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(3)
Spring where I live is a cold and wet affair, but the plants seem
to love it: they're thriving. The branches of saplings,
plumed now with masses of bright, green leaves, crowd against my arms
and legs as I walk through the woods over by the cemetery. The
sloping sides of the gully are lush with myrtle; moss spreads thick
and spongy over the water-logged trunks of fallen trees. I'm
enchanted by the sight of all this burgeoning life; refreshed,
invigorated, empowered. Then, one day, when I reach the creek
at the gully's bottom, I notice that somebody's painted graffiti on
several of the boulders lying there. Nature of course doesn't
care, is not even aware of the small act of transgression that's
been committed – but it angers me. It disrupts my aesthetic
appreciation of the woods, the only place I have left within walking
distance that remains untouched by human hands, that is still "wild"
to any degree. Another day I'm walking there and I hear a group
of teenagers nearby – whether the same ones who sprayed the graffiti
or not I don't know. "Hey!" one of them shouts to
another. "Your hand just touched my ass! What are ya,
a fuckin' faggot? . . . Well, whad'ya touch my ass for then?
Ya fuckin' faggot!" These words spit out with just a little
too much venom to be dismissed as mere play. I spend a whole hour
that day trying to find one spot in the woods out of earshot so that
I can sit and rest a little – without success. Wherever I
go, it seems that the gang of kids is always nearby. The time I
spend alone in the woods is the only time I have when I feel
genuinely at peace. But such moments will, I know, be denied
to me more and more often as the season progresses and the number of
people to be found in the woods grows.
Leaving the cemetery one day I see a woman slowly driving her car
along one of the narrow winding roads. As I approach her she
peers out at me from behind a window rolled partway down.
"What are you trying to do?" she asks, looking
straight at me. I stare back at her, bewildered.
"Huh?" is all I can think of to say. She eyes
me steadily, suspiciously, for several long seconds, then turns away
and starts talking to someone else, a passenger sitting beside her
in her car. "What am I trying to do?" I repeat
confusedly as she drives away, and though I realize by now that she
must have been speaking to her friend, not me, I feel rather shaken
by her words all the same. Once again dream and reality have
overlapped. The woman's appearance before me at this point in
time has been something more than merely coincidental, of that I
feel certain: she was speaking to me. I turn the
woman's question over and over in my mind as I make my way home.
"What am I trying to do?" I ask myself. "What
am I trying to do?" I have no answer. I realize
that I no longer really know.
One night, lying awake in bed far into the wee hours, I snap.
I need to sleep, and cannot; and I'm feeling panicky about it because
I know that, without sleep, I'll be tired and morose all the next day
at work. It's raining outside and so both my cats are in, but
they're restless; they wander my tiny apartment, caterwauling and
scrapping. I cannot think straight, and yet I can't stop myself
from thinking; I'm desperate for sleep, but cannot find the necessary
lull in my own self-induced tempest to sink down into it. Suddenly,
I bury my face into my pillow and begin to scream. I scream –
and then find, to my horror, that I'm unable to stop. My hands
turn into pummeling fists; my feet beat against the mattress:
I throw a regular temper tantrum of frustration! When I do
manage to stop, finally, and lift up my face again, I am amazed.
I cannot pretend, even to myself, that that tantrum had been a willful
act. I'd simply lost control: for the space of a few seconds,
I had been, quite literally, mad, bonkers, my mind unreigned and
galloping, a shriek in the dark. Snap.
There is no one to pity me. If there is no one to pity me,
perhaps it is because I do not deserve pity. There is no one to
comfort me. If there is no one to comfort me, perhaps it's
because comforting is not what I need. Frustration and despondency
are emotions I decide to regard as no more than a self-indulgence, a
sign of laziness as opposed to distress. This they must
be, or else I lose all hope. If my psychological disarray serves
any useful purpose, I think it is only this: to demonstrate just
how valueless the process of self-analysis really is. Sometimes,
crawling into bed at night, I feel a sense of depression so crushing
that there is no other recourse than to wad myself up and throw me
away, like a scrap of old paper. I close everything down:
my mind – my emotions – everything.
The cause of my depression lies partly in ignoring my own experiential
existence in favor of an analysis of that existence; partly too it
lies in the anger I feel towards humans in general: their
incompetence; their ignorance and their arrogance, particularly as it
manifests in their abusive, exploitative treatment of nature and of
nonhuman animals. Yet I too am complicit in that exploitation,
however unwillingly: I have long been aware that suffering
exists all around me, though never realizing the enormity of
that suffering, nor fully comprehending just how thoroughly it was
disregarded; neither had I foreseen just how profound would be
my guilt once I came to fully understand the implications of its
continuance, and of my involvement in it. I cannot help but
be part of this world, and so cannot help but take part in the
transgressions committed in it . . .
DEATH CHANT
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Because I am me
Because I am who I am
Because I was born to be who I am
Because you have made me who I am
I will tell you this story
I will plead with you to listen to me
I will pound at the dirt under feet
I will shout these angry words in your face
You are the rogue children
You must be brought to heel
You disobey the Great Mother
You must be brought to heel
Nature is the Great Mother
Nature is the only god
But this you do not understand
The Great Mother is wounded
The Great Mother is pissed
But this you do not understand
Nature is more than merely human
Nature is the feral beast
But this you do not understand
Nature will destroy you
Yet the destruction will come by your own hand
But this you do not understand
This you do not understand
Because I am me
Because I am who I am
Because I was born to be who I am
Because you have made me who I am
I will tell you death's story
I will chant you death's chant
Because you do not understand
Because you do not understand |
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