pathetik

Do not let yourself feel. Do not let it out. Contain it. Suppress it. Push it down. Find pathways for it to flow. Pathways deemed appropriate. Normal. Do not let it seep out your pores. Do not let the stench of your feelings fill the air. Keep them inside. Contained. Controlled. Let others pull them out of you. Let the TV solicit the emotional response you’ve been waiting to feel for so long. Do not feel. Do not move your soul.

It scratches. It itches. It builds. It accumulates at the corners, in the recesses. It drifts in empty corridors, meshing with other stragglers, aimless feeling.

Keep it in. Move mechanically. Do not move naturally. Do not scream. Do not yell or shout and breath that sigh in the middle of class that releases the weight of this bullshit world from your interiors. Composure. Rigidity. Squeeze it down. Love the suffering. Love the suffering you see in others. Love the suffering you inflict on yourself. Embrace the cruel pleasure of censuring yourself, of self censorship. Let the other automatons spout their regurgitated responses into the air. Nod acceptingly. Their fate is not yours. Keep it down. Cool it off. Until the fire is but a coal.

It grabs at the insides, it rips at the corners of your body and pulls together with the weight of a fading star, a collapsing hole. A hole started by others. A hole getting deeper by our own doing. Let it fester. Let the darkness draw in the dark creatures that scuddle and scurry.

Do not let yourself feel. Do not let it out. Do not fill the hole with your own devices, your own preponderances, your open opinions, your own love. There is none of that in the hole. Let the hole get bigger and darker and more all encompassing.

Suffering is a sadness we keep close. We learn to love the sadness, and we call it names like “poignant” or “nostalgic” or “so true”.

God— it is like saran wrapping the insides with cellophane. Artificially cloistering in the flow of blood and oxygen and life. The brain numbs.

Do not let it out. Do not. Do not let it feel. Do not feel. Control. Maintain composure. Domestication isn’t so bad. We can be our own master.

But I don’t want to master myself. I want to master others. I want to master this world. I want to dominate my will onto the world. I don’t need the law, its fabricated fixes, its language, its punishments for acts of “negligence” lacking “accountability” and “responsibility”. What are these words? I did not coin them. What acts of mine ever lack such qualities? I am whole.

It begs to squeeze through the door frame, through the window panes, the flues, the sweeps. It wants to escape. Its nervous humor, even at its most domesticated state, like a dog performing tricks. The reward is approval. Their nervous laughter. Do I need approval to authentic my will? My being?

It is nervous. It is anxious. It boils. It swarms and swirls and twists and tightens into knots and explosions that implode over and over again. The feeling. The being. The emotion. The passion, the ability to feel with abandon, with wings, without gravity.

Set it down. Become your own gravity.

The culture is too massive. Its norms, its practices, its linguistic conventions. If you say it right, do it right, act it right: are you right? I believe you are wrong. You liar. You scoundrel. Appealing to everyone else’s good. And you call it survival. You call it the game. The cards. The deck. You drunken fool. Where are your cards? What are your rules to the game? You pathetic cheater. You cheat yourself. The house always wins. Do not gamble with the house. I never gamble but on myself. Deal the cards to others. You design the rules. If you can feel.

Looking right. Acting right. Speaking right. Texting right. Oh no you didn’t. You didn’t just say that. You didn’t just give me that look. All pathetic. All wasted fakes.

There is nothing genuine. There is no gold. There is no gold. No gold. No shimmer. No shine. Everyone is a copy. Printed by the machine. Dull. Crumpled. Lifeless. Weightless. No gold.

Do not let it feel. Do not feel. Do not let it shine. Do not let it seep out your pores.

We’ve censored ourselves. We are animals. Devoid of thought. Devoid of feeling. We defer to words. Empty, meaningless, ancient words. And pop culture trash. The fleeting. The temporal. Like our lives. Our empty lives.

There is no need to censor when a society has learned to censor itself. There is no need to ban books when society has no imagination.

There is no revolt. There is no individual. There are farms. Factories. Schools. Duplication. Replication. Cast from the same mold. The same material. No gold.

You do not understand me. You do not understand what I am doing. I am trying to live. Trying to manipulate myself out from under the game. Trying to escape through the barbwire. Through burrows. And tunnels. I’m trying to escape the god awful monotony. I’m trying to scream at the top of my own voice. My voice. With my own god damn song. Original. Not casted.

