Something In The Air

A red deer stuffed into a tiny box

Last week Sweden voted in the Euro Elections. The Greens are now the third largest party and the Left Party increased their vote by more than any other party. All parties on the left increased their share of the vote. Right-wing anti-immigration parties all fell in support. Let’s hope this trend toward sanity continues.

But we need more. The destruction of the planet and of any semblance of a dignified and fair human social condition continues under the current insane economic system. After voting I came home and wrote this short piece. I hope you enjoy it, even if it’s a little…raw.

Uncertainty - by Jonathan Foster

1.

The entire city is melting in a hot and sticky funk. Clouds of pollen hang in the stillness, suffocating the lungs, slowing everything down. It’s early summer, but spring’s fragrant explosion is still in full swing, the seasons now encroaching on each others territories with a wayward nonchalance that won’t end well.

This is a day of torment and endurance. A testing day where tempers will stumble in the humidity. Where apologies will be offered and space given, to try and keep the peace. A day to hold one's tongue until the rains come and wash all this strained uneasiness into the gutters.

There’s been a string of these entombing days engulfing the land, like repeated dawning of nothingness. Although, strangely, bringing unexpected relief too, as our relentless racing toward uncertainly is deferred for a moment and I lose sight of our fate in this disorientating haze.

Windless, warm, wet days and endless nights. No past. No future. Just great slabs of Now holding us like insects in the humid amber. Open the windows. Pray for a breeze. Turn on your side. Nothing will change.

There’s something else too, in the air. Something ominous. Something that makes the world feel like a prisoner, standing on the scaffold, hands tied, hood on, noose ready, trembling on the trap door. Something that makes the world feel like a stumbling drunk who’s fallen and yet to hit the ground, sailing through the air, face first, toward the pavement, shouting obscenities. Everything. In. Slow. Motion. But. The. Outcome. Inevitable.

I’m staring out the window in a stupor, with the perfectly balanced lightest of breath, not quite inhaling and not quite exhaling, on the precipice of an inevitable shift that hasn’t yet happened, but must. Surely.

There are colossal storm clouds building up on the horizon. I’ve seen them before, these dark clouds, and I wonder if the eventual deluge will bring relief from this suffocating stillness, or wash all of us away.

2.

Maybe I should just get with the program. Sit down and shut up. Lighten up. Look on the bright side. Maybe I should be a little more grateful. Maybe I should stop predicting disaster. Stop being so negative. Stop feeling at all. Maybe I should just accept that utterly meaningless platitude that everything happens for a reason. Maybe I should have a little faith.

Maybe. But then again.

I stand by the window, like an exquisite red deer, stuffed into a small concrete box, way too small, but there I am, stuffed in nonetheless, barely able to breathe, crushed, a senseless act of destruction. How do I come to terms with all this pointless carnage? How do I process my ever growing impotence? How do I understand rewarding only the basest and most trivial power over life itself? Pandering to the most depraved of broken emotional architecture where hubris and rampant appetite have overpowered and forsaken the possibility of love? To have discarded dignity, grace and virtue for an handful of empty symbols?

And yet how easy it is, to blunder onward through all this carefully constructed charade of symbolism, to pull up the anchors, embedded in the soils of Mother Earth, and float away on an ocean of invention, as if that were more real than reality. How easy it is to feed the ego, caress the ego, slide into the ego, let that fucking ego Vesuvius over everything.

Boom.

3.

The city is sardined with bodies. The seasonal ebb and flow of tourism is now flowing as cruise ships dump their daily cargo of ghosts that haunt the city, not really here, not really there, seeking something, authenticity perhaps, which they imagine they’ll find in the cafes and restaurants and shops, as if in these places they could divine something important.

But the important things have been boiled down and simplified to trivial stupidities. The city is amok with power as political parties plaster posters everywhere, reminding we dwellers of a spate of fabricated fears, lest we forget.

Huge complexities boiled down to pithy, aggressive tag lines printed in party colours beside smiling faces are everywhere. No matter how cruel or aggressive or stupid the slogans are, the adjoining faces are always smiling, as these various parties, invariably punching downwards, demonise whichever vulnerable blameless group they deem deserves a good kicking. It’s a festival of finger pointing, bullying and baiting.

More Borders For Them! More Freedom For Us! Smile. Punish Criminality, Not Policing! Smile. Perpetual Gang Paradise? Smile. Vote For Your Own Future! Smile.

These posters, screaming at me from railings and lampposts seem to imagine I’ll be enlightened by their darkest of motivations, as if I too am impatiently waiting for a reason to hate or to fear or to despise or to ostracise my fellows, who are surely staring like me, from their lonely brutal boxes, with the same expression of bafflement and sorrow as I have.

They say, of these vicious smiling faces, that no one saw them coming. But of course they were seen. I saw them coming. We all saw them coming because they’ve always been here, waiting in the shadows to be released once more into the daylight. And we all knew that they would be enticed out again. We cannot live in a world where people are ranked, where people are dehumanised, where psychopaths and sycophants are rewarded, where the vulnerable are exploited while the powerful are unduly rewarded, and not expect the smiling faces of evil to shine their pearly whites.

In the cafes and restaurants the ghosts scanned their screens being convinced how dangerous and dark the world had become. Then they returned to their cruise liners, and spluttered further along, pumping their oily bilge, sewage sludge, and hazardous waste into the ocean as they traversed the globe, certain that these appalling “others” were destroying everything.

I open the window and take a deep breath and hope that maybe, just maybe, we come to our senses before it’s too late.

I’m not afraid

to

perish away

but

before I do

I want to

escape

this stupid small box

and help

smiling angels

gather up

the broken pieces

in one

embrace, and

painlessly

reassemble

Kindness

Compassion

And Grace