Revolution in My Mind

The USSR deserved to live.  There are so many things that I wish had never happened, like the entire year 1989 for instance, or New Years Day 1992 – when the moneymen came and took everything.  God damn why did it have to end like that? A bunch of backroom deals by mafia-sponsored yes men – choking and strangling a dream seventy years in the making – and the motherland that had smashed Hitler was nothing more than a memory.  What if Lenin, dead drunk from drearyhead, had stumbled from his tomb on that fatal day and said “WAIT...don’t do it” – would anyone have listened? Could two decades of misery, meltdown, decay and terror have been avoided? Even better, he could have dragged Boris Yeltsin down into his tomb and ate him up – though I doubt his liquor filled carcass would have tasted all that good.

Lenin

Good intentions are not enough.

What do you do? When the world around you is twisted and tainted, when the most hellish injustice passes before your wandering eyes, nourishment for the beast whose hunger has no end: beggars, thieves, filthy factory barracks, 3 year olds whose only toys are the lethal cogs and spinning wheels of iron machines, whose waking nightmare dreams carry them across the deathly jungle of the factory floor and into the cracks and crevices that mark the haggard, guilt-ridden, broken faces of their mothers.

Innocence is no defence against the hounds of hell and cold streets swallow the prisoners of the night: child prostitutes who sell their bodies to the unwashed crowds – draining the excess lust of an oppressed people until its irrepressible raging consumes their flesh, snaps their bones, and leaves them done to death in a broken stairwell or a dirty back alley – their bodies, limbs, the organic tools of life itself, fuel for the cities medical schools as they teach their students how to save the arms and legs of those who can afford the price of living.

What do you say to cold eyes, lonely eyes, angry eyes, sad eyes, dead eyes? What is left for you to be?
For once you know you can never go back.

The ghosts of reality will never leave you alone; plunging at you in your sleep and gnawing at the edges of your dreams.  Tranquil boyhood homes transformed into citadels of lies – beautiful green fields, rushing streams and warm breezes screaming with the desperate cruelty of distended bellies gorged on clay.

What is left, trapped in darkness, trapped in hell, except to be the vanguard of the new dawn, the light to the hopeless, a living symbol of who they can be, a living hammer breaking living chains? What is left but to be a man?

What is left, in a world where 99.9% of politicians are bastards and self-serving criminals, except to have the courage to stand among that 0.01% who call themselves revolutionary leaders? To stand amongst those who have cast themselves into the fire, crossed the threshold into endless struggle, sacrificed privilege and comfort in the name of a dream they may never see fulfilled.  To throw oneself, in terror, into the unknown; navigating storm-tossed seas in search of new lands just barely visible on the far horizon and shrouded by enough reefs and shoals to make any sane man turn back.  But the revolutionary leader is no martyr, no willing sacrifice upon that bloody political altar that eternally thirsts for the blood of the ambitious.

No, he is there to win!

An elder brother swinging from the hangman’s noose, a grieving mother, a naive bunch of idealists, a broken tribe of assassins, a shattered lonely Parisian commune that could never get its shit together, Spanish anarchists ground into dust because they refused to stand together against a pathetic, ill-disciplined, government army that could barely crawl let alone walk! This time we’ll walk a different way.

No, he is not here to play the martyr!

For there is only one thing that the living can do for the dead, one thing that can sooth the pain of those alive but barely living, those standing yet barely walking, those working yet barely surviving, those broken yet yearning to be whole again.  One thing! And that is to win, and to keep winning; to form up lines and never break them; to achieve the unthinkable because the organization is unshakable.

So when you ask, why won’t he let you give a dissenting opinion? He will respond that your dissenting opinion means more dead children, more tiny hands shackled, more tiny hearts with no love, and more tiny brains uneducated.  Why does he dislike debate? Because there is no time.  Why is he such a hard ass? Because enough is enough.  Why is he so damn authoritarian? Because without discipline we lose and losers don’t make revolutions.  There’s only one way out of hell: we can’t afford to be innocent and we can’t afford to play nice when our playmates are devils and fiends.

The greatest of warriors are born with the taste of injustice on their tongues and in a shackled land, Russian Simbirsk spawned a Spartacus.  But he knows in his righteous might that he is nothing but a symbol, an inspiration, an organizer – for the people make revolution just as gods are made through the looking glass of oppressed eyes burning with a secret power, a strength that was never thought possible amid the rubble of crushed dreams.  But now the impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin born anew.

A life runs over with hopes, fears, exile and return – and finally fire sweeps the land and from hell the revolutionary rises like the spring wind sweeps away the dust of winter beneath an April sun.  And the world hears a cry fifty years in the making.  The streets rebound to marching feet, the creaking of open gates and the beckoning of a million hands as dark clouds begin to break upon the anvil of history. Statues and old gods shatter as the child looks up from the oppressive spinning of the power loom to the sound of distant thunder rebounding from pavements watered in blood and the voices of a risen people. Ten days that shook the world! New words rise with the dawn and echo though time and space: “My name is Vladimir, I am the revolutionary, and I am here to win!”The impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  In autumn’s ashes a new man and a new world is born.  Bright eyes stare into the future that stretches on endlessly.

