A thousand times I decry your revolution.
by Austin Meyers

***

I was driving my daughter to school when I saw them, and I stopped.   They had lined up on the hill that meant that south edge of town. Traffic stopped, people were getting out of their cars, an excuse to be late from work, a reason to play in the park I guess.  

"What's is that?" Jessy said, that's my daughter, pointing to the line of them on the hill.

"Men standing in a line."

"Why are they in line?"

"I'm not sure, but I think they're why we've stopped."

I parked the car in the middle of the 23 rd and Prospect intersection, took her out of her safety seat, took her hand in my left, and her juice box in my right.   She'll want this in ten minutes, though she swears she won't.

Seventy-five yards from the road was flat for two hundred in either direction, at the end of the flat run was the hill - where they had set up camp.   And like we did every Fourth of July we packed the mall and waited, cept it was August, and no one had hotdogs, and the kids weren't happy.  

We weren't the first ones there, but we were part of the first wave.    Within 5 min, the better part of town would be here.   We starred at them with some humor, but a great deal of confusion, which we didn't like.

As we got close we could see them, dusty figures, old men in found rags, their skin stained with tars, acids, essentially their skin was tanned and was hanging from their bones to dry.   They were all seated, bloodshot eyes starring intently on the entire town, not a person or a building, or a brick, or even and idea, really.   They were just staring, some might call it hatred.

The tall one in the middle was standing.   He looked like a giant mantis in silhouette, if it had a bald spot, and very Irish lineage.   In the basket of the bicycle next to him he had what looked like a small (I assume battery powered) guitar amplifier, the one you might get in an electric guitar for a beginners combo pack.   Into it he plugged in a microphone, that looked old, duct tape was now part of its form.  

The amplifier popped, then shrieked out when the man touched it, we went silent.   And then calmly he gathered his crumpled slips of paper together, coughed once, and began to speak.

"... and through a valley darkened slightly by the almighty in his infinite wisdom, shaded by dogma - the condition of man to preempt contest through a deferment to credentials - and indelibly burned senses of your followers, in an inevitable move towards a system of divested cruelty and capital debt relations; you have given us nothing but these ignominious moral preoccupations, showering us in a luxurious passivity - sheltered as it were from the necessities of governance and systemic happenings."

He changed his page; we stayed silent.

"There is nothing thought in your philosophy that is not presupposed by another, that you and I both know already is.   You tell me dualism, but I know materialism, you tell me episteme, I know empirically.   There is no way for you to counter our art, our way - our divestment of sense, though a salve ... an excerpt of the collective writings of western children.   All metaphor ripe with the way of your false premise, I speak of sensation, the barely detectible event on the periphery of your conscience - not metaphor as allegory but literally what comes before you capture.   In these words, we seek to go beyond the realm of your metaphysic, to preconceive sensation before you posit what you must to make a good sense of it.   We wish, nay, will, a convenience of sense through detection and apprehension, of not to know, or the chain of identity, not the self in all its infinite wisdoms, but trajectory, the event.

"Your self, your body, your mind, caught in one contentious clusterfuck, destined like bar beasts, cattle to the slaughter, a meat market for cannibals, for the consumption of tainted enzymes of neurotic symmetry, to devour you thought sameness to cease meat, to become vegetate, plantlike, but a dead ear on the end of a stalk, your Identical Dualism will molest itself to grater and lesser degrees of consent, angry regressive, priestly pseudo-guilt, orgasms like signs, moans, not screams, and in the morning receive to bill though blinding rays of God's glory tapping the psyche, a dot matrix printer from some long defunct office of general accounting sending the bill via teletype, and only because you bought Babel."

He had to stop, we were screaming to loud. Saying "fuck" in front of children - bastard.   But our offense was less powerful than his point, so we quieted down, and he got louder.

"No less it was your parents who sold you into this pyramid scheme, and now, too far invested in social contractual obligations to escape.   And why? But to be free, Dearie.   There's no place like home, a district investors meeting, plotting how to sell the neighbors for a small upfront fee, how to sell the school system, how to make the ends meet, so you can fulfill your quota to your superiors, the tax collector, the dead ancestors, the church, your own pathetic ambition.   The vacuous Dorothy.   Fantastic repression, a paranoid identity, the self, the body, the mind, free of causality, a freedom of will.  

