The state of the state. The opposite of Empire is ecosystem or flux;
Henri Chopin said “It is man’s [sic] body that is poetry, and the streets,”
those not-quite-right vibes, the poet’s tendency toward self destruction,
I appreciate that. High-level meetings with creditor nations bring no surcease.
Any meeting with the flux or ecosystem would require a mental abruption
to release our persistent habit of adding more police every time crime
increases. I am good at experimental disassembly, I am not a body
on the streets of the state, sometimes I am citizen, trying new root vegetables
like kohlrabi: why? Traders brought it to Italy in the sixteenth century,
but cabbage has been a thing in Europe for a while and my ancestors
probably ate various forms kale, which makes me feel I-don’t-know-what
when I crave a kale smoothie. Trevor says, “cabbage tastes delicious
if you cook it with other things” and Coco continues to ask about the number
of things in the world. Her world is abundance with precise sensory detail,
I write to remember anything, but my memory goals are ambitious. Somewhere
between Empire and ecology are words like military, citizen, and their opposites.
I can’t see the moon or pluto but I believe in them, believe in this neck pain
that three days hence will be a migraine. I like the monotony of living.
All creatures love a routine, even the ones that don’t. Non-combatants, civilians,
foreigners and aliens all crave at least occasional predictability: The sun,
the earth, the air. We don’t crave the stupid decisions of Columbia University’s
president but we can predict them. Liberation is not predictable: It wasn’t
inevitable that God would keep hardening Pharaoh’s heart, or that the Jew’s Egyptian
neighbors would give them supplies as they fled, or that Pharaoh would march
into the Red Sea. Narrative is full of disasters and inevitability. If you march in formation
you’re an army, but if you walk a scraggly line you’re people, maybe refugees,
There is no total pervasion of apathy. There is debate, dissent, if you march
in formation you might be hundreds of activists holding an emergency seder on
the Senate Majority Leader’s doorstep. In this era of misrule my country sends
billions of dollars to the Israeli military even after the discovery of a mass grave
with over 300 Palestinians uncovered at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan
Younis, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I can’t bear the star-spangled
Irrationality, I won’t explain the difference between an Empire and an ecosystem.
We’re in it. Them. Are it. Them. That’s us, ourselves, but collectively. We’re it.
