woe to you who do not see

Woe to you who do not seek to disrupt the flux of capitalism.

Fight not, and inside 50 years this whole planet will be in economic slavery to China; that is, to the Chinese Communist Party.

So I have said.

Let’s go play ball with St John the Apocalypt: you could read China as the dragon in chapter 12. This is a bit harsh actually, because for John this dragon was the divine principle of absolute evil, but if you consider it well-documented that violence and domination are foundational principles of Chinese communism you can see the connection. It is red, says John, with seven coroneted heads (caps with stars’ll have to do) and ten horns. The beast to whom the dragon cedes its worldwide authority – a hybrid monster with seven heads one of which bears the deep scar of a fatal wound from which, with terrible power, it has recovered – is Capitalism; perhaps each of its heads will be one of the last, greatest corporations. And the beast that comes after that, the one with two horns like a lamb but that roars like a dragon (dragon in lamb’s clothing?) – the one that is servant to the first beast – that’s the US.

You won’t often find me quoting the Bible but this is dead amusing.

Revelation 13:13 and on… And it (the second beast) worked great miracles, even to calling down fire from heaven onto the earth while people watched (shock and awe, anyone?). Through the miracles it was allowed to do on behalf of the first beast, it was able to win over the people of the world, and persuade them to put up a statue in honour of the beast that had been wounded by the sword and still lived. It was allowed to breathe life into this statue, so that the statue of the beast was able to speak, and to have anyone who refused to worship the statue of the beast put to death. He (the second beast, if you’re losing track; biblical syntax can be tortuous) compelled everyone – small and great, rich and poor, slave and citizen – to be branded on the right hand or on the forehead, and made it illegal for anyone to buy or sell anything unless he had been branded with the name of the beast or the number of its name.

The first beast Capitalism. The second beast the US. The statue in honour? Democracy. I await our imminent barcoding.

i find i am still here

I write from the middle of a dark night. Outside my window, the muffled clomp and scramble of raucous r’n'b from the pub next door beats distantly at my bedroom wall, but in here all is still, subdued. I am a week out the other side of the bender I went on when I realised Drew really was leaving, and after the sobbing and the sickness, the rages and the herbally-induced escapes and transcendences, I find I am still here.

The imminent removal of that relationship, that ten-year presence in my life, has highlighted both the deep strength and the limits of my other significant relationship, with Eugene. I don’t want to spend my life being little more than a font of secondhand faith for others; a source of unfailing, energetic reassurance for the incurably fearful and the chronically doubting, without space to address my own fears and doubts. I am quite remarkably alone; more profoundly alone than I have ever been; more potently, more peaceably alone than I had yet imagined.

Please bear with me while I recover my health, my impetus, and the thousand threads that make my life.

3rd anniversary of the invasion of iraq

Remember the concept of the ‘pre-emptive strike’? An abuse of language, a propagandistic lie to gain the support of the ignorant for the kind of war that is always evil. Time continues to prove our objection justified, and our participation shameful.

In Canada, Joshua Key – an Oklahoma boy who joined the US army for steady pay and medical insurance for his young family – seeks refugee status, having deserted after service in Iraq. In case you doubted it, he tells of witnessing routine disregard for the Geneva Convention and a culture of American atrocities.

my musical map

my musical map

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

the time has come to bare my musical soul in all its awful glory

it a morphing, forking, howling thing, of course, as you can see

click on the image for enlargement and comment

john

john

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

i am proud to continue a long line of ratbag agitators and poet-shyster-manque idealists.

bastard refuses to wear his teeth.

please think globally

This time I am not dreaming. I am at home, pouring a mix of fruit juice, cordial and chilled water into a crimson plastic beaker. I am suffused with the awareness that everything is toxic. Pesticides in the fruit juice, preservatives in the cordial and god knows what in the water. In London they’ve found Prozac, suntan lotion and way too much oestrogen (though if fate has a sense of humour and it really gets everywhere that just might be the saving of us all). Sydney water’s more likely fertilisers and blue-green algae; I let the chlorine evaporate off. I can’t believe the price of supermarket water these days; as for imported, forget it. How far exactly, from Chernobyl, are the French Alps? I know Chernobyl is totally last century, but this is nuclear, forfucksake. Its memory is longer than ours.

