#386

It is such a mistake to live within industrialized society. What a trap. What a miserable cage we have built for ourselves, our masters delighting in rattling it and poking at our vulnerable flanks through the bars.

For the safety of the cage, we put up with it, and forsake our precious lives.

What fools. What tools. What anemic caricatures of ourselves.

*

We even fight wars for the privilege of this sterilized hell. We allow wars to be fought on our behalf.

We call it good. An even trade.

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These so-called telephones, addictive portals into a nether realm of nightmarish engineering. 

This chimaeric hydra, capital. 

Infinite chatter. Hydrochloric acid on the limestone of our minds. Chlorine bleach in the soil of our souls.

We call it wealth, and leisure, and efficiency, and productivity, and connectedness, and the duty to be well-informed, of the immense importance of our opinionate display and the general good health of our intellectual array, by which we mechanically sort ourselves into absurd tribes and ridiculous hierarchies.

We call it common sense. We call it righteousness.

*

Someday they will tell each other that as Rome fell, so did her heir and the global empire she forged, fifteen hundred years later or thereabouts, after they have emerged from the consequential period of chaos and forgetting. They will tell each other a fragmentary but satisfying version of how and why it happened. It will have no bearing on their own inevitable disintegrations.

Like cancer, the same accretions always coalesce in the body of a society, a variety of corruptions of form attacking a variety of tissues and bones. It kills them, but never immediately. Slow, fast, painful, bearable. Bodies run down. It's what they do.

We never admit this, though. We say they should not. We say we may yet unlock the secrets of immortality. We say that our city of man will last through eternity.

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If I am a doctor, I must be a poor one. Enjoy my diagnosis, for I know no cure.

--JL