Stealing

And from the earth rose a song
That shook the depths of depths
To the skies of skies

They were brought on the seas
And the stealing began
Creating the disharmony
Of which ancient gods had warned

From jungle to jungle
From forests to plantations
And the gods' sceptres were usurped
And turned into whips

The monster of a thousand heads
Began the fight against the song
The great imbalance started to make them lean
To a side they had to flee

Covering men and land
The hand wanted more
Flags flourished, chimneys rose,
The hand grew hungrier

For land and men they fought
And their doom fed the heads
Eating more, wanting more
The stealing, the rape, had to go on

From beneath the soil
From above the edge of forests
The hand gathered food
And gave but misery back

And the songs of thanking and praising
Of love and fear for the world
Were fewer and fewer
What ancients would do, they would ravage

When they had stolen the land they stole the youth
When parents had perished they would lie to the child
When the booty was gone
The stealers turned to each other
And cannibalism was the law

When the soil was dry they looked above
To the stars where food is infinite
Feet and hands getting monstruously enormous


And from the earth rose a song
That shook the depths of depths
To the skies of skies

Unheard
Harmless
Vanishing in the wind and the sea


Everything is said yet I need to illustrate, in order not to be disdained as occult or arrogant. It all started with a discussion about the world, one in which you enter with full weaponry or just leave, one of the many discussions where mischievous ghosts and gouls come up at every turn of phrase dressed in words like "natural", "we were born like this", or "man is such, and has always been". I truly enjoy these dialogues most of the time, allowing me to try another delivery, with words as labor, to extract my poor counterpart from the matrix of the "common sense", which I dealt with in a previous post, the thousand faces monster that has found me and that I have recognised after all these years spent learning my enemy. My short life has been everything, but it was mainly a dance for two between the monster and me, education and work being but the steps I had to follow around it to finally get as close as I could, because straight way can only lead to succumbing to the seduction of the monster. I will tell you about those steps if we get a chance. But for now I want to tell you about an encounter that happened last week, one of many, but one in which I could smell and feel the demon thoroughly and precisely. So much I could see the exact moment when the first particle of fear started to change side. When the rictus of mockery it had always given me, without changing from a single inch, started turning into a grin of apprehension.

It all started with this memory of a German poem, learnt in classe préparatoire, depicting the world as a song, no, it all started with a book in which reason was abhorred, no, actually, it started in a car where "social construct" was repeated like the sufis repeat their words until the transe begins, or no, it all started in a classroom. In a classroom where the origins of marketing and accountings were discussed, where it was stated that the first product which needed such arts was human being.

Slavery started the process of marekting and accounting because it started the big imbalance. One needs to count and promote his/her (only adding the feminine for the sake of it, I doubt any slave dealer was a woman) production. Production being nothing else than a surplus, an overflooding that needs to be gotten rid of. In capitalism I mean the world we live in, where every mind is monopolised by a system, there can be no argument against the fact that since the seventeenth century capitalism has started to rule everything, and eventually produced the world we live in. I do not mean it as a school of thoughts or a discourse (though it is also all that) but as a matter of fact, as the situation, but not as the only possible situation, or the logical one, and this is where I want to lead you dearest reader.

It is a tale of imbalance and monstruosity, a thirst that never goes out, but mainly it is a tale of theft. Taking men and women from Africa to bring them into America was also a magical trick consisting in taking human beings and transforming them into numbers. For every shipping, it is a well known fact that only 70, 60, or 50 per cent of product will not make it to the other shore. How would numbers matter? The infamy is that they are, turning soul and body and mind into a numerical figure, into the percentage of probable deaths, into the number of guards and whips needed, into a price. This magic is commonly called stealing, that is depriving a thing from its value to take possession of it for free. The biggest imbalance that could ever be, the most hideous metamorphosis, of turning a man into a coin. After such a theft, and such a profit, the cliff was dug and needed more sacrifices. Words like growth, per capita income, importations, are legacies of this first event.

To fill the cliff, they threw more men, lands, even nations in it. They had to perpetuate the imbalance by depriving others. Colonisation took place, forced labour, exportation of goods, ethnocides of the native Americans, of so many others I am ashamed not to quote. When the world was filled and therefore the cliff was not receiving as much, they started eating each other. Wars created the imbalance needed. Destruction and crimes created a new gap that had to be filled with cement and food, and capitalism could go on. The fall of the last bareers and nations in front of capitalism, in the end of the last century, provided new markets to fill, new money to make. Now the exploitation of men and land throughout the world brings more back.
The imbalance perpetuates itself in the price you pay, for you do not pay for the land that has been dug, the people that have been expelled, the blood of the worker that has been poored, and what could pay for this anyway? You only pay for the cunning of the one who could organise such a magic trick, and of course you pay for them to make you believe there is no trick. You yourself pay evey day by giving a pound of flesh to capitalism, by working, and most of all, by believing that here lies hapiness, stealing away your energy, your years, your hapiness, and eventually even the thought of other possible ways to truly achieve hapiness.
Imagine someone robbing your neighbour's house and offering to sell you their tv for half the price you would pay at a store, would you buy it? Now imagine it is not your neighbours that have been robbed but the soil of Brazil, oranguntans in Sumatra, farmers in India, bees in Poland, would you buy the set? And when you are surrounded by signs praising the set, when it is sold in a friendly environment, with pictures of nature and smiling average joes, when your hapiness has been described as possessing such a set from your very birth, when any other form of hapiness is described as being against the common good, or namely human rights, when the theft is hidden or described as nature or how the things are supposed to be. May I introduce the wonderful, the magical, the one and only, capitalism. The inequity and imbalance have to go on, and that is precisely what the priests ask when they call for more growth, more productivity, more incomes. The only question that will remain is to know how long a snake can keep on eating its own tail?

The sacred and profane, the ceremonies of the ancients have been turned to stupidity and anachronicism. Indeed, who is righteous acting in the manner I describe when others turn to the world, the land, the animals, to thank them, to fear them, after they have taken what they need to eat and dress? The harmony that rituals and spirituality try and achieve is precisely the opposite of the concensus needed by capitalism, it is its perfect antithesis, and as such, has to appear as foolish and useless. Science has to decode everything and prove there is no mystery left standing, for us to go on in the way we have chosen and built, narrowing the scope of knowledge to what we can observe and understand, very little indeed. The fear of a storm, of dark woods, and of what lies in the attic when we are asleep are but clues that we are disdaining the sound of the world and barricading ourselves in rationality, while everything tells us not to do so.
But here too, we have found new myths, myths that we can cope with and contain, serial killers and man made disasters, so that we forget about the old ones, so that we are never tickled by the memory of the corpse under the bed we sleep on. I fear the werewolves in the moor, I fear the vampires in the hills, I fear the things from the sea in the little ports, I fear the succubes in the river, and I am grateful for this, for I fear the most to learn what my children will fear.