Apart

"..and it's all falling apart..."

...I heard a woman complain, quietly, as my wife and I took a Sunday saunter in the half-cold, crossing a third of the city to land in a pub for a pint each, and blackened chicken.

We left for coffee and returned home on the heavy vapors of lukewarm beer.

We ate and drank at the only pub in town to regularly show rugby, football and soccer (yes, I put it that way you, you silly POMs). The place where the Aussie, British, Irish, Scot and English speaking European ex-pats all gather to drink warmish beer and watch grown men hug themselves and each other in a violent clutch to grab a ball.

The guy next to us sounded like he was cast right out of The Damned United. Shave headed and balding, crisp shirt, staples on the left side of his scalp, an inch or two above the ear. Staples. I assumed, rugby, which has its local aficionados; the lot of them gather there, planning for the Highland Games for half the year, sporting kilts and Hibernian patches for half of half of the other.

Manly reserve or dumb silence, and all eyes on a match between ManU and Bpool.

With a faceless voice in my head, ringing over and over again, pitched above the football commentary and the lewd jokes about loose girls left behind from another bar, the night before...

 "...and it's all falling apart..."

A tense voice, speaking words which sounded sincere, for all that I had neither face nor context in which to place them...

...I don't know about memes. I so no evidence for the theory. It think it laziness, mostly - the rich boy kind, not the wrath of sloth in protest. Memes are stupid. The word explains nothing - but yet, I had a facsimile of one, a figment of a fraud, doing subvocalizations in my throat, and therefore in my usually and gratefully empty head.

I don't like verbal thoughts. They all seem like lies.

But this repeated phrase did not strike me as a lie, or a self-deception- it does not, still and yet - and I find myself amused to continue wondering why.

An apprehension of a sudden, the moment I heard it, perhaps. An encased and wordless reply. Because I heard her say it, this woman whose face I did not see and for that fail to picture even now as I type, I being the sort who eschews imagination...

...I heard her say it, and mused back alone in my head, "Ayup. You've got the right of it."

And, abstaining from the desire to forget, begin to wonder.

Do we all feel it?

The fraying and fragmenting of familiar habits? The disruption of the algorithms of society? The breaking of patterns? The foreclosure on traditional traditions, and on new traditions all nouveau-riche and upstart bold?

I'd like to think so, but maybe it's only I.

Were it a different age, would more of us have noticed by now? I don't mean, you know, have felt the vaguey vague angst and anxiety of our overworked, distracted age. I mean, looked it straight on and taken note.

I think so, and have no proof.

But, but, but.

I sat there, in that pub for ex-pats from the dying Commonwealth, and all eyes were on the telly. And thinking about the words from a voice without a face, and shedding a learned passivity of thought, I pushed my own envelope just barely, just enough to seize a new thing from within, and pulling it out all wriggling and writhing, caught the whisper and hint of its name - a feeling in which I have found solitary comfort, but which now seems more universal, a condition equally obtuse and predicate: A community to which I have never before belonged, since I am at best an outcast, and more commonly a bad man and a monster.

We are, the lot of us, desperate.

And none more so than the powerful.

I have for as long as I've cared to care, attributed to power only its venality. It's a true thing, for all that its expressions and manifestations are less so, and often muddled and complex. A simple focus of the lens, then: the powerful take power because they want to have more, and keep it.

But, that's not really enough, is it?

The formula fails, because it forbids its own conclusions.

It elides the essential desire, the involvement of those parties concerned, their involvement with the very stuff of life, the matter and people they will to shape, and how and why they do it.

Because those who need power aren't just armoring up for the sake of some treasured enjoyments. No. They pay their staffers and they arm their captured minds because, in the end, it all falls apart and those who rise to the top, who claw their way through the shadows of human suffering, who can see others as instruments, who forget that we all die and that alone is a reason for kindness - those fuckers need something more. Don't they? Don't they.

They need order. Security. A shape to society. A habit of habits. They need the clock, the calendar and the scheduling app on their meticulously planned and built in devices.

