|
Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2020 10:54:16 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2020 19:12:51 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2020 18:20:46 GMT
Life on earth is being destroyed so humans can use, own and hoard technology that fails to make our lives more fulfilling. This is not the way it has to be or the way it should be. We should not have to apologise for being human. We need simply return to a land centred way of life and begin the regeneration of the living communities that sustain us. Our connections with each other, with land and with the living communities that sustain each other must be remembered, refreshed and cherished once again. dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/technology-and-death-culture/Industrial Technology is a Death Cult by Ben Warner Once upon a time our activities and our technology were available to all with almost no cost or negative impact. Starting a fire, moving from one place to another, making a place to live, were things every human could do without causing long term harm to living communities. Now they are restricted, expensive and life destroying. What was once human centred has become system centred. Once upon a time we walked on Earth. Our feet were bare. We walked across the globe. Some of us made canoes and crossed the ocean. Now we use trains, cars, boats, and planes. Once upon a time we told stories around the fire. Anyone could speak. Everyone could participate. Now we silently watch films, TV and Netflix. What happened in between is the story of one group of humans, not the story of humanity. For thousands of years and for most of our brief time on Earth we walked and talked. We made bows, fire drills and baskets. These activities were things a human would learn how to do before they became an adult. They were made from local materials by the people who used them. When they were no longer useful, they were returned to Earth. We had a land-based existence. Everything and every being that helped to sustain us came from our local environment and was eventually, returned to it. After thousands of years a new type of technology began to emerge. Matches, transportation devices, concrete and steel are not freely available to every human and they destroy life. Now this type of technology dominates and is in the process of destroying Earth and life. Its strength will only last, as long as we believe its lies. It seems impenetrable but the things that make it strong are also its weaknesses. This technology appeared around the same time as cities and agriculture. The dominant narrative told us that it would make our lives better and easier, so we would have more time to do the things that made our life more fulfilling. Never mind that we were already doing them. It lied. We do not have more spare time now, we have less. Our lives are not more fulfilling in fact there is an epidemic of suicide and depression. We can turn on the light with a flick of a switch. But first someone must mine, poison and destroy living communities to make electricity, lightbulbs and copper wire. The system creates infrastructure, builds houses, with all the social and environmental impacts that these things entail. Then individuals work for most of the day to pay for it all. With each level of convenience comes another layer of complexity. With every bit of ‘freedom’ comes a new restriction. The writer Lewis Mumford called this new type of technology Authoritarian. He distinguished it from Democratic technologies. This Authoritarian Technology said “I will be your servant. Your benevolent tool. I will make you the lords of nature.” But we are its slave. We are the tool of our own technology. The machines have taken over. Any human can learn how to make and use a fire drill with only the resources they might find in a living unmanaged forest. To make a box of matches you would need to mine the steel for an axe, make charcoal, make a forge, forge the axe, chop down a tree, cut the tree into matches, get ammonium phosphate, get paraffin, make card, turn the card into the box and you would still not be finished. Yet this type of technology emerged, and began to dictate the way we lived. Without forced labour, mechanization, mass production, the work arm, the military army, the bureaucracy and specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts we could not have modern technology. Worse than this, it inevitably leads to the utterly insane and deplorable notion that the system itself must expand at whatever the eventual cost to life. It cannot exist without a hierarchy to control it and it never stops growing. But the elite will only remain in power while the system functions and you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 15:05:33 GMT
How To End The Perpetual Alienation Of People’s Birthrights? medium.com/@manasearthcustodian/how-to-end-the-perpetual-alienation-of-peoples-birthrights-462bf10cbd97Nature does not accumulate anything and gives all Creatures evenly and indiscriminately. The only aim of Nature is to give even when She takes a life. The latter is often instantly consumed. The input (production) and output (consumerism) gaps are the roots of all sufferings and poverty, wars, and destruction of Natural Resources. No matter how we look at the picture wealth is a delusional view of reality and staggering failure to understand Nature. Men with a higher awareness are going to follow nature instead of fighting it because when they fight Nature, they become environmental destroyers and commit suicide as a species.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 23, 2020 19:34:28 GMT
