The Sludge Puddle Rainbow by Fjolla Hoxha

The future is safe. No one and nothing will harm it. It seems reserved to the privileged ones who will know how to play the new game by the new rules. The future is far, far, far away in a distant time which is impossible to envision both as a temporality and as a distance. The present seems eternal. We’re participating in a trauma which we sparked ourselves and now we are crying for help to save us from the wildfire. It’s good to be aware. We may learn how to treat our non-human cohabitants and negotiate for balance. Or we may not.

Maybe we’re stuck in this situation for as long as the new world rule doesn’t declare its agenda. A new constitution. A new autocracy. One that uses prison language to tap into our early impression of authority relationships. ‘Lockdown’. Rule-bound, having no permission to leave the classroom to go pee. A situation which recommends that the silver lining of this whole apocalypse lies on the vivid dreams we are having, a consoling drift zone of inner exploration. When or rather depending on how this will end, we’ll know where we stand and adjust to the new normality. For now, we are stuck with non-metaphorical reconstructions of our past, to process the enormous amount of anxiety and stress, much greater than we would expect, the therapists suggest. They call it the first phase: the denial. Then comes the entrance to acceptance and lastly growth, they say, as if emotions are static and irreversible. Why does everything have to have a progressive explanation? A closure? The professional etiquette seems enough to validate knowledge. A naming. Therapist. Science. What a waste of time and resources. The only truth is that which becomes true if you click on it. The more you click, the truer it becomes…language, oh, the mass control mechanism for self-destruction! 

In my dream last night, two friends were holding each other closely by the shoulder, content, while returning from an evening tour to Hassan II'nd's wife's palace, her name was Elisabeth. 

-Hassan II'nd, King of Morocco who has a massive mosque by the ocean in Casablanca, died in 1999- the year I experienced war.

I couldn't join them, because I couldn't figure out how to wear the shoe on my right foot properly: the toe part was on my heel and the heel on the toes!

In an interview with David Quammen, a scientific writer of ecological niche, brought out of the shadows of mainstream ignorance these days during which the capitalist system is being given a slap in the face or two,  to describe how a biologically modified invisible strip of genetic material inside a protein capsule evolves in its natural processes, he of course takes an anthropocentric example:

“But you know, they say when a bullet hits a soldier, you never hear the shot from the one that gets you because the bullet gets there first and then the sound gets there after. This virus works like that.” – he analogizes. 

I imagine the soldier giving away this profound wisdom after he was shot to death, then decide to save the soldier and have him severely wounded but vigilant and philanthropic enough to share with the rest of us the precursive measures of the transformational experience we hope to understand but be spared from, in the same way as we anticipate to be shielded from the protein capsule which occupies our bodies…

‘When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves’, advises neurologist Viktor Frankl who dubiously survived many second world war camps. He teaches us to focus on the rainbow appearing on the mud puddle, on our way to the gas chamber. He advised us that between the stimulus and the response, there is a space in which lies the choice of our freedom. What defines the capacity to be capable of choosing? A survival instinct? One that is always shaped by stepping on someone’s head pressed in dirt so that the other can see the rainbow in the slough? 

I’m inventing theories of the new monkism and the concepts of nuning as a lifestyle with no alternatives. Deliberate turns towards the inside to find universal questions whispered to us by the voice of inner wisdom which somehow seems mute and disconnected from its source. Yoga and spirituality seem like great ways to allow totalitarianism to take place without objection. We are guilty. Now we need to be silent before we can confess.

 In my burst of anger during the first phase of denial, I want to dig through the cracked earth below that mud puddle, reveal the severity of our dominant and egotistic race, ‘the evilest of all inventions’ and show it its reflection while it eats its own flesh until there is nothing more left to eat. The planet goes back its undisturbed Darwinian peace where one consumes to keep alive and not to satisfy hunger. 

My self-extinguisher kin never lets a good crisis go to waste! It empties out its public sphere, pitches and develops surveillance tools to help governments track citizens with the goal of stopping the spread of the unpredictable that brought its bearer to its knees. It produces its own avatar: the digital monkey. That which documents its every move. Who eats data for breakfast, data for lunch, data for self-pleasure. Masturbation-data. 

‘The underground, the savior, is an illusion of the revolutionary past. The fatalist heroes of George Orwell. Some Bolshevik fairy tale. We instead, are left with emptiness. A void. There is nothing beyond, behind the screen…’- I write on my teenager bedroom journal documenting how my first phase crashes with the second, jumps to the third, then pirouettes back to the first and I have no algorithm to track its variations…just yet.