Human Nature - How we are adapted for Communism

It is time that we faced reality and understand what is at the root of the psychological and spiritual alienation we face amid the fast-paced and ruthlessly competitive environment of the modern capitalist society.  In the 1960s, the scientist Desmond Morris described how the “human animal” built for life as a hunter-gatherer, has imprisoned himself in the gilded cage of the modern city where intimacy is fleeting and where no one knows his name.  Recently the famed geneticist Spencer Wells described how much more “natural” it felt living amongst the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania compared with the “crazy” life he was used to back in urban America.  David Suzuki has described how, in the face of impending catastrophes like global warming, humanity’s only salvation would be to re-capture our ancestors’ ability to live in harmony with nature in sustainable communities.  Many other scientists have said similar things but have failed to draw the obvious conclusions: the fact that for more than 90% of humanity’s 150,000 year history, human beings effectively lived in self-sustaining nomadic and semi-nomadic groups according to communism’s founding principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.  Suzuki and other scientists are implicitly arguing the same thing Marx did: that our only hope for a better future lies in bringing the virtues of our distant past into the modern age.

So Many Poets...

So many poets spend so much time talking, rapping, writing about openness, love, the primal need to be as one with the world, with nature, and with other people.  They light up the room and their audience’s hearts with glowing phrases urging them to embrace life in all its diverse aspects.  To those who stop and listen they appear as lost messiahs for a species that has lost its way and wanders in dark places.

But so many poets are so vulnerable.  So when the slightest discomfort comes to them and when fear races through their mind and anxiety thunders through their bloodstream the lessons they impart to the world evaporate all too easily – blown away on a wind that is not blowing.  Fine words are replaced with walls and loving words with hatred as they crucify the transgressor who has dared to trespass in their eminent domain.

They do not know what it is like to live their dreams – so they hurt each other: Pain replacing pleasure and wisdom sinking into the sands of time like a weary shipwreck survivor.  And all I can ask is why? But that’s not the hardest part.

The hardest part is that I DO know.  You see when you responded to my affection with an “emphatic piss off” I was wounded and if I had been 18 at the time it would have taken all my willpower to stop me from falling to the floor crying – how could someone be so cruel? But 26 year olds better understand the tragedy of having the face every day with a marketable facade, face every stranger or ex-lover with deadly suspicion, and the need to pre-emptively hurt others to avoid being taken advantage of – in short, we know what society demands from us.

So I was wounded, a cut opened in the scar tissue around my heart and I bled but it was the words of a far better poet than me that saved me then: “I wish I could tell him that I love him”, “Gotta make love, and remake love...reincarnate love”, “That’s what love’s like...that’s what it was...what it is...what it will be...that’s what love’s like.” And the passion of those lines, the blood from my wounds and the defiance of my spirit poured forth into three words, your hostile message countered by that deepest yet simplest phrase: “I love you.”

They Say Perspective is Everything...

They say perspective is everything.  To her I was just one of many.  To me she was as radiant as the sun standing out in a crowd: a woman who held me in her arms and told me that she loved me.  Too many men are afraid to express just what that means to them: what it feels to be so close to another human being, another heart, another mind, another soul, flesh caressing flesh and bone caressing bone.  Two living creatures in the highest state of togetherness, where all clichés collapse and where no words exist to cloud our minds as the senses bask in primal overflow.

But they say perspective is everything and what to me felt like the most Holy Communion with that most secret and powerful mysteries of the human spirit, you saw as a tidal wave of sin and corruption, revelling in this island of debauchery we had made together: our own half-acre of hell that was in reality nothing more than two people exploring the deeper roots of harmony.  What’s so sinful about a force of nature?

They say perspective is everything but one thing was true: for all our differing perspectives, like your fantasies demanded, I wanted to stay in that bed with you for three whole days until we were so on fire that we would rise together like a pair of phoenixes – purified by the flames of our pyre until our corruption was reduced to ashes.  And during that time I would show you the true meaning of endurance until our mortal frames could take no more and we would collapse into the burning embrace of the inferno we had made.

If only I could have shown you what it is like to burn.  Maybe then your perspective would have changed.  Maybe then you would still be here tonight.

Expanding Circles

My whole life I have been spinning in circles: Confined by the orbits of confidence and the downward spirals of fear, shaped by the seasonal cycles of expansion and contraction as I face a world that sometimes appears to be spawned from nightmares.

The circle always starts small, from the warm wet comfort of the womb to the fenced in kindergarten playground I was afraid to leave in case those “big kids” were hungry that day.  It echoes from the mind of a frightened kid who longed to be knight in shining armour so no bully would ever mess with him again to the 23 year old man who had trouble making that first scared step through the door of an airplane.

From grade school to high school to university; from the family to humanity, this world is often terrifying.  For who can tell what lies ahead, through the next set of doors or around that next corner? It could be love or hate, a mentor or a bully, a true friend or a liar, a beautiful relationship or a broken heart.  It’s hard, because you never know what to expect when you walk down that next street or into that next room.  What will you find? Pain? Joy? Something so unforgettable that it leaves a permanent blessing or scar? Or something so dull and boring that you want to tear your hair out and scream for mercy?

What choice do we have really? We either keep risking, keep reaching out, expanding, caring, loving, sharing, striving, dreaming, becoming...or we collapse in on ourselves, contracting into a hard shell, fortress walls we hide behind, shielding ourselves from a hostile world – a hostage who has built his own prison from the four walls of fear.  And I would be lying if I said that this world doesn’t scare me, but nothing compares with the terror I feel thinking about these dungeons of the mind.  I keep going because there is no love behind a castle wall, and there is only freedom in an expanding circle.

Bowling for Humans

You know it’s probably my fault...I’ve just never learned how to love.  And what am I doing here, sitting among people I seem to talk with endlessly but have never really met? I wonder if we’ll ever meet.  And really, how many people have I actually “met”? How many people have I really and truly “met” in the course of my life? How many people could I actually relate to as something more than a bag of bones, a face, a name, and a relatively short and meaningless conversation about...well, I don’t really remember, it was a long time ago.