Keep it in. Hold it down. Breath it out. Let the feeling subside. Let it dwindle.

You cannot wake a sleeping herd. They will interpret it as only a bump in their dreams. They will not see the sword at their throat, pleading with them to wake from their abysmal slumber, their trance, their march into the houses of slaughter.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. The signs and symbols are not real. Your feelings are not real. They are too domesticated. Too dead. Too lifeless. Too controlled. We are wild. Civilized? What is civilization? The art of control, the art of homo domestication. Herding humanity. What a task. I want to be the shepherd of my own flock. I do not want to roam in your pastures with my sheep, I do not want to pay you a token of gratitude. I am not a sheep. I am a shepherd. I am a master. Not of my self. Of my world.

Do not feel. Squeeze it down. Drink it down. Numb it with textbooks. Numb it with abstract associations. Rub it and smother it with overwhelming fumes of rotting consciousness.

There is no free will. There is no novelty. The master is the creator. The master puts things into existence. Into the heart. He elicits feeling with the whip, of disapproval, of punishment, of justice.

The drunken herds. Unintelligently squealing about in the mosh pits. Oblivious to their pig stench. The lights and sounds saturate the senses, overwhelm the mind. We cram, and we push, and we shove material in our minds, codes, conduct, names, cause and effect. Then we toss fuel on top and light it up. Watch it burn. Douse the senses in alcohol and revel in the flames.

We long to escape the burden. The beastly burden. But we are unintelligent. And only sheep. Only cattle. So we make sheep noises. We get together and howl.

The approval. The disapproval. We judge others because we judge ourselves. If only we would be kinder to others. We might save ourselves so much pain.

The pathetic imagination. The weak hearts. The fallow, callow minds. Over run with fingers, with people plowing and planting as they wish, stripping us of any original worth.

The god damn noises. The cacophony of noise. We bombard ourselves with music so that we don’t have to hear ourselves. We are tired of our conscience, that terrible tyrannical master, the master that’s been trained so well by others, by their approval. It is a disease, this conscience is. This form of self enslavement. The self litigating, self censorship. We plug the feeling. We stifle the streaming thought. We remain passive. Waiting to be pushed. The well trained elicit the appropriate reaction.

I have pretended to be a sheep for too long. I have worn the masks. I have camouflaged myself in the dense thicket of other dead bodies. Lifeless. I am tired of pretending. To be a robot. An automaton. A mechanical creature. A computer. A calculator. I am will. I am being. I am a god mighty force. I am wholly original, wholly wild, wholly revolting.

They let me into their home so I can shit on their carpets. That is what I propose to do in the grandest of these cultural cathedrals. I am not a creature to be tamed. I am much more cunning than those other limp sheep who simply kick and create commotion. No. I am clever, genius, conniving. I am smarter than the master.

The master will pay me to slit his throat. That is what the Caesars, the Caligulas, the Phillips, the ancient giants had learned. That duty is not a duty if it comes from my will. You ingenuine creature, Marcus Aurelius. Fake. Poser. He acted on a stage he did not believe himself to really possess. A duty. Our will is not a duty. Our being is not a duty. Our propensity to look at the world and exert our opinion, our influence, is not a duty to be shouldered. It is the greatest luxury on earth. And you accepted it, humbly? You are not man. You are a domesticated animal, trained to exemplify behaviors edifying to the masses, by a group of stoic scholars steeped in their stoa, a few minds that collaborated to manipulate the world to see from their eyes. And you cheated yourself of your own sight.

Humility. Empathy. All disgusting. In war, in battle, in life or death: there is none of these. There is no room for anything but sheer, unadulterated power, straight from the will, the depths of the heart that screams survival at the top of its lungs.

Keep it in. Keep it together. Stay composed.

I know how to do it right. Act it right. Take the tests. Get into the best. Smile for the best. Sport the best. Compete with the best. When competition is imitation, life becomes a charade. A playful dance, an act, a theatrical spectacle. There is no more carnage. No brutal, unadulterated will. No authenticity. No autonomy. The rules. The game. Pathetic. The rules are rigged. The house always wins. In war, the most cunning, the most intelligent, the most subversive, the most brutal survive. In life, it is the same.

So we have theatrics. Life has become a spectacle. The gods liked it this way. A group of self entertaining sheep. How wonderful a spectacle? I can think of none better.

Except when a sheep takes off the blindfold. Sees the game. And stabs each of his comrades in pity, in savagery. And turns on the gods.