They need to hold the world together, these general managers of the universe.

They need to believe that the lines and grids of their truest true religion - a voyeurism devoted to the everlasting hatred of decay -  actually exist on the surfaces and tablespaces of the world...and not finding them, like true prophets everywhere and everywhen lay them down in law and blood instead.

But, the lines aren't holding anymore, are they? They have fewer believers.

They did it to themselves. Didn't they?

They did it to us.

It's just, I think, that we aren't looking it straight on anymore, because we no longer, in our collectivity, know how. We've got these colonizations in our head - these conqueror histories, those checkbook calibrations, them lying designs of a hand unseen and impossible indivisibility - and worst of all, we've got them in our faces every day.

The telly locking our eyes in place, above the well drinks and the top shelf liquors. The piece of furniture in a central room of a working habitat, at which blood kin gather to stare, while they learn by mimicry and repetition how to unlisten the nearness, the smell, the breathing of others. Crowded in, in order to abstract all distance and disappear into the dots and grids of corporate and placeless destination.

This furniture reduced in size, made portable, marketed into every space, attacking time and place as its path to least resistance, erasing context not by obstruction, law or violence - but by breaking it up into consumptive bits and bytes of fee based revelation. Gone viral, potable, miniaturized, until the evidence is everywhere and no one can see it because we're all part of the scenery now.

And the trees and the oceans and the foreign Others who have only mud and old faiths, or the passe fealty of family, they die for it. Because in order to have order, we really have to learn how to never pay attention. We have to fail to attend. To give the powerful their due, to give them the sacred honor of unfocused stares, to forget, unlearn or never know scrutiny, to grant them the potency of our obedience and our apathy.

They need the wealth, because they need the order. They are weak. Power is for cowardice. And in order for the weak to feel safe, to feel like they have the measure of decay and death and the surprises which delight and amuse better women and men, the rest of must be reduced until we are marks on ledgers and numbers in a grid of grids.

Until we are economized.

But, it's all falling apart, and while the surface tension of manufactured distraction spreads thin and taut over its too many screens and surfaces, it cannot hold out forever.

Its very materiality demands this end. Its fictions, its spaceless and timeless conceits won't stand in the face of friction, depletion and the terrible beauty of entropy.

It's the largest machine ever made - the power grid and the machinery of distraction, production, consumption. It covers two continents in its electric penumbra, and vies for control of a third.

But, it's all falling apart.

It really is.

Because. Because. Because.

It needs the fuel of effort, of labor - and its captive bodies are breaking. It has cannibalized the rest of us for too long, now.

We are breaking.

Coming apart.

Desperate, scared and for the first time for many of us, finally paying attention.

Attendant to the world.

It could all go horribly wrong. It could fly apart and flattening place and ignoring memory swell up again as a collective debasement, a reaction, a transformation of the bloated corpse itself, maggoty with fecund depravity, until the majority of us reach out and grasp not at the now of our suffering, but at the crystal faceted death god of order and eternity.

At a new order, and more violent, and more caustic and unforgiving because it has neither place nor history, because it hates them as records of its own inevitable passing.

The prophets of eternity - of thousand year reigns of God or State or the numen of rationalized numbers - this is their time. This is their dawning age. They won't resist degradation. Don't believe the lies. They'll pursue it with a holy zeal and a righteous vengeance. Order needs corpses to prove its power. It ever has; it always will.

Easy targets, at first: we're already seeing it. Gay agendas, the Muslim invasion, "baby" killers, the welfare poor.

And as it starts to fray further, coming apart with the pressure of its own dissolution, we who are not them might do well to remember this. They'll start to eat their own, of which plenty of us number.

And fight. And fight back. The weak want order. And they want prophets to lead them.

Perhaps it's time to keep this in mind, to attend, to remember that an arriving age of desperation is more than a conclusion.

And maybe, just fucking maybe, this time we'll fight and play and gather to shape it differently...