"Your intuitions, your beliefs, are by products of the same scheme, an illusion of possession, you cannot apprehend your senses, they, rather, apprehend you.   Like a soccer stadium filled with chanting fans, sensation apprehends you in the moment, and crush your fervor with sanctioned arms, your will as crisis control, a dictator, a fascist schema.   You depend on this supposed otherness of sensation, to create anything, there is no freedom being apprehended like Dorothy and swept into a vacuum of fantasy, but to be apprehended like Mogli, and swept away by beasts.   Yet even here your colonial intentions take root, you become, leader, Promethean fire, you are superior, as man, as human, as container, as being apprehended by your own vacuum.   But during your fervor, you break laws of motion, spontaneous acceleration defies the second, and you become, "irrational" only to justify by way of superiority, a dogmatic reversion to your own superiority, to your apprehension. But this bell jar gives no peace, no security, always new particles seeping through the glass, new protons here, new quarks there, no rest for the weary wicked, always Quixotic in your vain attempt to empty the self.   You beat it out of you, they beat it out of you, and end the end you love them ... for emptying you.  

"And when you bleed to fear infection, the introduction of new particles, you fear, addition qua multiplication qua the calculus.   Your arithmetic morals account for the inverse relationship between you and your infinite world view, anything in relation to the self produces infinity, one dived by zero, two divided by the same, a whole host of others x y n, 'P' of 'e' by way of Fucking, all produce the same, ERROR qua infinite, all things in relation to the self produce the same, or infinity, a trajectory a stasis.   Your still born ideas, float in an ever increasing scum, a terrarium of death and decay becomes of your bell jar, the sides fog up from so much fecundity, you choke, you quit cleaning house, all is decay, and the jar becomes your grave, in a final moment you write through the muck, like a high school girl fucking in a Chevy, on a cold night, HELP ME."

Misty, my neighbor, wasn't going to like that.   I think its funny.

"You live to the eventually of death, imagining the afterlife, this reward, this liberation of mind like the cashing of a bond, you assume the body ceases, but no appreciation that even in your conception there is no gradient of equivalency between your afterlife and your life here, this corporal examination doesn't qualify you for shit.   You are apprehended by sensation, you may attempt to rid yourself of it, but your mortality is hinged on those sensation, without them your mind is nothing; your dualism is contingent on trajectory, the calculus.   Pathos is your sphere, pity yourself, your friends, your family, all categories of contingent relations, substantiated by random Aristotelian qualities, that indicated NOTHING, no objective consistence, a bundle of limbs like the back room of a department store, mannequin heads crying being comforted by the shoulder of torso, held about the bald head by the arms of the children's department store window dressing.   Ripped from familial relations by a clumsy intern.   The senseless violence of objective relations, colored by your gradient.

"A shadow could teach your metaphysic to vomit, not to purge but to create, a vile violent thing, where for sport, they see how much magma the boys and girls can take in a go, these are the trenched soldiers of war on yourself, shooting bodies caught in barbed wire to pass the time, off track betting on the trench runners.   The war is yours the violence is ours, a deep chasm where we lurk.   Keep your morality for your polite friends, with they're polite children, and polite homes, we want nothing of it. We want metaphor not for the dynamics but for the sense, like morphine drip and an mechanical vagina, great chrome lips, gear shift clit, strap in and ride till doomsday.   But we know you, and where you sleep, and how you fear us.   Boogiemen, you call us stalkers, drug addicts, degenerates, Other.   We're winged monkeys, and witches, and tigers, and vultures, extra legal contenders outside your dualist gradient.   Good is white, Black is Bad; we thrive in red and brown.   We're your rape fantasy, a great muscular burn victim, naked, kitchen sink gloved, with 16 ounces of petroleum jelly.   Smooth violence, like the lining of the stomach, strong undifferentiated, uncontrollable, MACHINE!"

And they yelled as they hurled gracelessly down the hill, waving rakes, sharpened brooms, the occasional Saturday-night-special, but most of all, shaking their fists.  

And we shrieked.

-am