It took me a long time to get here. I started off as animal noises, screeching and grunting. Obviously I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones, you think, or I wouldn’t be here at all. 11 million of us die of malnutrition every year before we reach the age of five. Our little bodies literally devour themselves to try to get the nutrients they need to grow. My sister was one of them. My mother gave me her share of the food, to make sure I made it, to give me a better chance of becoming an adult. It seems horribly cruel.
What would you have done? Was she right? Was she wrong? Who knows. All I know is that there wasn’t enough for everyone and my survival was no mere accident. It was not the luck of the draw. It was the result of a calculated strategy of putting as many eggs as possible in one basket. My genes are not intrinsically better, stronger, more interesting, or more adapted to survival than the genes of the 11 million who die yearly; no. The dice were loaded in my favour.
I suppose I should be grateful, and I am, in a way. I’m happy to be here, for now, in the spotlight, but every time I think of my sister I feel rage. It used to blind me to the potential beauty of the world. Whenever I was on the verge of having an aesthetic experience I would hear my sister screaming, and then, even worse, hear her silence when she no longer had the force to scream, or even whimper. It made me so angry! Now I carry her around with me like a wound that will never heal, could never heal. A wound that will hurt till I die. My little sister.
Meanwhile, the voracious among us eat on. Dog eats dog, man eats everything he can get his hands on, including popcorn. Starting with woman. I cost my mother a tooth and a nail, in more ways than one. My father did what he could, died of exhaustion clutching desperately at any kind of straw to feed us. I made my way in the world.
Strangely enough, I made it to this stage, here, now, me. The violence washed me up here, on this beach. I feel your attention, like a tide, ebbing and flowing, you like my little sister, you’re sorry she died, but you’re wondering what it has to do with you.
This anger is endless. This feeling won’t ever go away. This indignation will not falter. This sense of injustice can never be stifled. There is nothing whatsoever that you or anyone else can do about it –
- Except share it. So that the under 5s in
people stop killing themselves and each other all over the world for the right to sleep in clean sheets
If only I didn’t have to do this –
I could go over the edge, teeter, stretch out to the extreme point of no return and let myself go, literally pour myself into the words liquidly and let myself savour almost the substance, what it was about the world that forced these words into existence and not some other words and I apply my brain and my soul and my being, not standing naked here before you, but hiding inside my jacket, I mean, behind my body, my sex, my hair, my nose, my bum, my presence, my contours, my beliefs, the tone of my voice, my charm or my repugnance, depending, hiding, yes hiding behind my persona and I’m ready to fall and what about you? How do you hide from yourselves and from them because they are very, very nasty, they will eat you as soon as look at you; they are already planning to engineer you out of existence.
Please disregard what I have just said. Like an aircraft that needs a long runway to be able to take off, I cannot state what is of absolute importance to me from a standstill.
My first words must be discarded, like the scribbles of a child, an important part of the apprenticeship of writing, but of no intrinsic worth. Only the language as a whole is of worth, is of use, and I am not the whole language. I am not even my whole language, the whole of the language I am using or the whole of the language I am capable of producing.
What is essential to me can only come out in the telling, as part of a coded message, an extremely long coded message, and my desperation pushes me to tell you that what is important to me may not even be within my power to state, may appear as a pattern behind the words, among the words, between the words I speak, maybe the words I do not speak are even more important than the words I do speak.
This speech, that speech. And I have an intuition that it is neither the words I say nor the words I don’t say that hold something of significance. The value, the energy, the substance is in the relationships, the relationships between the actual words – the spaces – the silences – and the relationships of the chronological existence of the words, the sounds, the music I am making, the pattern I am laying down.
Here I am bathed in light, energised by your presence, surrendering to the necessity of the moment, laying aside all the important things I had to do, could be doing, should be doing, just to let this happen, to let this out, to let this moment be this moment and not some other moment. This experience be this experience, of me and you, from me to you and you to me, since I am feeding on your energy to be able to give to you what I want to give to you which is my undivided attention, my concentrated intensity, my channelling of a message that comes through me and is not me and is not someone else either but is a necessity of speech and a necessity of freedom and a necessity of theatre.
