An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

The New World and the World that was

[thoughts from     ~burning woman~     by Sha'Tara]

This is a new world—man-made, yes, definitely man-made.  It's no exaggeration to say this new world is utterly mad, punch-drunk on power—the power of death, or perhaps more accurately, the power of killing.  Yes, that's it, a world driven by killing, not by death; a world peopled and governed by the half-dead; by shards of minds and flesh screaming their pointless pleasure-pain from contact with the skin of cement and asphalt constructs; from fondling battered flanks of metallic machines and kissing collapsed plastic containers.  Day and night, all over the planet but more so in the hells they call cities, you hear the zombies of technology belching and bellowing their pleasure, a pleasure that returns only pain as dividend. 

A succubus.  A world awash within a meaningless half-life desperately sucked from what remains of the natural world.  And the sound it makes, the thumping head-banging music, the thrumming of motors and rasping of tires; the loud and hollow laughter, the endless talk attempting to pass itself off as conversation but never quite managing it.  It rises and thunders, a special effects storm screaming one certain obscenity: I'm alive!  But all of it contrived.  If one were to pull the plug, the silence of its settling sands would be deafening.

There once was a world—perhaps it still exists, somehow, but it would be in the realm of the faeries I should think.  In that 'was' world, there was no need to scream pain and pleasure to realize one's aliveness.  You knew.  You always knew because your senses touched what was equally alive.  There was the azure sky, home of the light of sun, moon and stars.  Below flowed clouds that made the sea, the lake and the river, who in turn made all the growing things in sand and soil.  Meadows of swaying turquoise grasses, flowery shrubs and stately giants of the forests.  Within these gentle realms there lived countless multicolored birds, endless varieties of insects, fish and whales, turtles and buffalos.  On the soft loam a child could run barefoot without fear of harm.  It could blend its laughter and cries of wonder with those of the monkeys in the trees and those of the wolves in the hills. 

Did such a was world ever really exist?  Yes, says my mind, because in the remaining slag can be found evidence of such a time. 

Will such a world be experienced by man, or by any generation of his children, ever again?  No.  Never again.  For such a world was cursed by man's gods who saw it as a threat to their hegemony and who will continue to see it so as long as one atom of it remains. 

So go on...

Scream your pointless existence; laugh your hopeless death, in this hell of your own making and believe they are ordering, from a million keyboards in artificially lit cubicles, your new world: you new heaven and new earth. 

"He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."  [Voltaire]