Letter Against the Firmament

this is a fairly extensive reworking of this, from a few weeks ago

Well, I dunno, it feels like we all just lost our minds. I mean, if you remember, not so long ago I tried to convince you that plague is the only solidarity we might have left, as if that plague might lead to some kind of new force of collectivity, on both molecular and social levels, wherein a new utopia might open up before our eyes, a rose-garden of strange harmony, new forms of human and inhuman love. Perhaps I got it wrong. I mean, I’ve been ill for quite a while now, and if I feel solidarity with anything at all, its simply with the forces of namelessness and invisibility, as if my body was less an ordered system of molecules and more a negative community of shattered, cannibalistic and stupid sub-atomic particles, and some of those particles are mine and some of them are not, as if my body had become an anti-linear intersection point where hail and domestic locusts had somehow mingled with the original recitation of Thomas Müntzer’s “Protest About the Condition of the Bohemians” - that would be 1521, something like that - and those two only coincidentally anti-capitalist forces have manifested themselves as a red, black and slightly painful rash that’s made it even more difficult than usual to leave the house. And if you can’t see just how politically inconvenient that is, its probably only because you’ve still got some kind of job, and your wage-slip still has the ability to stitch you together into some kind of utopian facsimile of, what, maturity, satisfaction, calm and good health. Like you’re a walking vaccine, or something. Don’t get me wrong, its not like I blame you or anything. There’s plenty of people, plenty of us, who have just carried on as if nothing was happening, as if the grievous black wind beating through our minds and our skies and our homes was either totally invisible, or simply something that didn’t apply, as if we had conjured up some kind of immunity to the swarms of metallic tumours that have for decades now replaced whatever it was used to pass for reasoned discourse in this, or any, country. Yes, it is of course more than reasonable to wander through all of this wreckage, this peevish radioactivity as if it was just another landscape ripe for gentrification, as if all of this was just the normal way of things, as if it was the way of the world, as if everything had always been like this, and it has, because as everybody knows, the projectile vomit of the present moment - in whatever “historical era” -  has always spattered and poisoned the entirety of written and unwritten history, all the kings and queens of England simply tiny worms wriggling about all over it, that vomit, that history. And all of those tiny little worms have by now been re-interpreted as a golden and glowing currency, the basis of our tradition, a word which rhymes oh so neatly, well almost, with radiation and rendition. Oh beautiful stinking England. And other blah blah blahs. I thought about making a copy of this letter, sending it to the Daily Mail. I’m serious. Because, and I don’t really need to tell you, I’m sure you’ve noticed, over the past few years, since the current administration “took power” or whatever it is you call it, I’ve become a monster, absolutely intolerant, psychopathic in my hatred for every cop and tory on this entire planet, and that would be fine if it wasn’t so clear just what a comfortable place in which to live that hatred has become. And I wonder how close that comfort is to whatever warm, titillated bliss your average Daily Mail reader feels as their own suburban hatred is tickled into being by, for example, the way they so fondly believe their taxes are being made to subsidise huge masses of starving people, the way their hard earned xenophobic cash goes to pay for all those unsavoury Victorian diseases the poor seem to feel so entitled to. That’s right, it must be very cozy in there, inside that glowing, subsidised hatred. There are, of course, some very serious differences. Because, for one thing, they actually own the hatred they live inside, they put a deposit down, they pay their mortgage, they ring it around with flowers, with birds and other things, the immense screeching of starlings, the avenues of devastated cities, all of it transformed by who knows what magic into a neatly mowed lawn, gadgets, polite chat about interior design. Not me. I have to rent mine. And every day I have to worry about the landlord, about how one day the rent will be too much too afford, because the landlord will have worked out that even embittered, quasi-principled political hatred can be converted into a slab of real-estate. That’s right, a slab. A slab composed of tungsten and dense micro-shrapnel, which explodes in deep, fabular silence somewhere on the other side of the planet, a dense micro-nebulae in which all of us - Daily Mail readers or not - are either vaporised or transformed into a dense organisation of molecular bullshit, a ring of roses, rigid and ossified, a foul-smelling network of bones, and all of those bones played upon like holy trumpets, because what is bone is also teeth, and when those teeth are scattered across the soil, the floodplains and the scorched tory desert, they start speaking, and the noise is tremendous, at frequencies no living creature can hear, but the dead do, and they crawl out from underneath their shattered houses, and the music is intolerable, because the time for tolerance is long past, and at this point I collapse, all of the creatures from which I’m made, all the constellations, they implode, they divide themselves, tear themselves to tatters, as if the heretics of Saturn and Venus and whatever remains of Hackney had been compressed into some kind of bacteria and preserved for years in a secret laboratory located several miles below the magnetic gulfs of the Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London EC2R 8AH and, when released with great triumphalist fanfare by a gang of fearless anarchists, when those bacteria are released into the atmosphere like a huge trumpet-blast of invisible comets they achieve absolutely nothing, people breathe them in and sneeze and that’s about it, and that’s the type of solidarity I’m feeling right now, its like a vacuum, a microscopic black hole, an occupied territory, a supermarket, a net of protons passing through matter with no effect whatsoever, a hospital crackling and burning in the heat of the midnight sun. That’s right. Hatred is a very comfortable place. I’ve been living on speed and whisky for weeks. Come over if you fancy some. I’ll try not to puke.