I am a heavy aircraft and to defy the laws of gravity I must rev my engine and achieve that critical speed when fuel and weight and cargo and tickets and luggage and out of date passports with fingerprints and iris identification and destinations are all forgotten in the awe-inspiring lift-off, and soon we’ll be in the air and soaring above our mundane cares and floating in the realm of free flight, freedom, unattachment, unattached, in a world of our own, in a sphere of our own, in a place of freedom, in a domain of independence, in a situation of exceptional delight.
Now we’ve managed to get rid of ground support, the work, the effort, the struggle, the problems to be overcome the challenges to be met -
And we have managed somehow to keep the walls of the theatre erect and pay the doorman and the cleaners and perhaps even the actors though that always comes last, art is always the last thing to be paid for, artists all start working for nothing –
For free – DUM -
For no remuneration other than the excitement of free flight and the possibility of staying up there because if you never take the trouble to reach critical speed and accept the risk of nose-diving at the end of the runway then you will never know if you can fly and only if you try and reach for the stars can you hope to by-pass Mars and find out a bit about the universe.
Many are scared that they would never be able to come back down, so they don’t try,
but the adventurous ones want to make it up here and stay put, believing incongruously that just flying is enough to be able to stay in the air, that making it into the stratosphere deserves a cheer and and and…
That’s not it at all. I told you I have to crawl before I can walk, have to walk before I can run, have to run before I can fly, have to fly before I can…
Take you with me?
That is not it at all. I become self-conscious. I am not here to manipulate you but somehow or other I cannot hide the truth from you and that truth, which I have already stated, I feel compelled to state again. To make sure you know that I am not hiding anything from you.
(PATS (BULGING) MIDRIFF)
I am not real, and this is not how I really feel, I am a product of this situation and if I agreed to put myself freely in this situation – because we are talking about freedom and about speech and I am speaking, seemingly freely, though prompted – in a theatre –
Plant the seed. My job here is to plant the seed in your minds that you will take away with you and that seeds will grow and propagate and the end result will be that freedom of speech in the theatre will be as important to you as it is to me and it will grow and grow in your minds the way it has grown and grown in my mind and that way we will all together save the save the freedom, save the speech, save the theatre.
But we are not here on a mission to save. We are safe, here, now. There is nothing threatening about this situation. There is nothing precarious about this experience. It began, it shall run its course and it shall come to an end and nothing will interrupt it. The theatre will not suddenly implode in the middle of the performance, the roof will not fall in, with a bit of luck I shall not have a heart attack or blow myself up accidentally, no expertly-trained snipers lurking in the shadows will start taking you the audience out one by one, the director’s food will not be poisoned…
What am I taking about?
Freedom of speech in the theatre.
Not crash landings or airport controls. Theatre is not like life. There is no physical danger here. You sit in your seats and you don’t have much leg room and you are expected to keep the children quiet but this is not an aeroplane. I don’t know why the writer used that image.
Anyway, that would be preaching to the converted because anyone who is here tonight is already doing the necessary to give freedom of speech in the theatre a chance, the right to exist.
You don’t have any pre-conceived ideas about what can and cannot be said here. About what it is right and wrong to say in public – but not just in any public, in the intimacy of mind to mind – oh, no doubt, you are all free to close your minds to any of my words that don’t please you. You think you can sift through the message and take only what you want, or maybe the sifting works in another way and the resonance set up by a particular word or image is individual to each of you, and when I say a word that meant something to the writer and means something slightly different or even very different to me it will mean something totally different to you and it will spark off connections that we don’t have so each of you receives your own individual message and I don’t have any control over that and I certainly don’t want any control over that, I don’t want to influence how you receive the language that is shared here, that is up to you, and when you leave the theatre you are free to instantly forget everything I said or any part of it and keep what you want or so you think or so I think. We are free to think in any way we choose, or so we think. We are all free, here, now. We are free because we are here.
Nobody asked me why I did it. I don’t have a coherent answer. If I was able to express myself adequately here with you all listening carefully and understanding what I’m saying then maybe I would not have had to do it. You see, it was my only option. You can’t understand why violence, physical violence, is an option, let alone only. That’s because you are sitting in a privileged position. Whether you like it or not, you have freedom and you have speech. I had neither. And so violence was my only possible theatre of operations.
