Category: The Early Years (page 1 of 2)

Raid police have entered our campus. Marches have retaliated, cleared stomping grounds for tents and free food, sometimes shouting angry, sometimes naked, and always with a hint of rouge. A generation of squares has passed into leadership, an Ominous X, and now knitted squares arise, trying to cut out a history for the people, for the Generation Why.

“But this is not my place. I am not from here. I do not speak the language here, nor do I understand its history. This simple business transaction between myself and the University must not be sidetracked by local politics.”
Look around you, what does your bubble consist of if not the people of the City? Where are you free to go? Only where you have been before? Alas, the present fantasy..

As a generation of students, we are tech-dependent: our ventricles palpitate from the technological tentacles of various life-enhancing machines:

Streamfeeds, surfing on Chrome like a cosmic superhero, StumblingUpon Operas, or into Safaris. Webcrawling through an alert hive-mind, arguing, discussing, laughing, learning, making connections, breaking barriers, reshaping and rethinking, and always, always editing. Even in our sleep, we map pathways in our minds to make the stars align, or to redefine the symbols and signs of our times. We no longer rest, tired and rewired, yet still feeling blessed.

But, the power of this generation, this embryo cannot be harnessed until the foetus accepts that it is no longer in vitro, but fully grown. An amniotic sea change is required, when the egg will hatch, and a new age will be born. And this era shall be marked not by differences of age or experience, or of generation, or of race, colour, creed! No! Those are the scars of the annals of history, bygone pages of ragged civility, that must not be reopened, for we can access a power far beyond ourselves, if we would only merge our minds, without the limitations of ego.

Humanity has fled the trees of knowledge from which we evolved to the sprawling space-like dimension of the synapse structure and we are carried by the shoulders of giants through it, already gingerly dipping our toe into the Red Planet. Scanning it. Planning escape from the possible destruction of our race.

Indeed, these are ill times and I have seen far too many students walking in the eye of the storm, and complaining about the inferior quality of their manufactured shoelaces, because they were worried about the risk of an unexpected stumble, of a scraped knee, while the foundation of our species, and of our societies, is picked apart by the wind. Literally.

The planet is fermenting, like rot, and releasing waves upon waves of heat: pure chaotic energy. Humanity’s strict requirement for rigidity and structure has untethered the tides of the Earth.

An imbalanced geostasis, all for roads to nowhere, symbolic infrastructure, and destructive technology, and now the wheel of entropy spins out of control.

And regression occurs in times of tension, and fundamentalism emerges as a threat, a sociological, psychological terror that preys upon our doubts and upon our fears. And the stories just get stranger and stranger. The inconsistencies of 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror”, Project MKUltra, the use of scopolamine in the Colorado shooting (the Devil’s Breath), the LIBOR scandal, the ever-silent media oligarchy, the BP oil spill, Plan Nord, Goldman Sachs immunity. These all affect YOU. We are citizens of the World now, and it’s time we recognize that.

Over the year, some have seen and participated in the buzz-buzz-buzz of the hornet’s nest, others have listened to their friends and planned ahead, and still others have sheltered themselves from the throbbing vein of politics and power that steadily injects adrenaline and ill-begotten vitamins into the City and into the University. But all have felt the need for change, the tender vibrations of our species suffering, quelled beneath the tools that would give us freedom, if we only looked at the horror of our times with honesty.

We are an international university, so what are your politics when they come knocking at the door? Or when they provide the ground beneath your floor? Are they mine, or theirs, or yours?

