Dear Cellist,
...Yes yes, all this is true. True, but not all. For, besides this most immediate occasion for my own individual withdrawing into miniature living--into sparse comforts and spartan needs--there remains, unchanged, what has always been the case, for all of us: the new reality--dogged and demanding, ominous and invariable, like a storm impending...
Storm clouds, friend. Looming darkness up ahead, hulking its goliath span, foreboding, brutal; a long far gray haze bringing midday darkness, and the unseen lightnings; bulked up thunder in the distant belly architectures of its lumbering mass... I tremble when I think...
For now, we sit. But even now, beneath its creeping shadow, everything ornately beautiful in the organic tendrils of Earth's elderly weather withers. The once vast networks of connections fray. Enshadowed, the species die. The rich array of nature's copious bounty: bungled--beaten into ruin under plastic boots and our stupidity. Millions and millions and millions of beings and sentience: forever decimated in a hidden holocaust--for syrups and toys, syrups and toys! Eradicated for cheap fat in Teflon frying pans, frying enslaved gizzards, tortured to the beak in long dark huts across the once wild plains of Great America. Brutal, bungled world. Stupid, stupid idiocy! Stupid, stupid and ugly. And for what?
Convenience moving things. Convenience, God of everything. Idol of our brutishness, and the sick sleek stupid ignorance with which we move, and fat ourselves, and grow large on cushioned couches, and buy more houses, and rape in oafish ruin everything of any value, and laugh at screens.
Fools. Everywhere. Felling. Toiling. Stealing. Selling. Profitprofitprofitting like little pigs their pigbellied mansions, and slurping from electric wells. Slurping everything dry. Feeding the furnaces with all the final dregs of fuel as if tomorrow were eternities from now, and Now was all there is.
Fools. Meanminded, fatnecked fraternity stockmen heaping pennies stolen from old widows into their bank accounts to pay their beachhouse energy bills. Golfing as the flower-seeders die, as Venice sinks, as the divine abundance of biology is whittled down, commodified, and sold to slake a banker's hunger for a Caribbean jaunt.
Burnt to ferry ogres from ogre mall to ogre villages.
Burnt to heat a hundred thousand uninhabited palaces.
Burnt, to watch it burn, and pay a dominatrix for the thrill of losing.
Burnt, consumed, and vomitted into the sky, to better burn the world, burning.
Melting continents of ice because they left the heater on.
Left the heater on, everywhere, burning, furnacing, consuming, vomitting into the air the ash of million-year old lignin fires, crisped in minutes to have a hot tub ready come the wintertime.
Burnt and belched and vomitted into the sooty, befouled, all-chemical sky. And, seeing no stars, demanding billionaires launch rockets over blanket smog so they can ride them for an afternoon, and snap a pixel picture of some purity they blame the poor for ruining.
Burnt, burning--the world all up in flames! And up ahead, the storm! The deluge. The rivers rise. The oceans, overflowing...
Oh, my dear friend, is it no longer prudent to speak of Godwrath? Does the burning Earth not moan and weep and cry out for some justice? Who will give it? Who, in this awful matrix of systemic impudence and thoughtless slog? Of awful, stupid, careless, heartless luxury and license? Who, if not some waking deity, in light and thunder, rising, roused from slumber, furious, with boulders dropping like thick sand from off its arms and from its eyes, and, rising, wretched, infinite and wild, wreaking retribution. And in the harvest fields the poets chant: Wake, O Lord, and put on your armor. Woe, that this awful Day should now last centuries...
Centuries, through which the pent-up consequence of all our tomorrow-borrowing will blaze, and see the rains drop thunderous and horrible upon us, flattening beneath their epic turbulence all prideful city skylines, all supply-chains burning silkroads through the forest ghettos, knocking down the walls of Wall Street, of Wal-Marts, disrupting the million miles of cable hissing underneath the waters, sink the frigates and the tankards, from whose inexplicable sudden silence shall ring out, in one great symphony of angelsound, the songs of innumerable whales, rejoicing, lowing hallelujah in the depths of light as, finally, the maddening cacophony of human industry and awfulness has ceased its screaming, and the world is still again.
Oh friend...
The world is on fire, and what grim future lies ahead, I shudder to consider. Shudder, but prepare (as best one can). And even if no cataclysm strikes, or godheads stir to shake the Earth out of its hubris, still I'll live: sunfed, frugal, far from the pulsing grid; at peace with whales. Should all the world go on in even evermadness, mingling, toiling on into exponential growth and turning star-imperialist, I'll sit, and read, and warm myself by firelog light, and keep no fridge, and mind my lights, and make wide gardens for the birds and me, and drink the rain that slithers down my rainchain chimney, demanding all the while no tax from widows, no loans from tellers, no returns from stocks or receipts from sellers. I will just be, and try not to offend the Earth by being so, but to make Her glad, and be a shepherd of the Lifeforce flowing.
And that, dear friend, my lovely Cellist--child of Gaia and goodness; wide-eyed smiler above the bow and string--is not so bad I think, and in fact may be as noble as nobility can be these days, in a sordid age of thanklessness, waste, stupor, incivility, and hatred.
And so I shall frame my bus: my ark, to ride out rough waters still ascending. The flood is coming, is here...
And so I frame my ark and pray.
- Leaf