I did it because it was the only way I had of saying that I don’t agree with how the world is being run. People are not being nice to people. Some of the people who are not being treated nicely happen to be a part of me. Some of the people who are not treating them nicely happen to have some things in common with you. It is not black & white. It is not a question of putting the “guilty” people in prison. Dick Turpin wore a mask. Nothing is clear-cut on that side. The real robbers don’t wear masks anymore. They hide behind numbered bank accounts.
You are afraid of me because you think I want to steal your possessions out of envy and greed. I am not envious and I’m not greedy. I am desperate. There’s a difference. Time is running out for me. I don’t own anything. This suit is just a prop. I have been given nothing by previous generations and I have nothing to give to future generations. I can only act in favour of this generation, of the souls who are alive now, by protesting against the way things are, about all those who receive from the past and give to the future and leave us out.
We are nice and cosy here, but theatres have wings and if this theatre was to take off like a gigantic bird and fly to another part of the world, outside the theatre doors there could be starving children. There could be mass graves with genocide victims in them. There could be people dying of diseases we have cures for here. There is something wrong in our world, wrong with our world.
Together, our minds can soar and hover in the ether of intellectual abstraction. We are the ones who have enough. We have aspirations and ambitions other than keeping our children and ourselves alive from meal to meal. We have dreams, and we pay people to interpret them to help us achieve our ambitions, attain our aspirations. We are free. But we are all part of the same experience, the experience of life on earth at this moment, an experience that is being shared by six and a half billion people. At this moment, people are being born, people are dying, and six and a half billion people are alive. That is six thousand five hundred million people. A child dies of hunger every three seconds.
I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m not saying it’s my fault. I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault. Ok, so it’s nobody’s fault. But it’s happening.
Every human soul is a part of the human spirit, we are all parts of humanity the way the stars are part of the universe. I know there are parts of myself I like more than others but I am the way I am and I have to accept myself as I am. I don’t particularly like my nose and I’m not proud of having to defecate every day but there you have it, I’m a man, an adult man, and that’s the way it is. And you may say, well, that’s all right, if we take another image, the image of my body as a microcosm of the universe, my cells stand for all the people in the world, then it is only natural that some cells die and new ones are born, where’s the problem, what’s wrong with that? Well, there is a difference between dying naturally when your time comes and dying prematurely because you were deprived of sustenance. Try cutting off the blood supply to your right hand with a tight elastic band and you’ll see what I mean.
I am a man. And the part of me that has succeeded in achieving abstract thought, poetry, and great works of art wants to share the sublime with the ridiculously large number of those whose entire existences and every ounce of energy have been taken up to procure their mere survival. The great thinkers in past civilisations were free to think because they had slaves to do the drudgery. We do not need slaves. If we put our minds together, we can work for the greater good and provide everybody with a minimum assured subsistence. What else should brain power be used for, than to provide everyone with what it takes to be able to think?
But we can’t let go of the way we have been taught to think, because we equate the way we think with our identity and we believe that if we were to change the way we think the person we are now would kind of disappear – puff! Gone. We are attached to our customs and habits and the idea of giving it all up for everyone to be on the same level doesn’t work for us. We believe that if we take away the incentive of being able to have more than someone else then we would all just stay in bed and nobody would do anything useful whatsoever.
You don’t understand why I am violent, why I am storing all this spare energy around my middle, which is accumulating to the point of… can it keep expanding? Where will it go?
Desperation and inexplicable violence, I don’t happen to agree that there is a scale of values that applies to human souls. Not at birth, at any rate. I see life as a one-off experience. We are born, we live, and we die. All of us. That’s when I get desperate. When I begin to realise that things won’t change for the better in my lifetime, when I realise that if change is ever to come, it will be too late for me and my kind, and something inside me cracks and I think I cannot go along with this any longer, I cannot silently accept this state of affairs for my children and their children.
To begin with, you are optimistic, and you think the world will change for the better of its own accord or you believe that you could play some small part in making the world a better place just by your being on it. Then as time goes by, you begin to doubt your optimistic premises. According to your experience, you can see that the world is not becoming a better place overall at all, in fact, from the point of view of the human race as a whole, it is becoming a worse place, it is becoming a place where the individual soul is given no consideration whatsoever, where somehow some huge fuck-up has occurred and something has to be done about it.
