Sunday 6 April 2014

We the Multitude


There was a video circulating, Russell Brand promoting his Messiah Complex tour concerning the likes of Malcom X, Ghandi, Che, Jesus Christ, esteemed company to be sure.
There he is with some of his mates who are outsiders, by which he means they live outside. And you can’t help but notice the raw exhuberance in how they all speak.
There is a part of me – it might be the best part – that wants to be one of those sidewalk prophets. Not a messiah. That would be overshooting. Unless it was like in Life of Bryan, one of those instances of unchecked humanity out there prosteletizing their idiosyncratic concerns to passerby. Even better, the relatively captive.
The video also reminded me of an article where a prominent leftist is admiring an anti-poverty activist for speaking to homeless people as if they were . . . I can’t remember what the word was. Middle classed? Important? Human? There really is no good way to end that sentence.
But it speaks to something. People (obviously) want to be the Russell Brand version of empassioned vision, not the one whose rants don’t resonate, whose poetry grates or goes unheard.
Really I can’t be either, lacking the bravery or whatever it is that overcomes fear, maybe it’s always just love. Whatever it is that lets you throw caution to any hostile wind that might to pick you up and spit you out or actually spit on you, as happens and worse, when you lack four walls made of something stronger than cardboard.
So for now I just keep it lyrical, grateful for the safety four walls afford.
 ~~~
We think of words as immaterial, not solid like pixel points or pillars of sedimented time or beaches breaking waves of migrants and tree rings.  
We are migrants and tree rings, our circles laughing in and out and in and out, pooling in cities, forever headed seawards.   
Notice how the grain grows both ways, how tensive plasma bands every colour, every nation into rythms of the same thing: this bubbling brood Creation           
We are the multitude, a seething, shifting lot of slaves and kings, huddled together in agonistic harmony, reigning down upon each other, wading through infernity.
Here, in this land where divine and earthly cities meet, the one shimmering in the other’s skin, our jangling nerves and rustling signs, small endings. All the perfect sum of myriad infections, our half lies.
In the beginning as in the end as it is now, practice tests truth and destiny’s manifest is a cross-hatch of chalk lines through carbon. Silkworm fragile, we are caught in its hairs. 
And it is a hard hot light, this beaming, beaconing human. 
posted by Aleks

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