John Michael Greer – Occultist, Environmentalist and Activist – Is a Modern-Day Gandalf BY JONAH LOCKSLEY ultraculture.org/blog/2015/03/04/john-michael-greer/An interview with John Michael Greer – author, magician, environmentalist, activist and High Druid – who has been a leading light of paganism for years. John Michael Greer is the Grand Arch Druid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) and an environmentalist, historian, and littérateur. He’s written over thirty books, on topics ranging from Hermetic philosophy to the peak oil crisis (see his Amazon author page here). Greer is also the author of the Archdruid Report, an immensely popular blog that focuses on contemporary social and political issues in the public sphere. As a boy, Greer’s role model was Gandalf, and it wouldn’t be far from the truth to call John Michael Greer a present-day member of the Istari, serving as a dogged voice of reason in the whirling chaos of modern society. In an interview with us, John had some practical wisdom to share about “green wizardry,” the reality of mind control and the dangers of universal belief in the idea of progress.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 28, 2020 12:59:31 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 28, 2020 13:02:40 GMT
The Place Above Time experiences and reflections, an internal expedition Maori Poem by Tieme Ranapiri My Law The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun Will sweep on its course till the Cycle is run. And when into chaos the system is hurled Again shall the Builder reshape a new world. Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal: Move on for your orbit is fixed to your soul. And though it may lead into darkness of night The torch of the Builder shall give it new light. You were. You will be! Know this while you are: Your spirit has travelled both long and afar. It came from the Source, to the Source it returns The Spark which was lighted eternally burns. It slept in a jewel. It leapt in a wave. It roamed in the forest. It rose from the grave. It took on strange garbs for long aeons of years And now in the soul of yourself It appears. From body to body your spirit speeds on It seeks a new form when the old one has gone And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought On the loom of the Mind from the fibre of Thought. As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend Your thoughts drift away and in Destiny blend. You cannot escape them, for petty or great, Or evil or noble, they fashion your Fate. Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow Your life will reflect your thoughts of your Now. My Law is unerring, no blood can atone The structure you built you will live in alone. From cycle to cycle, through time and through space Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace And all that you ask for, and all you desire Must come at your bidding, as flame out of fire. Once list’ to that Voice and all tumuIt is done Your life is the Life of the Infinite One. In the hurrying race you are conscious of pause With love for the purpose, and love for the Cause. You are your own Devil, you are your own God You fashioned the paths your footsteps have trod. And no one can save you from Error or Sin Until you have hark’d to the Spirit within. forevernow.wordpress.com/mylaw/
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 29, 2020 16:45:56 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 30, 2020 18:11:01 GMT
As a collective, men have been lost for awhile now regarding issues of authority, power, sex, leadership, and trust in the “feminine mystique”. They have been silently carrying heavy loads of guilt, confusion, shame, self-loathing, fear, hopelessness, and loneliness. They have buried all this pain under ever increasing responsibilities and treacherous, daunting burdens that exact unquestioning duty and self-sacrifice, in a desperate effort to feel vigorous, vital, potent, and of intrinsic value; and sadly, also penitent, an aberrant impulse to punish themselves.
They have no choice but to carry the painful collective legacy of what’s commonly termed “man’s inhumanity to man”...especially to woman, and to our planet. Bound to it, like Prometheus to the rock of Sisyphus, with the Eagle of their highest and most noble potential misdirected, feasting daily on the gaping wounds in their side. Women, I know full well what we have suffered as a gender. As a survivor of sexual assault and of domestic abuse at the hands of men, no one need school me on the violence and exploitation men have enacted against women. This is a given. However, how can we expect the men whom we dearly love, our life partners, our husbands, our sons, and our fathers - to love themselves and to feel worthy of us, whilst chained to a flaming dumpster of patriarchy filled with the rotting afflictions of their forefathers’ collective wrongs?