There are people who hold their beliefs so sacred that any perceived criticism of their belief system is intolerable to them. Personally, I have never come across anyone with exactly the same beliefs as me. It is a bit lonely, at times. It means that if I were to destroy the people who don’t think like me I would unfortunately have to destroy everybody other than myself, and as I also find that I am often in contradiction with myself, I would have to go, too. Pop! Boo hoo!
Theatres have wings to allow us to fly quickly and easily to places we couldn’t go to by pedestrian means.
To country A a few decades ago, for example, when country F had sweet-talked the As to fight against each other to allow F to keep their resources, the superior Fs with their lingua diplomatica, the beautiful language that sounds so good because it is empty of substance and leaves plenty of room inside its hollow self to resonate with the semblance of truth and beauty – and so some of the A’s did, they fought against other A’s with guns provided by the F’s, “fight for us and we will let you come and live with us” said the F’s, and the A’s believed them, they thought life in F would be qualitatively better than life in A, only, when push came to shove and the airlift was on and they all got to the airstrip, the F’s took their F-ing guns back – “you won’t be needing those now, you’re coming to F with us where this is no war” – and promptly jumped into their aircraft and left the A’s standing there on the tarmac, minus the borrowed weapons, to face the other A’s who were less than friendly, as you can imagine. Only the A’s didn’t have wings. They were in a special kind of theatre, of operations. All these countries in the world going around thinking, actually believing they are somehow morally superior to other countries, as if power was synonymous with moral superiority rather than greed, and creating conflicts ex nihilo and not a one gives a shit about any of the others.
I love you all, every single one of you, from the front row to the back, even those of you who aren’t listening or who are listening and hating my every word I love you.
But I also love them, I love every one of them, too, and you don’t like that, you think I must choose, and back the winning side, take a chance on a side and back it and if everyone did that then there would in fact be a winning side and a losing side but if we all refused then maybe we could call the whole horrid gamble or stupid game of chicken off
Chicken out
You are jealous. You want me to tell you that you are the most wonderful audience in the world. But hey, it’s dark!!! I can’t see you, I can’t hear you, I don’t know anything about you. Should I hire a consultant to run a survey to measure the compassion in your silence?
I’m not here to talk about the difference between you and me or the difference between me and you or the difference between them and us or the difference between us and them. I am here to discuss the links, the chinks in the armour, the hushed atmosphere in the parlour. The bit of us all that is the same, the bit of all of us that wants to hear the same message. The message of love, the message of hope, the message of levitation. To get there you have to put up with an awful lot of things you don’t like. Ha! You make the effort to go out and use some of your very precious time in a theatre and what do you get? It gets rammed down your throat about how maybe we are wrong and they are right, the ones who don’t think like us, the ones who don’t act like us, and this time I’m not talking about sex or race or colour or creed, because they do look exactly like us, two ears, an eye, nose and throat – teeth like stars and a cutlass broke loose…
I’m talking about violence. Here I am, going about my daily life, getting on with my own business, minding my ps and qs and childrening about the future, worried, anxious, I’m not one of those who easily lets goes –
(a loud bang is heard offstage)
Why do they do it?
Why do we do it? Do you know why you do everything you do? I thought not. I can read your thoughts. There is no simple reason. Many are called and few are chosen and many more are not even called. They don’t do it. That’s their prerogative. They don’t concern us here. Or do they?
I have no idea why we do it. We are all different, and I suppose no two people do it for the same reason. Ultimately, although the result is vaguely the same, the objectives are more individual. What do we get out of it? A chance to escape from reality. That’s it, its escapism, in a way. When your reality is just too horrible or too mundane, that’s when you do it and there is an added complication here because not all of those whose realities are too horrible or mundane take the trouble to do it. And some whose realities are to all intents and purposes not horrible or mundane at all do take the trouble to do it.
So it is trouble. It is an effort. There is a lot of work involved, some would say courage, at least willpower in the sense that you have to keep your cool and decide that you will do it come what may. We are not put-offable. If we were put-offable we would do something else, something less troublesome.
