own?
What if the facts were wrong?
What if the most significant advances in technology turned out
to be the bagpipe and the harpsichord?
What if the calendar told time, years and so on from a different
center, say the black eyed sun at the galactic core? Or if
Jupiter or Venus inherited the Sun’s throne?
We already routed the Earth from that hallowed place, and
almost so the moon—the universe is heating up, strange
eyes of storms peer out from both the poles of Saturn—is
it a planetary revolt heating up? A new lord stepping up?
Just the thing for a new story-line for beleaguered humanity—a
new neighbor in the solar system—a new center to
revolve around—what will be thy name? Thy rule be
spring or fall, winter, summer, day or night, not in time at
all? Newton, Galileo, Planck, Bohrs and Einstein (gladly)
all shown up to be boors, cranks, charlatans, rank amateurs
who couldn’t count to hyper-4 on toes and fingers.
Sound will paint our walls, move through our bodies, matter
will be all in nothing, and other mystic pronouncements
forthcoming that sound like they make sense to all.
Prophecies keep bouncing off the walls, keeping the
melancholy light of TV blue from smothering us all—but
not a real blue or a sky blue or a natural blue, but a light
that comes imbued and saturated with rays like LSD-fed
acid-head spider webs and patchworks of nebulous gases
anemic, blood-fed on warmth our soul-red veins produces.
It makes itself everywhere to erase our memory of the sun.
Perhaps the sun is puffing up its might like a golden rooster to
herald the breaking of the night. Perhaps the sun, too,
feels invaded—perhaps a gold-bright warrior emerges
from the hydrogen dragon-egg to fight a predator away
from her scattered sleeping hatchlings.
It’s fashionable to scoff at notions of an interplanetary war—
it’s all over our mythologies, past and present, old and
young. It’s an idea that pops up daily, in the Bible, in the
papers, in our politics, our music, in class. Good and evil,
light and dark, ignorance and knowledge, beauty-ugly,
rich-poor, fat-slim, short-tall, us-them.
It’s a fragment of our past, long before we had a past, when to
current minds we didn’t exist at all. We lived in jungles
there, and swamps, and all participated in the lives of all.
Things worked very different then—rich in ways we no
longer understand—words on printed page can’t convey
their lives and thoughts at all.
What we need is a time-machine that runs on sound—an
engine powered by cymatic vibrations of strings stretched
over frets of adjustable calibration to suit the scales of
different times and places, and open up that world with
fairy eyes, the arabesques on walls and gardens spring
alive, and we can walk through it, talk to it—a past of ours
purged, all the good found in it transferred to the master
reel of the tapes for the Akashic Record, the only hit
around, that crazy cosmic sound—and visiting in it we can
realize we’re not stuck in a groove at all, it’s the beats as
they happen to fall, and just like music it can change its
mind, its mood, its time, its tone, its flow. The place you
are, the time you got, it all depends what song you’re
singing, when you’re hot, when you’re off and running.
Purple pants-suit funk dressed up with ostrich-feather cavalier
hat, early-‘70s Harlem—
Guitar-pullers, roosters, chickens, shanties by the river, 1920’s
Ishmaelite-town outside ‘a Cincinnati—
Tang dynasty China tea-house, farmers, scholars, courtesans
together, sighing as the silk strings tell of a sister and a
brother—
Time not yet invented, Bedouin in the desert, fiddling on his
horse-hair fiddle for a love lost last full-moon —
Imagine all the places you’ll go when your time-machine
lullabies whisk you to lands long ago and rock-n-rolls into
the future…
V
They see how easy it is to make us suffer.
They see how deep in the dirt they can kick us before we rise
up.
They have learned very well how to turn us against each other,
To make us believe that the differences between us mean what
they tell us it means.
The only difference between them and us is that they hold the
remote for the TV.
If we can’t separate the power structure from the taint of
power,
We separate the people from the power structure.
Other worlds are possible, no matter what they say.
We walk away into the mountains and jungles,
Leave them to their pretty holograms of power,
Their empty glass and steel cities of grandeur—
It’s only a spell cast by a bad magician…
Ourselves…
