Before I Write a Word … I Must Remember
Before I write a word… I must remember every movement of beginning. All the way back to the before of nothing at all. The beginning of beginnings. I must remember before darkness was darkness, before light was light, the birth of stars and waters. I must remember the secret, sacred promise. The source of sources. The beauty of beauties. The hope beyond all hope that shatters death and transforms despair to wings.
Before I write a word, I must recall to mind those who had no voice. The silenced. The murdered. The raped. Each creature who lived and died unsung, each prisoner. I must answer for every cage our people ever built, or spoke, or used to harm. I must recall to mind a time before cages. A justice true to every life and being. I remember the broken. Those were destroyed in starkest anonymity and despair. They who perished at the threshold, holding the key to liberation for all beings and places. The prisoners. The lost and the rejected. The outsiders. The tiny ones. And above all these, the animals and living beings, the living places of Earth. The agonies they have suffered at the hands of my people. The cavalier assassinations. The laughter as we slaughtered them, like idiots on fire within, like demon gods, like broken minds gone mad with machinated stupidity.
Before I write, I must remember every salmon at the waterfall. I must recall the dying forests, the oceans … now poisoned and irradiated… the waters beneath us, now filled with lethal poisons and radioactive waste. I must remember that my people now death-f*ck the Earth with great injection machines that lay waste to life in time’s own body of the future. I must remember that our nations are pretending quite openly that rape is a preferred mode of commerce and produces valuable ‘energy’. Before I write, I must see the children and animals crucified on the machine of parasites masquerading as heroes, teachers, protectors, advisers, and advancements.
Before my fingers move I must remember that the living libraries burned wholesale so that we can make billions of photographs or package videos about nature people flying through the air on cartoon monsters. So that we can worship them. So that we can die inside, while celebrating electronic fantasies. I must remember this. My computer is made from this. My keyboard stands for all these things. I must remember that the living world is being rendered down into little manipulable objects so that the demonic nightmare inside us will not feel threatened any more by actual nature, humanity, beauty, intelligence, wonder, dreaming, hope… or love. I must remember they will assassinate everything to make a picture of it.
Before I write I must recall that the electricity we move costs a billion birds per year. That science, war, and industry have pumped lethal poisons into every living organism on Earth. That each human body is now born and will develop having to carry the metabolic, relational, cognitive, and social damage we have imposed — without possibility of parole or escape. I must remember that there is no escape. No safe harbor. No cage unpoisoned. I must remember that we have traded little boxes lined with threats and absurdities for minds. Images for intimacies. Artifacts for intelligence. I must recall that we have forgotten what the alphabet is, and have no idea what the arts of language were or are… because we now have the methods instead. Machines can handle all of that for us. I must remember that machines will read everything many times now. And that children and adults will not be able to. I must remember rows and rows of endless graves … bursting forth inside my like fatal popcorn… sprouting in every ecosystem, human family, culture, mind, and future… I must remember.
Before I write I must remember to speak for the living places. The sky. To speak for the dead. All of history. I must remember the heroes and the suicides. Each one. Before I write, I ask them. I plead with them. To move my mouth and tell the most urgently beautiful medicine power. To tell the lightning and the hour. To sing with sacred power of fire and water dear, to take me among where the storms of truth rend possibility into being and hold me there until I am destroyed, remade, reminded, and recognized.
Before I write, I have to call to mind and soul the unheard voice of every child. Every mother. Each beat of their heart. Each pulse of their dream. Because every letter I inscribe is in their name, and for their sake. My mother’s heartbeat pulses yet within the impacts of my fingers. My grandmothers, a living fuse leading to the inceptions of life on Earth, are watching. Before I write, I must remember them. I must give them my hands, my heart, my dreaming necessity of dire need to speak their words to life once more.
Before I write, I remember the promise of the living truth beyond all words and wars. I recall to mind a family of miracles too profound to possibly imagine, let alone describe. I call to mind the exquisite gambits and gambles that brought our world and living hearts out from the ash and void of our origins. The magmic fury. The epic flows and rains, plagues and deserts. The endless oceans we have crossed between eternities and stars… simply to find this chance, this glowing, incredible, impossible chance. To become alive on a world too paradisaical for us to allow, to bear, to adore, to remember. A world so shockingly exquisite that we must burn it down entire, to the very bones of it, and ourselves with it… for the sake of machines, photographs, hatred, confusion, omnicide, xenophobia… and insecurity. I must remember that my people, born to challenge the angels themselves, have, in their terror of flight, leapt headlong into the pit. They are burning in the fierce and tangled flames of their certainties. Their words. Their shadows. That their guilt forces them to prosecute inquisitions against every beautiful, exquisite, intelligent living being, place, hope, dream… and mission.
Before I write, I must remember all that is most urgent. How to remind my people. How to speak for the dead and lost. The true, whose voices drown in the shouted advertisements of the lethal, the addictive, the seductive… the parasitic.
I must remember.
How to find the doors to awakening. Now. Before I write… I must remember.
The pulses of my fingers are not mine and never were.
They belong to you. They are my mother’s heartbeats. They belong the children. To the sky. To forever. Remember.
Together.
I must remember.
You.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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