It takes unbending intent, and how many of us have got that? That’s not a value judgement. I am not saying it is a good thing to have unbending intent. I’m not suggesting for a moment everybody should do what I do. I have to do it. I don’t have any choice, I have no other options. But we are all free to do as we choose and the other 6 billion four hundred and ninety nine thousand million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine (6,499,999,999) of us can do as they please. They are all free to find their own staircase to heaven and if they don’t then they will be left in the lurch, they will be stepping out into the great void when the time comes if they haven’t put something in place during their time ici-bas.
So is that why we do it? To escape reality, not the reality of life, but the reality of death? Does it actually matter what we do while we’re alive? Is anybody watching, counting the points?
Even me, I talk about unbending intent and that is all very well, I do have unbending intent and I can testify that you need it to do what I do, but why do I have it? Did I acquire it or was I born with it? A part of me wants to change, is changing, I’ve read all the self-help books, I am passionate about a lot of things and I fervently believe that a human being needs passion just to want to carry on, otherwise what’s the point, but despite all that, there is a bit of me, I am almost ashamed to admit, I feel a bit self-conscious admitting this, but it is the truth, it is my truth, even if it is not actually true in any absolute sense, it is true for me because it is how I perceive myself, it is how I describe myself to myself if I happen to decide to tell myself who I think I am, and goodness knows, I’m asked often enough – who the hell do you think you are – my mother asked me regularly, and at the time, it was worrying because I thought she should have known, I thought she was the one person who should have known if anybody knew, and in any case, she had a better chance of knowing than me but I am not being rigorous enough here, she didn’t ask me who I was, she asked me who I THOUGHT I was. And that’s the difference. The painting I paint of myself, and I have always tried to be as truthful as possible, I’m no angel, neither am I rotten to the core, despite what some people think about people like me, about people who do what I do, narcissists, I bet you think we’re all navel contemplators, but I’m not, I don’t spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about myself or about how I perceive myself or about how other people perceive me, really I don’t, I’m much more pragmatic than that, I’m a man of action, it’s just that how you feel about yourself is the key to how you feel about other people, we all know we can’t love other people if we don’t first love ourselves, or at least we have to be at ease with ourselves, comfortable with our identity, which is why from time to time it is not a heinous crime to think a teensy bit about what one is, and I come up with the feeling, of which I’m not proud, that the bit of me which has unbending intent, whether I can situate it or not I don’t know, but that bit has always been there. I don’t feel as if I acquired it. I believe it was there when I was born. I will go even further than that, at the risk of putting myself out on a limb and losing the sympathy of some of my supporters, I don’t even believe it is mine. I think someone else must have put it there. I think I got it from someone else.
Why someone would give it to me and not to everyone is a mystery, but it’s a bit like the colour of your eyes. We don’t all get the same colour of eyes, not even from the same parents, and we don’t all get unbending intent.
So I can’t explain it. I can’t begin to understand it myself so I can’t explain it to anyone else. It’s like a brick wall. Inside me, I have a brick wall. There is a man building a brick wall inside my head – if the head is the seat of the emotions, for this is an emotional thing, a feeling thing, it is about identity and personality and not about rational thought – anyway, there is this chap building a brick wall, slowly, deliberately and carefully he is building a brick wall, and in the same inner tableau, some distance behind him, there is another chap taking it apart again.
Unfortunately the hours of work represented by the distance between them means that the cement actually has time to set, so the taking down of the wall is more difficult and arduous than the building of it, but the overall effect is that at any given time there is a substantial brick wall in there. The up with which we cannot put. I’ve had my back to it many a time. And these two chaps, the builder and the demolition guy, they can see each other, they can each see what the other is doing, but they don’t seem to mind. They haven’t communicated with each other so far. I live in hope. Though as I am mellowing with age, through the years, I suspect that the builder has already started to mellow along with me and he has put some kind of anti-hardening agent into the cement, that has a delayed action, so that the wall he builds is irreproachably solid, but by the time the taker-downer of the wall reaches a brick, the cement has already begun to crumble, and so the job is not quite as hard as it was in the beginning.