Come, let us clog these streets with Democracy.
Let us grind the gears of our city to a halt,
with rust or sand or salt,
for the oily pitch of greed will set fire to our society.
Let us defend the last trees, in the last parks,
and peacefully organize:
bee-hive petition drives,
and ant-agonize those who would wield weapons for Liberticide,
with gasmasks plastered against our sweating skin and sea-wide eyes.
Bring mirrors and martyrs,
and songs and dance,
to remind the textbook-tweaking technocrats
and the plebeian police
that power burns to ash
quicker than a star’s collapse.
Sing the slogans of peace that provisionally linger,
like the harbingers of jailed journalists,
the ghetto echo behind the Great Firewall,
the whimpering of whispering whistleblowers,
the wi-fi televised riots,
the groans of our climactic climate,
the hockey-stick off-the-charts
and my heart, bless me, my heart.
It won’t stop beating so hard.
I care so much for people, it hurts to see them unequal
and set apart.
We are living in Orwell’s sequel,
but instead of a boot stamping on a human face, forever,
modern oppression mines our metadata until we surrender.
The devil is in the details and
I have read about a lot of demons.
I remember The MKUltra endeavour
willed by McGill’s own Dr. Cameron
to riddle and rattle students’ brains
with sensory deprivation and LSD,
to provide the CIA
with a manual
on how to scramble
rotten eggs.
Or do you remember when the bank HSBC
paid slap-on-the-wrist fees
to U.K.’s State attorneys,
so they could continue laundering the Sinaloa cartel’s
mockery of Mexican democracy?
Now, in the land of the Free,
dark money from Koch Industries
lines the pockets of the GOP,
who push fervently for the TPP
while calling it a harmless free trade treaty.
Truly, Empires have existed since the beginning of History.
Only now, they achieve victory through demands for “state secrecy”.
Some even employ economic hit men who sell fish-hook loans
so they can bankrupt and buy countries bearing the load
of land-filled landscapes
littered with warlords’ regrets
over ill-begotten toxic debts.
And if those fiscal fishers miss their markets,
jackals and juntas
or spies and spooks will disappear dissidents in the night.
O! What a tale to tell those marines
who fuel those machines of military might –
fighting the good fight.
So let us clog these streets with capital “D” democracy.
Let us sympathize with the pencil-pushing police
who must swallow pugilistic decrees
and smile the whole while
that we are all processed
like only so much meat.
So,
when we, the public, reconvene on the street,
we may sleep,
knowing the inner belly
of our city
is
well-fed
with all this
soylent
green
to eat.

By Michael Cody Clarke

Standing still, speaking to you, poised in my posture, I spin slightly askew, upon an axis, grounded by gravity while circling the sun in a solar system that spins slightly askew, transfixed betwixt glutinous galaxies which twist amidst orbits of other planets, stars, and gases, and I think, What happens when I die?
Will my cells stop being friends?
Will my saliva become simply slime?
Will any single part of my body
even remember that it once was mine?

My poor simian brain bends until it breaks when I try to grasp the stakes of my existence. My pinprick millisecond. My firefly flicker. I know my life is shorter than a baby’s breath when compared to time’s true depth and yet, and yet, I cannot help but become upset or feel regret.

But if everything changes all the time then that must include my mind. If every cell in my body is replaced then some thoughts must die. So every so often I ask myself, Who am I?

I never would have thought that I could become a stranger to myself until the night I realized that I was alive while in my dreams.

The freedom of fantasy was silky and smooth beneath my feet and I felt,
for the first time in my life,
the absence of friction.
With my senses censored,
I fell. I fell, and I fell,
and I did not know if the ground was rising up to meet me, or whether the sky was falling upon my shoulders,
or whether I was slipping between the lines, to meet the space which lies within the space which lies within the space.

And when I woke, with my eyes darting wildly behind the curtains of my mind,
it was into yet another dream.

But this time, with borders and barriers, straight edges and hard-staring, downcast eyes, and all the birds were caught upon a wire, warped and barbed.
And I laughed. I laughed, and I laughed, and I thought to myself,
“I’ll never make it out alive.”
And when the sun finally shone upon my face,
and I felt the soreness in my limbs from having slept with a spun spine,
and I felt my bladder bulge within me, I turned upon my back, stared at the lampshade and wondered
whether my mind would liberate me with its dreams or ensnare me with its nightmares.

I left my life behind then to seek refuge in an old-growth forest.
Et un sapin triste m’a dit que la planète est fatiguée avec tout le monde.
And a snake eating its tale told me that the end times were near.
While a buried pinecone prayed for fire, I wept.

For indeed, the Sun had crashed into the horizon, setting the world ablaze. And to save me from the flames, the forest floor closed in upon itself and swallowed me into its womb.

There was no scream. No shock or protest with my sudden burial. This moment had been in the background of all my dreams so how could I be afraid?
I was absorbed into the soil and my exhalations were swallowed by the fires raging overhead.

And amidst the ashes of a crumbling ego
There was peace.
And there was silence.
And time stretched onward.
And as the molecules of my matter traded places with the surrounding space,
and as this trade took place with the space that surrounds the space surrounding the space, I dissolved.
I dispersed like a dying sun, traveling to distant galaxies where memory could no longer serve me.
And yet, and yet, I spoke as myself without having an entity.
And the Universe spread itself before me, until the end of eternity.

FIN

by Michael Cody Clarke
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