Crab Theory
“if I can’t have it, neither can you”
Soundtrack to this piece:
Adultus
…I know what god knows, their faces as they lay dying, blood all over the floor, flies in the air, heat, insects, explosions in the neighbourhood yet the will to live, that urge to need someone, the doctor, that look in their eyes “please save me” “I want to live” “you are the only one on this planet who can help me right here right now, it has come down to this (my soul screams at me, my brain is on fire my tears stain my cheeks), the one thing I know” from their eyes “is that you are the only person able to keep me in the land of the living, the pyre is open, the black hole of souls with their twinkling eyes in sockets how they both yearn and scorn the living I can feel them – the dread, the emptiness the loss and this energy this impetus for living – I am consumed!” is a miracle each time I see it, the chemicals in the brain able to produce each and every time the same survival instinct or revelation or ‘truth’, it is inhuman to not feel it for a split second, that is, to not succumb to their existential dread or to accept the task or role as it is manifested to be, the dying body clinging to and using all of its tools to remain living, why, why does each and every individual version of this ‘thing’ we are want so badly to live, why is the ‘individual’ version so driven? we see there are many of us isn’t that satisfactory, why the deterministic pursuit of every single version of mostly the same thing, love hate fear sadness, hunger joy happiness, jealousy envy guilt deceit, whatever, any and all emotions smashed together or put in new positions or situations or formulations just like in our own dream world with invented calamity and juxtaposition for the simplistic goal of “trying it out”; we are animals imbued with sensors (senses) that intake and output various stimuli in order to group-test adaptive traits in the genome of a species of mammals that for now is the dominant adaptation on this planet falling towards a sun whose radiation burns our flesh, all things not possible to say to a patient who I inject painkillers into until we run out, the military has given us three days to continue treating the wounded here and if I ever take a break, that is, if I let thoughts form in that brief moment when I stand up, the top of my neck permanently hunched and I let that stretch out (flashback to anatomy class where they in detail reveal the behaviours of the spine and how with repeated contortions the spine moulds or actually forms through cartilage and cohabitation, the same way teeth grinding against one another eventually form a natural comfortable coexistence, so does the spine, the bones stop sending the signal to the brain that there is pressure on the spinal cord and as the signal is ignored that this is detrimental and instead live though this deprecating posture, comply and rub and reform the cartilage so that the spine and neck curves into the most comfortable position that the human being has decided they will now mostly exist in, similar to) the mind, so to discover in that moment, the fresh clean moment of a pure beat away from dread and death and chaos, in that moment where else can the brain or the mind possibly retreat other than to first a lovely place; home or vacation or ideal situation where one is diving into pure clear Mediterranean water, the feel of the clean salty sea washing over the face and eyes and hair, then sitting comfortably on the beach and sipping some pineapple or mint or otherwise cocktail that for that moment is uncomplicated and perfectly apt, or secondly that only rationalisation is allowed, dissociating that deeper gaze from the role you must perform, one act after another act only that process, but not to go too far in your dissociation to think of humans as pests and that the entire struggle and reason and desire of this species is to actually unlock some truth as to what existence is, why we are conscious and slightly outside of the natural reality although we can understand it, though you in your mind can race through and are doing that now even though even as you are supposed to be stretching your hump-neck between patients, your only vacation where the crushing thoughts come as you crane your neck up to the roof and notice paint chipping off the ceiling which never ceases to ground you in the building in the concrete as it were, that even though this is a break it is instead or does always serve as a way to both remind yourself why you are doing this and also reset your psyche so that you can deal with and push through the terror of what it means to betray those faces, those eyes, that configuration, you tell yourself, of brain and ancient spark DNA impulses that are, for those that don’t know, the most intense and penetrating gazes that are ever produced by a human being…
Pubescent
…even though he is sitting still, he has the feeling of waves washing over him, from behind, electric waves that are on the left and right of his body the more he concentrates the more these waves come, like a reward for concentration, the maddening stillness, the control, the exclusion of all other senses is rewarded ultimately by this phenomena, this extra sensory, perhaps imagined yet largely felt throughout the body sensation or understanding, the justification or fulmination of the concentration of meditative state that, when one achieves, that is, only when one achieves it one is ‘shown’ or ‘given’ this overwhelming confirmation/reward/result, and further, after his parents pick him up and they do the small talk with the sensei and go home, he actually goes through the motions of being a kid, pretending, well, taking some pleasure in playing with his toys and running around and, here now is real pretending because he sees his father observing him with proud eyes and, well, seeks to enhance or at least please his Father and so, under that supervision, precedes to ‘pretend to show the martial arts to his younger brother’, the level of satisfaction observed so obviously in the fathers face as he watches on, the older brother gently teaching the younger, the father not aware that this is a façade created by his older son who has, through the teaching of his sensei, uncovered or more accurately the sensei has unlocked an extra dimension to reality, one in which the boy, going through the motions of “being a boy” performs so as not to draw any attention to his secret art which he must perform in complete silence and so has decided the perfect time is after bed, when the house in silent and he can, in his room, practice the deep meditation and art his sensei has entrusted him with, the art that, when practiced correctly, begins to reveal the truth about reality, about purpose and what could ultimately lead to fulfilment in a body that has been created out of the earth and will return to the earth, a control over the fibres of the muscle, an observance over the functioning of the organs, of the position of each vertebrae in the spine and how the perfect alignment would produce the untapped pleasures of heaven, the pure unfettered flow of sensora through the nervous system aligning the chakras in a harmonic symphony which brings this one’s individual consciousness closer to ‘the whole’, the one source, the eternal stream from whence energy and ‘consciousness’ arise, believes the boy now perched on one toe, his entire body glowing as it sits like a tree whose trunk is planted in the most fertile soil, the toe holding the weight of the entire body and his hands formed in prayer like reverence stretched above the head, the blank face eyes open but blind, the loss of self-awareness and the dissociation from body must be sustained through the next challenge his mentor will introduce…
Pupus
…index, log, record, archive the knowledge, it’s right there, for us to take, to use, to employ, like gifts from ancient gods or angels or ancestors, the shrines filled with scrolls, the temples with writing on the walls, the books, the manuscripts, the analysis, medicine, science, advancement? no, no, we want to do it again and again “all from scratch” we say, “we don’t believe you” burn it! poets do it again, love again, hurt again, pain and loss, love, happiness, the illusion of life, learning from mistakes…motherfucker we did this already, and you, with your idea, with your ‘nature’, with your ‘yoga’, hey, we’ve got one of you already, we don’t need another one, we have logged hours of you, we have every thought you could think, every iteration or combination of scenario you might extract wisdom from, we have records that go back thousands of years written by artists who are far better than you at expressing, far better too at even feeling, and we offer then up to you to read, to make you feel better, to know, to connect by the way its not an attack it’s a celebration, you don’t have to go through that any more we already did it together, as one, as one species we did it, we have every single one of you, we know the wheel yes, how to make cheese, how the rain works what love is what caring is what loss is we have it all, my children under the sun that burns you my loves, this is all (gestures to nothing) nothing, this is, what you make it and, “here’s the tricky part”, that’s all there is…