It’s time to set them free, my sisters. It hurts my heart to see our men unable to rise as the amazing vessels of divine masculine energy they are designed to be for us. Kind, decent, faithful, passionate, loyal, honorable men are living lives of quiet desperation, resigned to being estranged from their true powers, from their divine birthright. At their first breath, they inherit this horrific legacy, their DNA encoded with the cries of women and of soil drenched in bloodshed through the ages. It’s astonishing that they even find the courage to try to love us at all, yet alone to feel deserving of our devotion. As a woman, it’s my responsibility to absolve these men, to set them free, to envision their pained bodies and starved souls bathed in the warm, golden light of forgiveness, and lovingly annointed with oils of deep compassion. It is for this reason that I unearth my own wounds, that I walk through the valleys of my own shadows, release ancestral karma, and seek healing. We must be like the woman with the alabaster jar of expensive perfume, the one who washed the feet of Jesus with tears of love, wiping them clean with her long tresses, then using all her perfume (her only possession of any value) to show him that even his baby toes were so very precious to her. The apostles scolded her for this. They were offended and claimed her behavior was embarrassingly foolish, that her jar of perfume should have been sold, with the proceeds going to the poor. Jesus told them no, that her show of love for him was justified. He said they would always have the poor with them, and that he was here but just a little while.
The men you love, my sisters, are also here with you but just a little while. Drop your calcified layers of victimization, and release your storehouses of festering rage. You also are born carrying a legacy, one that doesn’t want to ever cease punishing men for everything they have done, and for what they have failed to do. Turn the page, please. I beg you. Our men are suffering. They just aren’t noisy like us about it. They soldier on, alone. Daily they beat back their inner drill Sargents shouting at them that they are pansies, failures, unworthy, and unloved. As women, it’s time to take what we’ve gained on our journeys to discover and grow our own inner masculines, and show up now for our men. They need our strength, and our courage to help them face their terrifying shadows. They need our extravagant love.
—JJ Fonseca
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 14, 2020 20:28:52 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2020 12:34:10 GMT
All Organizing Is MagicIn this contribution to Verso's Caliban and the Witch Roundtable, Sarah Jaffe finds echoes of witchcraft in contemporary anti-capitalism www.versobooks.com/blogs/4465-all-organizing-is-magicThis October, Verso is hosting a roundtable on Silvia Federici’s incantatory and incendiary Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), inviting reflections from activists, writers, and scholars to discuss the provocations of Federici’s arguments on capitalism and colonialism, bodies and reproduction, race and slavery—and the powerful figure of the witch. Witches are troublemakers. Specifically, witches cause trouble for capitalism. When Silvia Federici wrote Caliban and the Witch, it wasn’t because witches were having a “moment” but to bring us a history braided into social movements around the world. Witches, she wrote, were “the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt.” And the witch-hunts of a world coming under the domination of capitalism were part of the process of dispossession and accumulation, a process that Federici noted “was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.” While the actual practice of witchcraft isn’t the focus of Federici’s book, it is these days the focus of an increasing number of books, Instagram accounts, magazine articles, profiles, and podcasts. More to the point, today’s left movements are home to many who are reclaiming witchcraft, magic, and indigenous spiritual practices that capitalist imperialism attempted to stamp out. The collective practices of a new generation of young people—mainly women, queer-identifying people, and people of color—may or may not have much in common with the practices of people tortured and killed for witchcraft. That’s because, as Federici noted, the witch-hunts “destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction.” Malaya Davis is one of those people. We met when she was organizing with the Ohio Students Association after John Crawford III had been killed in an Ohio Walmart by the local police. I didn’t know at the time that she had just gotten her first tarot deck; she told me, “It was all around the same time that I was exploring my personal spiritual power, and exploring my personal political power.” Her spiritual practice was very personal at the time, she said, while her political work was incredibly public. The realization that the two were intimately connected came later: “I realized ‘we can't actually get the freedom that we want if we aren't free within ourselves.’ That looks like a lot of intentional decolonization, including our spiritual practices, including our practice to heal the trauma that's a result of the systems that we’re actively dismantling.” Davis practices Ifa, a faith with West African roots, one that felt familiar to her as she began to learn about it. She had been raised Christian, and for a while she had been a “follow the rules kind of girl.” But as she moved out into the world, beginning her organizing work, she decided to follow her own spirit, to do more research and find people who could teach her. “Following the rules was not getting me to a lot of places that I was told I would get,” she said. What she was learning was a way to find her own power—much as she was finding her political power with OSA. As she told me, “It’s not like, you do these things then by the grace of God something will happen, it’s like by the grace of God and your own personal power, things will happen.” It was that kind of belief that the witch-hunts aimed to crush, because it encouraged rebellion against the emerging capitalist labor process. Belief in magic had to be eradicated, Federici wrote, because magic was a way to get something you wanted without working for it, “a refusal of work in action.” A belief in magic was a belief in an “anarchic, molecular conception of the diffusion of power in the world,” a conception fundamentally at odds with the centralized hierarchical power structure of the boss. Forcing people to submit to wage labor and the discipline of the time-clock first required the discipline of the stake. Though Davis noted that the women punished as witches did work, “It wasn’t work that benefits capitalism. It was work that benefited the community,” she said. “How do we extract the labor from witchcraft? How do we exploit the labor? We can’t, so therefore it’s demonic.” The emerging proletariat had to be trained to defer gratification; to stifle desire; to value accumulation over expenditure. A belief in magic, instead, centered desires—and their fulfillment—communal and personal, for care and sustenance and protection. It is no surprise, then, that magic is in vogue again just as the old bargains around work are breaking down. For young college graduates like Davis, taught to follow the rules, the promise of a good job has disappeared into the reality of mountains of debt. Work is no longer working. The scrim of freedom and choice dropped over capitalism’s coercion is falling away, and people are reaching for new—and old—ways to make things happen. To be a witch, Davis says, is to be a wise woman, a wise person. The reason why witches were and are considered wise is because they knew the unseen; because they consulted with the spiritual in order to “co-create their physical world.” Or as Jaliessa Sipress at The Hoodwitch wrote after Trump’s election, “Witches stay ready. A predominant part of witchcraft is completely based within ‘the unknown.’ We communicate with things we cannot see or are told have no vocabulary. We know how to improvise, to work with flowers and weeds and how to heal ourselves and oftentimes others.” The witch, too, has a different relationship with the world, a relationship that is being explored and reclaimed by today’s climate activists. As Federici writes, the witch had a conception of nature that does not adhere to the mind/body matter/spirit separation but “imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in ‘sympathetic’ relation with the rest.” The witch-hunt, then, helped solidify a false distinction between man and nature, as “The world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated.” It is not surprising then to see new ritual, magical practices appearing in movements aiming to fight climate change—movements that are aiming to, to think alongside Federici, “re-enchant” our idea of the world. As Niki Seth-Smith wrote recently, movements like Extinction Rebellion have created new ritual practices to help people face “the existential challenges of climate collapse.” “It’s not a coincidental thing that people are all of a sudden coming back to these indigenous practices to sustain ourselves,” Davis told me. “I really do think it’s the universal energies that are influencing us globally, and I also believe that a lot of the folks that joined movement work right around the time that I did—2009—in this generation ... seeking answers on how to make this world a better place, how to be free, how to truly liberate ourselves.... I think it opened up a lot of doors for us and has opened our minds to what else is possible.” Particularly in the organizing circles Davis has moved in, where death and trauma are a daily reality for young black people, a spiritual component can help people, she said, “both on their individual health and as they work to heal the collective.” The greatest fear of the witch-hunter was the fear of collectivity. The fever-dream projection of the witch-hunters, luridly described in witch-hunting manual after witch-hunting manual, was the Sabbat: a massive nocturnal gathering of witches to practice their craft, cavort, and have wild sex for the pure pleasure of it. The hunters’ fears of covens of witches flying to the nighttime rites was the fear of a mobile, organized working class refusing to submit to the dictates of space and time that capitalist work discipline required. The Sabbat was anti-work (its name is, indeed, from the recognized Christian day of rest), but it was also a harbinger of class revolt. Magic, Federici wrote, was “an instrument of grassroots resistance to power.” The ultimate way of getting what you want without work—or at least, without wage labor—is rebellion. It is not surprising that any time the working class calls for taking back wealth from the rich, or re-collectivizing things that used to be held in common, the first finger-wagging response is that we want to get something we haven’t worked for. Today’s witches also understand the power of the collective to make the world anew. All organizing is science fiction, wrote adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha in the introduction to Octavia’s Brood. All organizing is a plan for a future that doesn’t yet exist, a way to envision things you’ve never seen and to bring them to life. It is also true in this way that all organizing is magic. The witch-hunts ended, not because we entered a more enlightened age, Federici argued, but because the world of the witches was ground under the heel of capitalist work discipline. But as that work discipline breaks down, it is the witches that can show us a way to a world that values our healing, our wisdom, our desires, and our play—a world re-enchanted on our terms. Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (2016).