It’s not just what I pour into me of course. I’m a walking, sweating noxious pharmacopia myself; shampoos, skin creams, aluminium deodorants, detergents, and fabrics with a nuclear half-life slowly shedding a nanoscopic glitter of decay. Sure, I’m less at risk than every other species on the planet; in fact I stand one bitter better chance than diversity itself. The Earth can take a fair bit but Christ, get a sense of proportion.

It’s not just everyone’s chronic low-level ill-health. It’s the gazillion-dollar smoking industry, the montimipillion-dollar drug industry, the massive slow-death fossilisation of food sapped and zapped. It’s the exhaustion caused by a devout, determined, against-all-odds belief in continuous, inexhaustible growth. It’s the stress of constant, low-level terror in the heart, quelled by pillage. A culture in which the obese are the poor is a grotesque travesty of its own hunger.

They are poisoning us. Who are they? In truth, they go by many names, but fewer and fewer the more we die. Though some blame must fall on the shoulders of every shareholder who votes for profit before charity, and every human being who will not stop to see that this is a race that cannot be won.

The commercial aspect of international war stands scaly and roaring before us – how many years before the sacrifice of our young begins in earnest? Other nations are giving already. Ever talked to a teenage boy who remembers being nine, being forced by soldiers to watch while his sisters were raped and mutilated… He could hardly speak. He couldn’t look me in the eye.

It’s not just the painful, terrible sacrifice of so many lives that we could’ve saved – and so many, many more we could’ve made less miserable. It’s the vain rhetoric about the value of life. Life is cheap; always has been, looks like it always will be. It’s only your own life you really count dear, and those of your loved ones by extension also yours. If you and your kind band together in this dog-eat-dog world and stick to your guns, you can bully a whole bunch of other people into fighting and even labouring and providing for you, and in the end you might just live. Or not. Whatever you call it, you’ll need to take pride in destruction and vice.

We go to war every day via the global economy, each one of us if not with vengeance then by force. Conscripted into a system that benefits us as little as is necessary to secure our compliance, reluctant or otherwise, we fight for the subjugation of one half of the planet by the other. Down and round in this Antipodean outpost, the West beds the East in uncountable ways, with considerable rough-and-tumble, behind the lines and between, as the Apocalypse hots up.

sometimes lonely journey #2

I was dreaming again. A great grey kangaroo, one I had met before, lay right in the path; it was dying. I met its limpid eyes but it asked nothing. Someone I did not trust was about to move it out of the way so I went to help, wanting proper care to be taken. We lifted the creature and began to carry it toward wherever it was we had to go. I was glad to have the heavy end, and to be leading, because it was no burden and I knew where to go and would not give up. At some point I realised I was now carrying the great creature alone, cradling its limp head awkwardly in the crook of my arm, having to stop it from morphing into a swan. It became still. I trudged on, no longer sure it was alive, but with some way to go yet.

zombie rapture dream

The night before last I was travelling through a dream with a long and complex narrative, most of which had faded by the time I woke, due to the arresting nature of the last couple of minutes.

I was with Drew and others, and we were in a large and many-roomed house such as form most of my dreamscapes. There were other people around, some known to us, some not. Suddenly – I have no notion of the cue – some few of them began heading intently toward the central room of the house, and as they did, from all around us – particularly the floor of the outer rooms – people began to rise from their hitherto unnoticed sleep, layer upon layer of them, standing and joining this blank, determined migration into the centre. I peered through a doorway into the central room and found that inside it was a turret with a spiral staircase ascending beyond the roof of the house, and the crowd were all heading up the stairs or milling ready to do so.

I had a distinct sense that they were undead, though they didn’t stagger or drool or rot like zombies in a horror flick. I felt no horror – only pity and distaste, and dismay that they were so misguided as to think there was anywhere to go when they reached the top of the tower, or enough room in the tower for all of them. I may have shaken my head in sorry incredulity. I knew they were upsetting the nature of everything for all of us, ruining the balance out of sheer, joyless, pigheaded, self-righteous stupidity. We did not try to stop them – it seemed obvious they would not, could not listen. When I had absorbed the truth of it without torment, I woke.

It is the tenth anniversary of John Howard’s prime ministership, and the papers say his legacy is ‘a contented Australia’. Welcome to the dumb, blind, purposeful upward trudge of aspirational Zombieville. I hope we all wake before the tower comes crashing down.