These two are not alone, in my inner tableau, but it is a spacious affair and so everyone has plenty of room and they don’t need to communicate, I can’t say I have actually overheard any conversation as such, going on in this inner tableau, but there is a woman, and the woman is pulling on a rope. The funny thing about the rope is that she cannot see either end of it. She just keeps pulling, and she doesn’t seem perturbed by the fact that she doesn’t know where it is coming from or where it is going to. She just concentrates and pulls with all her might.
There are so many things I don’t understand. Take energy. The way it builds up. What happens to it. What it gets used for. Here’s an example of something that happened one day. As a boy, I found myself at the foot of that wall. There were weeds growing out of the bottom of the wall. I thought, what a mess, I must tidy up, and grabbed a weed to start pulling them out. When I touched the weed I felt a power unimaginably strong. I fell back in terror. It really scared me; it was such a powerful power, a force the likes of which I had never experienced before. I took note of the situation and went away to think about it. My thinking led me to the conclusion that I could make use of that force. Not only would I tidy the place up, because weeds are pretty unsightly per se, but at the same time, the power I unleashed would destroy the wall once and for all and I would be free! With that reasoning under my cap, I returned to the plateau to put my plan into action. Imagine my surprise and extreme disappointment when I pulled a weed out and it fell limp in my hand, the force had gone, moved on, evaporated, was no longer there. The weed just plopped out and lay inert in my hand. Drat! I had missed the chance to use an extraordinarily strong power. I had missed the chance to unleash untold destructive power at the mere pull of a weed.
I didn’t quite know what to make of the experience and in the end I thought it must have been my own funny little way of describing to myself the saying “strike while the iron is hot”. My version of which would go something like “pull while the weed is tremendously powerful”. I have waited years but I have never since felt anything nearly as powerful as that mysterious force. I don’t even know if it would have been a good thing to bring down the wall. For a start, the demolition chap would have been out of a job. You could say that he could then have found a more useful way to spend his time, but there is not a lot going on in that particular inner plateau so who knows?
(SINGS) Maybe I’m right and maybe I’m wrong, nevertheless…
Maybe freedom of speech in the theatre is necessary for there to be any freedom of speech anywhere. Maybe this is the last bastion of our humanity, because you can read in secret, you can buy your books cash, or borrow them from the library under a pseudonym, but the CCTV will catch you coming into the theatre to listen to this or that speech. And if there are keywords in the title, in the body, in anything connected to the production, those keywords will be linked to you.
(the bulge is now clearly visible)
I didn’t choose to carry this extra weight around with me. Nobody in their right mind would decide to carry around a weight they don’t need to carry. I need this weight, I need this cushion. These power packs, these cells all around my middle are packed choc-a-block with energy. They are sources of spare energy. Energy that was somebody else’s but which is now mine.
I am carrying around a kind of life belt or death belt, if you prefer, and the purpose is to give me added power, for me to have reserves of stored energy. To protect myself against the world, to protect myself from falling into want, to protect myself from everything I don’t want.
It was given to me, atom by atom, by my elders, by my peers. Some didn’t agree, some don’t agree, some don’t believe we need this kind of protection, this kind of cushion against reality, but the intensity of those who believed must have won over the tolerance of those who didn’t believe and atom by atom, molecule by molecule, sell by September 11 – oops, Freudian slip – the power-pack fell into place. Not all of the young men they tried to girth in this way were suitable, not all accepted the extra burden, some escaped, but those of us, who, like me, had no sufficiently convincing alternative world-view to counter them – and how could we, we had just arrived, they have had centuries to devise their strategy, to plot against us - found the thing growing gradually, too gradually to be able to stop it, one day a big, fat cell appeared, around here, and the next day another one popped up round the back, at my kidneys, and I did not notice, I did not notice and so I could not rebel against their invasion of my body, of my psychic space – the mental is physical and the physical is mental – and so it came upon me, bit by bit.
