Harangue for Revolutionaries

After Henry Rollins.

Some images like glass shards embedded in the fleshy reptilian part of your brain:

You are on your knees with your arms outstretched and head bowed before a shadowed tribunal and they can see right through you, and they can see all of you, and they look over lists and they compare graphs and they weigh mysterious objects carefully and then they ceremoniously pronounce: you are embraced, you are enough, and you are loved. Everyone you have ever known is in the audience and your wide shoulders begin to vibrate from the heavy roar of their cheering.

 You reach the hard tips of the fingers of both your hands into the thin flesh in the center of your chest and you voraciously tear open your own skin, but your bones are not a superman costume and underneath you are an armed explosive and all you’ve ever wanted is to explode with incalculable destructive force and as you explode the blast becomes everything.

You know that you can fly if you tried hard enough, but you are not sure what to do with your arms and you worry that you will look silly. You do it anyways and your arms are arched claws and you look like an awesome hawk.

Countless young women in sparkling eyeliner and sundresses with clasps coming undone are clamoring over you and they all want you, yes you, and what you are is something round that feels like rubber and is the size of a fist within your torso and attached quite firmly to the inside of your backbone and somehow there is enough there to please all of them.  There is much writhing and giggling and tiny hiccupping gasps.

Whatever it is you are wearing is very, very shiny like maybe your inner glow is outside now and you have finally found your place in the world and you fit in it like an old leather shoe.

You face the sun and you evaporate rapidly and the air becomes denser as you diffuse through the sky. 

You can’t really judge your size, not really, and you feel childishly clumsy again as you take a step, not knowing if your foot will land six inches away or six hundred meters away and you might be impossibly tall now, and you feel the tiny muted popping of human bodies bursting under your giant shoe as you crush firemen, housewives, schoolchildren, and department supervisors with your every step. Everyone is slightly sad about the mangled bodies but agree that it’s for the best. Your feigned murmurings of regret resonate deeply within the cavernous hollow of your chest in your undeniable monstrous body. Your smile is the length of your neighbor’s field.

There is a thin, dry rivulet running up the entire length of your brown body, and suddenly it erodes inward like an arroyo and as you steadily collapse into yourself you are for a moment shocked by your own lack of substance. But then you find a smooth, dark rock in the end and its heaviness comforts you.

You are twelve years old again and on that black and white and yellow bicycle and you’re riding up that wood plank and cinderblock ramp and as you reach the top you jerk the handlebars up but then you feel something new give away and you fly up and up and suddenly your yard and your barking hound dog and your house and your neighbors are below you and beneath you and so far away and you can feel the clouds brush your face and you can see the earth curve in the distance and it is so bright it hurts your eyes but you are not afraid because you will never fall again.

Your former friends who hate you now all realize that they have made a mistake and place small wreaths of yellow flowers at your feet. 

Now set aside your stupid fantasies.

Your problem is that you think you’re perfect, against all evidence indicating otherwise. You live with your constant and endless fucking up because deep down you think that you cannot do wrong. Because you know more than others, because you are considered and considerate, because of all the things you hold dearest to your heart but furthest from your actions. You think you are moral, you think you are virtuous, you think you are right. You close your eyes and you can envision the strength of your righteous conviction and it’s a clear rod of straight, transparent plexiglas four inches across in diameter and it runs from your puckered asshole to the top of your lumpy skull in lieu of a real human backbone and you think your righteousness keeps you standing upright even though every time you catch a glimpse of your reflection you are slouching.

Your bloated ego bleeds over to fuel your own self-admonishments because you are not as perfect as you believe yourself to be. You should have been a penitent priest: you practice writhing in pained piety often enough. You think that the more you pretend to scour your flesh with these fantasy flails the more your clear, upright, and shiny plastic backbone can be displayed like the mating ritual of a perversely inverted peacock. You hurt yourself in an imaginary game of potlatch, childishly thinking that every gouge in yourself will leave scars in others. You’re confused as to who you are and who the others are. You think you are beside the world, and you think you are the world but you are neither, though your narcissism is big enough for the world. The world doesn’t grow bigger the smaller you make yourself; how can you think you matter that much?

Everyone knows deep down, truly, that there is no order or chaos in the world. There is only this, only the dumb matter of this desk, these clumsy brown hands, this thick glass windowpane, and what is there can’t be measured by some speculative ideal. There is no imbalance in the world in itself. There is no alienation, no crisis, no disarray. That’s just your own disorder projected outwards. That’s your own wound you see in the world and you can never heal it because the wound is in you and the wound is you and the wound is just a metaphor. There is no wound; the world doesn’t need you to save it. But you need the world to need you to save it because that is the only acceptable theater for your as-yet-unpronounced monologue echoing heroically into the night. And your biggest regret in your life will be this: you will never bend the world to align with your impossibly straight backbone because the earth is curved and because the earth is so wide and you are so small and because even if you could shape the world into your own image, your plastic rod will just warp askew again and you will call that twisted thing the new straightness.

You are secretly terrified of being contaminated. You embrace diversity and alterity and miscegenation and hybridity in an effort to convince yourself otherwise. But when no one else is looking you think to yourself that you are pure in your embrace of impurity and you pat yourself on the back for refusing to compromise. You are humble and democratic and you didn't ask for this burden, and from this unique position you can see farther and you can see clearer than ordinary people. And unlike everyone else, you reject privilege because you don't consider yourself special. You embrace the masses and you sigh and pine because you know that this acceptance will forever set you apart from everyone else. Sometimes when you are alone too much you suspect that you are insincere. You suspect that you throw dirt on yourself only to prove that you are clean underneath. Because at heart you don’t know how you would be able to live with yourself if you were contaminated like the rest of the world is contaminated. You would lose your sure footing. You would lose that hard-edged look in your eyes. You may even stumble. So you try to avoid thinking about the fact that you are willing to get your hands dirty only because you believe religiously in hygiene in the abstract. You seek out friends instead. 

And you believe that you suffer for your truth: that it is your truth that makes you suffer and that it is in turn your suffering that ratifies your truth. You believe that truth can only emerge from the collapse of your illusions and you believe that illusions are sustained by an aversion to pain; hence you confuse humility and disillusionment and suffering and freedom. You have faith in your naïve attempts to uncover your oh-so-righteous purity through peeling away the parts of yourself that you love and that make you feel safe. You think that loving yourself is a form of weakness and you love yourself because you have the strength to say as much. You obsess endlessly over your every infraction and you pace back and forth and tirade alone and you harangue yourself and all the while you are grinning like an idiot on the inside. You secretly hope that you are levitating but you’re afraid to look down. But you’re not pure. You don’t stand upright and your body is stupidly fleshy and solid and hurts easily. You’ve convinced yourself that this false core is the real you but you will never distill yourself into what you think you are. And the more you try to purify yourself, the more your truth—in whose name you strut around so goddamn sanctimoniously—is compromised. 

No, you are made of human meat and you cannot fly.