Cleaning Up The Mess

Collapse is already here - it’s like watching the tower begin to crumble while standing at the bottom. Does that imagery feel familiar to anybody? I wonder what they will say in a thousand years’ time when they talk about the Twin Towers? These skyscraper buildings that you could barely see the top of even if you craned your head all the way back. That imagery was not an analogy. It was a symbol. A message, a clearly mapped point at the start of the new millennium.

Here we are 26 years in, and as I write this digital diary that has been so sorely neglected, I can’t help but think of the last 25 years in review. Never mind my own archive in writing and what it was I thought I should have been achieving somehow. Many things are still very confusing to me, and as I move through my life it becomes clearer that I don’t have the language. That I need more language. What I am told is going on is rarely what is actually going on, and well, I’m done doubting and questioning myself. I’m creating the language because otherwise I can’t speak. That’s been part of my challenge. I think that I am babbling when actually I’ve been forced down cognitive rabbit holes of confusion because nothing I see makes sense. True story. The explanations that people provide me with for their world view are largely self-serving. They need to maintain their narrative to justify their choices and morality. The idea that they are good people, making good choices, making the world a better place. From what I see, they need to uphold the agenda of empire. They need to maintain the position of power to maintain control. That control isn’t even of other people; it’s control of themselves. This realisation brings more than a few radical insights as I think about the Tower of Babel, which was not about the collapse of a tower at all; it was about the collapse of language. What does language truly mean in a world full of lies? Lies that have become confabulations.
Lies that are told honestly.

The beginning of each year is increasingly destabilising as I write to try to process world events for myself. Knowing that most likely the most sensible thing to do is turn off the receiver dial of any mass broadcast and focus on real humans. However, with the dawn of the internet superhighway, the internet has become my home, and within it I have my own global village of people that I am responsible to. 

I cannot keep up with the thoughts in my own head, the language that I need to describe what is happening in the world or indeed what has been happening to and in us as a result. I don’t know anybody that isn’t struggling. The people that I know that are doing well don’t seem to be capable of taking any real accountability for their actions and, more scarily, their beliefs in the closed-loop system of the Gaiasphere. It’s fucking scary to me how detached people are from physical reality and delusional about the end-game consequences.

Yet people look at me as if I am mad. People look at me as if I am a total fuck up, and what they can’t see is that I operate as the sinkhole of the consequences of right relationship if nobody else is willing to take responsibility. This is not a victim story, nor is it blame; it’s an acute and accurate account of what I see in front of me culturally, and it’s highly problematic. As I have continued to say frequently, “The problem isn’t out there, it’s in here.” The idea that you would go out there to ‘fix’ a problem, especially one of a humanitarian nature (which in most places is a result of unchecked imperial ambition) is misguided at best and, at this juncture, very poorly educated. As Palestine should have taught you. Palestine is not the issue, it’s the ideologies of the Western Empire that are the fuck up, as well as the systems they have created.

If at this point in human history you are not actively decolonising and making the in-roads to integrate into Indigenous ways of being or local Indigenous culture, then the only thing that can really be said of any meaning is that you are going the wrong way. I can no longer excuse your bad behaviour, nor can I pretend that the world isn’t burning. I also can’t glibly tell you that your avoidance is a great long-term strategy. If your strategy truly is to look the other way and pretend that this doesn’t affect you, or that “your problem is not my problem,” then it should become abundantly clear that the climate disaster in the closed-loop systems of the Gaiasphere is already affecting you. In the meantime, while you are figuring that out, I truly will be cleaning up the mess of epistemological violence that has riddled my life while wiping the slate clean on the confabulations of people that do not know any better.

I’m also getting increasingly excited about the ever-expanding understanding that I am your mirror.