Part of me was jubilant as it grew, because I had always been jealous, so very jealous of the pregnant woman and how proudly she struts around with her balloon belly to the fore, projecting her pretension on the face of the innocent world, and that smirk of satisfaction on her lips – the Mona Lisa was obviously up the skite – wallowing in the sheer existential ecstasy of the ‘I am being useful to the race satisfaction hormone’, of the ‘I don’t need to achieve anything other than the nurturing of my offspring’ self-congratulatory hormone, whore moan, and me, did you ever think of me, how can I get that same feeling, how can I feel that I am doing something really vital for the human race? I, too, can start by storing up energy all round my middle, the way she does to feed the growth, I do roughly the same and fill up these cells hanging all round my middle trunk with power, stored power, a latent…
But there is nothing growing inside me to deplete them again, nothing nibbling away from the inside at this excess energy store, and so it will surely suffocate me if I don’t find something else to do with it…
If I don’t implement the purpose for which my fathers placed it there…
I bet you think I’m trying to let myself off the hook, trying to pin the blame on my old man and his cronies, as if they were the ones who decided I would take on this burden and I didn’t have a say in the matter.
I am not trying to reject responsibility. If anyone has a ring of potential power around their middle it is me. I admit, I would probably never have thought of it myself, I would probably never have come up with this as a way of saving myself and the world from a fate worse than death if they had not suggested it. They wore me down, day after day, year after year, insisting on the necessity of me taking on inch by inch this responsibility. I accepted it. I wanted to please my father and have his friends smile at me and give me a little pat on the back.
My big sister - not the little one, who died, the one who survived against all odds - wouldn’t have anything to do with it. She didn’t need to – she had her own secret weapon, why take on the necessity to carry someone else’s? She completely rejected it. She has a funny character, funny personality, she literally can’t do anything she is told to do. As soon as the wires between her ears and her brain started to buzz, from the very first sound she heard, she deftly detected any instances of people trying to order her about and tell her what to do and her inner response mechanisms automatically triggered a refusal. Oh, she was far too subtle to spit out the refusal to the ordering party, no, she was ostensibly conciliatory and tried to pretend that she actually intended to comply with the said order but deep down inside she had been programming herself to resist. Her mother, our mother, actually, tearful, tried to reason with her, wringing her hands in anguish, trying to convey to her daughter the fact that the superiority of the male is a fait accompli and that there is no point in trying to deny it or refute it or call it into question in any way because it is a fact of life, two XXs are not as good as one X and a Y. Everybody knows that. It has always been that way and it always will be that way.
“But the Y is actually less than the X. A Y is an X with a bit missing. A Y hardly contains anything at all…”
“So they need an extra power pack, spare batteries…”
Incredible as it may seem, my sister’s theory is that men are lacking something, and they are The Unconsoled, they cannot get their minds round the fact that they are less than women, so they have been forced to find a way of valorising the fact that they cannot grow their own fat cells round the middle to feed the future from within, all they can do is pretend and grow fat theories in their minds to project onto the world to make it conform to their idea of it, to their imaginary plan of it, impose upon it, by force, if necessary, and by Jove they have more of that, more of the brute, raw, physically overpower thy neighbour for the sake of it strength, their artificial system in which some players are worth more than others…
I reckon that’s what it’s all about. I am not my father’s son. It was their idea to make me like this, but eventually, I reached a point, a kind of plateau, where I had gone as far as I could as an acolyte and had to find my own raison d’être. I don’t agree that men are in some way inferior to women. What we lose in the ability to create sophisticated replicas of ourselves that resist us we gain in brute force.
This is where it gets dangerous for me.
The purpose. Whether or not I chose to accept this burden or had it forced on me, the truth is that at this moment I am the one who has the energy pack rolled around their middle. Irrespective of who gave it to me, of whether I resisted or gleefully accepted, it is now mine, all mine.
There are so many aspects of this phenomenon that I want to talk about but our time is limited and I must restrict myself to covering only the most important here, only the most vital, only the ones I can think of.
As we have so little time left, I feel tempted to talk to you about YOUR role in all this but you will have plenty of time afterwards to think about that, wherever your belief systems take you. Telling the truth is a dangerous, difficult job. The truth is different for everyone, so no-one can help you to tell your truth.
Yet I feel this kind of tug of conscience pulling at my sleeve, whispering in my ear that it is only decent to devote the last few minutes to the …
(victims – left unsaid)
Any attempt at explanation could have the disastrous effect of lessening the impact of what I am about to do… forewarned is forearmed.
What does it matter? When it stops, it stops, full stop. Your brothers and sisters will feel the same way I felt about my little sister.
Will they put on weight round the middle? Will their bodies’ archaic survival strategy backfire on them? Only time will tell.
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