The vehicle’s side reads THE RESISTANCE. Adjacent a platoon of men in fatigues with berets and dark glasses. A brief thought. What are we resisting? The lot of it? Fighting to fight? To satisfy primal urge? Drifting like tectonic plates. Made to struggle. So I sit where the tension is greatest. Tasting ocean salt in burning lungs.
Bloodshed and violence. When is it enough? When do we tire of shooting houses and children? Squeezing triggers out of fear? When do we tire of marching and nationalism and patriotism and ideals? Burning monks and protests and riot police and batons? Kneeling before tanks like worshipers? When is it enough? Or are these floggings the stripes of human tragedy?
Why
is
it
so
impor-
tant
to
be
right?
Eaten by unintentional conspiracy. It’s what happens when we realize we have to be part of the machine to affect the machine. Even then. No one really affects the machine.
There are no grand conspiracies. Just machines making cogs conform to sets of rules. The illusion of conspiracy. Not components. Not people or organizations. Just the dynamics relating them.
I veer past the stopped car and the gang of militia. They raise clubs into crossbeam geometries like spotlights on steel trusses. Intention riveted to hips and elbows and kneecaps. I am still in my pool of time as they ripple away from me, lessening.
The feud goes with them. Beginning when they arrive and departing when they leave. How can the feud be real? It lives in their heads. Tomorrow will be another gang with another cause. As unstable and polymer as the one before. I watch with lazy-eye-renaissance. In a way I’m a new aspect of time outside time. A tesseract unmasking the concealed moment.
This in the space of a moment. The gang is here but hasn’t left. We’re caught in a narrow glitch. A bridge’s span compressed to a thin line.
“‘Well, actually, I’ve thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with — I got a theory now — freedom. You know, here —’ ahead, something moved — ‘you’re free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become exactly who you are.’” — Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
Realizing that unregulated self is the only truth and all else is pursuit of manufactured conflict. Designed from constructs and ideas: human mythos. Problems created and engineered by generations of collective thought.
It’s seen over and over. In the young scholastic at university and the boy soldier and the hordes on the steps of the capitol. All the same. Afflicted with ideas foisted by the generation before, thinking they have the touchpoint to lance the boil of preconception. It adds to the mythos. Expands the consciousness but not the awareness.
We wish to escape through a door. But the door is nothing. More street. More straight line distance. The doors to all things are shaped like the terrain behind us. Doors are steps in any direction.
The car is moving now. The throng is chanting with arms raised to porous sky. Horrifying cries that warn the same construct against the same construct. Decimating that from which they are made. In their agony they destroy what makes them whole.
It’s sped up. Sometimes it goes fast. Sometimes slow. It’s just the acuity of my perception. When I’m paying attention and when I’m not. A whorl that expands and contracts.
Tomorrow I will go to work and the radio will report Madison’s homicides. A large network will report statistics from a big city. Probably Chicago. And I’ll click it off in favor of music. I’ll drive past a wreck on the interstate and not pray. Then I’ll drive by a hovel and two beggars. One will be a liar but I won’t know at a glance. A man in a Porsche will be sitting next to a Corolla. A bus stop’ll fill with ethnic elderly waiting to bus downtown. A middle-aged woman will carry sacks of groceries to her apartment. All of it the same construct. And the only lie is that some of us are more free than others.
We are equal in our bondage. Pitted against each other, solids pressed against strainers. Not fluid enough to pass. Not forgiving enough to go free. We all break into pieces to escape the straining construct.
I don’t begrudge them their fighting. It’s. Just. When you have seen enough battle in enough places. It was never men fighting men. Never has been and never will be. When you’ve seen enough. Sunnis killing Shias. Palestinians killing Jews. Jews killing Gentiles. Men enslaved in fiefdoms. Men enslaved in 20XX. Poor men killing poor men. Poor men incarcerating poorer men. Men killing each other in prison. I am tired. Of war and fighting. Tired of pharmaceuticals to numb and alcohol to forget. The machine, fueled by pomegranate blood, devours us all.
All their protest to award rights, which bring you faster to the next wall. The construct is an endless maze of distraction in 20XX. It’s what happens when many people buy into sets of rules. Unintended conspiracy. Achievement does not happen by winning the game. It happens by changing the rules.
I plod down the road. Not particularly slow. Not particularly fast. The gang is gone. Another fledgling passing moment. Air withers, cold in my throat. I tuck my hands for a passing truck. A decal sticker of a fist in the air. A rebel flag clinging to an old way of life.
Never letting go, I think. The physics of the world is to evolve. Revolution happens when we stifle evolution. And all conflict arises from man opposing change.
I think of Delany and Bellona. We come into this world from wholeness and all of life is a return to wholeness. Wondering who I might be if I could be anyone. That would be my truth. The ultimate test of what’s inside. Who I would be with no repercussions?
I walk back to my apartment. Fingers numb from cold. I feel the wind stuck in my bones. My knee hurts. I sit down. If you thought I no longer fight — I do. I pick up the pen. I change the rules.
Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.
Another great one.
I've had an image stuck in my head lately of people crowding the rungs of a ladder. Since they can't move up because it doesn't grow, a group has been relegated like worker ants to moving along the outside of the ladder each day to report to work at the bottom, where they dig. Their job is to unearth more rungs so they can feel they've risen when they return home each night.
Feels like it fits.
We are at that culmination, nearing that apex where what was once surreal becomes real.