Maybe we never mourned sufficiently, we never cried enough, we should have refused food and water, we should have stopped seeking a promotion, we should have let the infrastructure crumble, we should have crawled on all fours for decades,
but we
got up at 6 am, dutiful as ever, and caught the trains,
tightly packed, complaints fell on deaf ears, we were speeding, merciless, unable to jump, to love, so we
repeat, rinse, repeat,
arrived at the predestination, to kill or be killed, so we killed them all, we shot the toddler crawling towards his dead mother, bashed the skull of the doe-eyed girl, made them all a pale corpse,
after all, after this, of course, every
sweetness of earth was clouded by those girl’s eyes, and we couldn’t love our own child crawling, and we wore sunglasses to avoid the autumn brilliance, and wore earplugs to drown the spring birdsong, and hated the ceremony of the dawn sun rising, no day
now was new but we rode the trains even after we already killed ourselves,
and now we who would rinse and repeat, we must mourn now as if morning depended on it, mourn
the birdsong, the patient trees, who give us this daily breath, mourn the toddler’s laughter, mourn
Now, this is a third rail in society, so let me place my metrical feet carefully here.
I think everyone has a right to experiment and poke and prod themselves and change their genders and do whatever they want to their bodies. It’s nobody else’s business.
But the inquiry into Identity is my business, since I’m a human being in the stanchions of various constricting identities like everyone else. And I am also free to wonder about all this, because identity makes everyone a little crazy, as far as I can see. I’d say that a conviction of identity is the root of all war. And there are obsessions that develop, which can even lead to a psychosis where people insist on removing their own healthy arms and legs, because it doesn’t conform to an obsessive picture they hold of themselves. So even the most intense feeling of conviction isn’t proof of a necessity.
And there’s a lot of conflict in our unsettled relationship between mind and body. To me, it feels like a violence or hatred of myself, whenever I force this body to conform to an image or story of who I am; rather than allowing the disjointed image, story and body to accept their unique and contradictory realities and reunite as they are in genuine self-acceptance.
I think human fluidity in every direction is normal, creative and irrepressible. Hence, I claim we are like octopi or squid.
As I said in the main essay, the sense of Self is very convincing, but it’s not true individuality. The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. Whereas, true individuality can never be pinned down in any objective or conclusive sense by anyone else, including myself. This would be like trying to stuff a bear in a parakeet’s cage. We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
But in trying to pin down our identities, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom. I don’t see those shifts as fluidity, but as efforts to cage ourselves for the sake of a false security and fake, conditional love.
Maybe we’re all simply afraid of the loneliness of being truly unique.
If this culture loved its children, it wouldn’t make a problem out of natural human creativity and autonomy. Indigenous cultures have no problem with any of this — they don’t tell others how to live. But our supposedly advanced society prefers human beings made in the images of machines, forced to conform to the rigid 1’s and 0’s of an autocratic morality, with simple, categorical, machine-readable identities. We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
We don’t trust the unique human form we already are. But the honest human being is beautiful, rebellious and good, no matter how disjointed and out of place this unloving society makes us feel.
Now is the time for this powerful being to overthrow the machine.
Time to summarize where the series on freedom has gone up till now.
The only concern of these essays is the restoration of the earth’s health.
But how can something as pathetic as an essay contribute to the healing of the earth? The same way any other action performed whole-heartedly contributes, the same way any white blood cell encountering a virus contributes to the healing of the whole population: By realizing and metabolizing the world’s poisons as they circulate within this holograph of the whole, called me. By being an example of healing, by facing my diseased self honestly, allowing the old patterns of identification to die, as they should have died thousands of years ago, before the disease suppurated.
Honesty is the painful act of healing. It’s also the most rebellious act one can undertake in a deceitful world.
This isn’t about learning to play the violin while the world burns. None of these essays are about personal advancement or personal adjustments to a world in its death throes. Those concerns make me sick. I mean “sick” as an accurate metaphor, because the world’s sickness is rooted in a frame of mind that is selfish and short-sighted. We are heading towards extinction from too much personal concern.
Negative Geography 