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2020 13:19:51 GMT
Embrace the Witch!Invite these women in, and let their voices pull on you: we pick our favourite witchy quotes from The Verso Book of Feminism. www.versobooks.com/blogs/4894-embrace-the-witchHalloween, also called Samhain, also called the Witch’s New Year or, in Latin America, the Day of the Dead, marks the border between the light and the dark, between the bright days and the cold nights, between the dead and the living. Witches are said to traverse this space and find, in the dark, what new things can be born. To celebrate the week, we’ve pulled six witchy selections from the new Verso Book of Feminism – from the 1st century to the present, women making things and bringing new worlds to birth have been called witches; some have embraced the identity. In this way, the book of feminism is possibly also a grimoire. Since the veil is thin right now, invite these women in, and let their voices pull on you.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2020 14:50:54 GMT
Julian Jaynes, professor of psychology at Colombia University in one of his books, surprised the great merit with the idea that in prehistoric times, so more than seven thousand years ago, people in reality heard the voice of the gods. While they visited nature, they saw fairies, elves, spirits and other creatures. According to Jaynes, this could be because at that time the two hemisphere of the human brain were even closer together, so the areas responsible for hearing of the left hemisphere were close to the hallucination parts of the right hemisphere (these are the Wernicke and Broca areas). Such a close relationship can only be observed in the person of our age during sleep or in the case of people with schizophrenia. Since there was such a direct relationship, back in the day-to-day life, the phenomena we call hallucination today - Jaynes says.
According to Jaynes, the presence of the Mesopotamian city state empire and the spread of writing can be held responsible for the breakdown of the close link between the two hemisphere of the human brain. Almost all of us have lost this ancient ability today, only our mystical and schizophrenic mates make a rare exception. Jaynes's arguments are very convincing because they are based not only on historical memories but also on modern neurological medicine. If Jaynes's point of view is right, we can make sure that if today's man had the abilities of our ancestors, our modern world would be full of spirits, sounds and supernatural forces. When a man is taken out of this special world and ′′ civilized ", so they teach him to write and read, he loses contact with that other world very soon (one generation, maybe within a few decades).
We can read about another interesting statement in Terence McKenna's book The Food of the Gods. According to McKenna, the reunion of two hemisphere of the brain in both ancient and modern cultures was achieved by consuming certain plants. It is a habit of using hallucinogenic plants in order to open doors to the gods world - writes McKenna. In his explanations, he goes to the point that modern life is so cold, painful and sterile because we lost contact with these worlds because access to once free-growing hallucinogenic plants are now state-regulated and restricted. McKenna also suggests that using these excipients helped create human consciousness in early mammals. In exchange for this, it heeled the development of thinking and mystical ideas. [...]
Regardless of the technique and method used, many researchers agree that ancient and modern ′′ primitive peoples ′′ are able to see and hear and feel something that we, who live in modern Western civilization, usually don't feel.
When a Soson Indian started looking for food, he heard what the earth told him and listened to the voice of plants and animals. And they told him and showed him where he could find that day's goer and they also made him aware of the ceremonies that would be appropriate to express his gratitude to the world for this gift.
If we face this to the way the European kings lived in the Middle Ages, we can see that the world's view of the reigning dominance of the era led us to an ironically ignorant, fake information age. Maybe this is what Daniel Quinn and the Australian native people call ′′ great forgetting "
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2020 20:53:44 GMT
“We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things. To breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it, realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh Realize You are the Earth – Thich Nhat HanhPosted on October 24, 2015 creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/realize-you-are-the-earth-thich-nhat-hanh/“You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. In that kind of relationship you have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change your life. Fear, separation, hate and anger come from the wrong view that you and the Earth are two separate entities, that the Earth is only the environment. That is a dualistic way of seeing. So to breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it, realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Not to cut the tree not to pollute the water, that is not enough. We need a real awakening, enlightenment, to change our way of thinking and seeing things. When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born. That is the meaning of love, to be at one. Many people suffer deeply and they do not know they suffer. They try to cover up the suffering by being busy. Many people get sick today because they get alienated from Mother Earth. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch Mother Earth inside of the body and this practice can help heal people. So the healing of the people should go together with the healing of the Earth. This is the insight and it is possible for anyone to practice. This kind of enlightenment is very crucial to a collective awakening. In Buddhism we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the Earth is in danger and living species are in danger. We have constructed a system we can’t control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims. We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, and in which we are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth. Activists have to have a spiritual practice in order to help them to suffer less, to nourish the happiness and to handle the suffering so they will be effective in helping the world. With anger and frustration you cannot do much. When I am mindful, I enjoy my tea more. I am fully present in the here and now, not carried away by my sorrow, my fear, my projects, the past and the future. I am here available to life. When I drink tea this is a wonderful moment. You do not need a lot of power or fame or money to be happy. Mindfulness can help you to be happy in the here and now. Every moment can be a happy moment. Set an example and help people to do the same. If we are able to touch deeply the historical dimension – through a leaf, a flower, a pebble, a beam of light, a mountain, a river, a bird, or our own body – we touch at the same time the ultimate dimension. The ultimate dimension cannot be described as personal or impersonal, material or spiritual, object or subject of cognition – we say only that it is always shining, and shining on itself. Touching the ultimate dimension, we feel happy and comfortable, like the birds enjoying the blue sky, or the deer enjoying the green fields. We know that we do not have to look for the ultimate outside of ourselves – it is available within us, in this very moment.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Nov 20, 2020 14:23:07 GMT
Power of the PowerlessOn ritual, protest and the art of self-defence What role does ritual and the sacred play in confronting ecological and social crises? Buddhist scholar, Jonathan Hopfner investigates the story behind the work of iconoclastic Japanese photographer Mitsutoshi Hanaga, chronicler of the activities of the Jusatsu Kito Sodan (‘Killing Curse Prayer Monk Group’) in the 1970s. dark-mountain.net/power-of-the-powerless/I Captured scenes Cast in grainy monochrome, they look like shades superimposed on an urban landscape in which they no longer play a part. Wide straw hats obscure their faces; identical robes dissolve each into a single mass. On the streets, in crowded trains, a few passers-by crane their necks but most avoid looking at the procession altogether, unsure whether it has come to help or do harm. The truth is it has come to do both. They wind their way through a town to its barren outskirts, drawing to a halt on a deserted beach. The target lies on the other side of the bay. By thrusting banners into the sand and gathering in a rough semicircle they stake out territory. Hands and mouths move, but eyes rarely waver from the factory in the distance, crowned by candy-cane smokestacks from which the company’s offerings pour skyward. It is dark by the time their fire comes to life. Whipped by the wind, it briefly illuminates successive pieces of an intricate ritual jigsaw: a fist clenched around prayer beads, scrolls covered in jet-black brushstrokes, hands cupping a conch shell, a stick curved like a blade poised to strike a drum. The chant is the only constant, drowned out by the restless murmurs of waves and burning wood at first, but swelling as the ceremony reaches an apex, loud enough to wake the metal skeleton across the water. It is less a plea or an exhortation than a statement of fact: ‘We curse them. We curse them to death, and nothing else.’ Over, and over, until surely the words bludgeon death into submission, mold it to their collective will. On the surface, inevitably, nothing happens. Long after the fire dies out, the factory lights continue to blink dumbly in the dark. Yet deep underground, the facility has been weaving a silent curse of its own, discharging through channels studiously unseen and unmonitored a blend of chemicals that taints bay and pond and paddy, burrowing into seed and stomach and womb to blight the lives of thousands for generations. Measured by this result, we must admit the factory’s magic is the more powerful.
|
|