I am the Individual

I am the problem you could never solve,

I calculate beyond your algebra.

I am that invincible disbalance in your equations

Untouched by your formula.

I am the star which sears the night,

Outside any constellation.

The blind spot in your planetary charts,

That blatant mystery in the sky.

I am the residue after the chemical reaction,

The indissolvable toxin.

Forever moving and making you stir Bulldozing through your foundations —

A ceaseless tornado.

Your theories despise me

Your Language crumbles at my feet.

Your abstractions rupture at each encounter

I revolutionize daily.

I am the sky above your intersections

Beyond your horizons

I precede the Subject of your ideology

Always outside your texts.

I play with your labels

And juggle them like balls

Any identity which you construct

Is yet another balloon

I’ll burst in jest —

A lego brick

With Which I construct a castle

Or throw away at whim.

I am that crude reality

You see with your eyes

Like the sound of wind chimes

I tingle your nerves

But never cross your mind

Like a hum or a shiver

I inhabit your body.

I am so obvious

You recognize me instantly

But your knowledge has Alzheimers

Your logic cannot fathom me.

I am the largest minority in society,

I am everyone.

Unique by blueprint

Overflowing every border and box

Excessive by necessity

Unbound by definitions

Undefinable by any category

Silent but sublime.

You can never put a finger on me

Never crush me under your thumb

I am not something you theorized

Programmed and programmable

Isolated units

Consumer and consumed

Obeying the scriptures you think

Are ingrained in me.

I am not some rootless

Impoverished

Fungus

Desperate for bondage

And categories to define me.

You cant even understand

I can exist without chains.

I am the individual

Discreet and singular

Multiple and infinite

All at once

The greatest silence in history.

Freedom: Beyond Rights, Towards Power

To be free is to be political. For we cannot escape the very power constraints which form us, but only transmute them according to our intent.

Unfortunately, we have been made to believe that freedom is something we are born with and need only to protect either by begging to our governments, or merely being aloof and apolitical — isolated from the world which sustains us.

We live in an age where freedom instantly evokes images of outrage and placards.

Incidentally, we also live in an age where states around the world are brazenly constructing precise machineries of surveillance and control — and we aren’t doing shit about them.

Freedom and rebellion have always been twins. It was the French Revolution which resulted in the Human Rights Charter in which Liberty became the inherent, inalienable right of every person.
Using this humanist doctrine all the European colonies kicked out their oppressors – – Gandhi being an emblematic figure of this kind modern rebellion.

This non-violent form of protest, with marches, sloganeering and placard-waving was soon picked up by civil societies around the world.

Although quite effective in the 20th century we see these kinds of protests fizzling out with no results in the 21st century. The Governments now know that a march, or a strike here and there barely dents their international power network.

The Occupy Wall Street, the Gender Equality protest in India, the so called Arab Spring – – all they could achieve was media hype, but none of their practical goals.

It is time we wake up and face reality:

If our Right to Freedom has to be granted by someone else, then that is no freedom at all. Liberty then is a slave to the whims and strategies of the government which rules us.

What the heck are we demanding out on the streets, in front of our parliaments? How is it freedom if it can be ‘granted’ by someone else?

The very idea of freedom as it exists in the current form is delusional.
Freedom is envisaged as this independence from the world which allows an individual to do what she desires.

This is simply a impossible. No one can be independent from the world simply because we are and always will be a part of it. Our food is grown by someone else. Our clothes are created by numerous unknown people. Our houses are constructed by others. We are bound by the laws of physics. Our bodies are made out of the food we eat, the air we breath.

Where the heck is any possibility of in-dependence? We can never be separate from the world. We can never be isolated, self-sustaining units, floating in the universe, powered merely by our free will.

Freedom is not a right. Freedom is an ability. It is a skill. It is a technique to interact, negotiate and mold our surroundings according to our intent.

Freedom is always an active, political act. It is the sum total of our abilities which form us and our environment in a cyclical way. It necessarily has to be a way not only to do what you desire, but to protect yourself, act against forces which intend to annihilate you.

Thus, our freedom, quite simply means acting according to political intent.

It is a fact that we are born into a network of relationships with our fellow beings and our environment.

It is a fact that we form our identities only in these constraints. I am whatever I am because I am no other person and I am also not a rock or a tree.

It is also a fact that these relationships are relationships of power.
Our parents are the dominant forces who decide our initial fate. We live because our immune systems constantly win every war against the pathogens always besieging us. We either mold nature to make it work like we want it to or nature shatters our illusions by sending disasters once in a while.

Thus to be free is necessarily to be political. The trend, especially in this generation, to be fashionably apolitical is something which is destroying our collective freedom.
In our relationship with the world we are either politically victorious or politically oppressed. Being apolitical simply means to be a passive recipient of other people’s politics.

Power has been usually seen as something dirty which intends to annihilate freedom. But it is only through power that freedom can be exercised in the first place. Power is not only domination but it can also be a positive force which results in growth, happiness and productivity.

Power is the medium of our being.

More importantly, it is the only way, in our current situation, that we can ever escape from universal, flawless dictatorship.

Rather than acting as if we already have the ‘Right’ to freedom, we should consider freedom as intent combined with the potential to act on them. Something which is both inherent in us and yet has to be learned and perfected like language, logic or art.

Freedom then is not some Right, but a life skill which has to be practiced, exercised, honed and implemented by all of us.

Why the ‘Law of Nature’ Argument is the Most Unnatural Concept Ever

The law of nature is a funny illusion.
It was used to justify slavery until the slaves revolted and claimed their rights.
It was used to sustain colonialism until the Europeans were kicked out and the natives did just fine.
It was used to imprison women until the world wars happened and magically they were able enough to work in factories.

Laws which were supposedly permanent and inherent – – existing since eternity – – were simply thrown away like fashion fads which outlived their trendiness.

And yet after a whole century of debunking the ‘natural’ argument most people still use it to justify their own prejudices and defend their medieval thought-castles.

Beneath all the ‘Natural Law’ arguments, there lies a certain kind of arrogance and a fallacious logic of morality.

The idea that human beings can defy the laws of nature (if any) firmly rests on the grandiose delusion that we can be independent of nature. It presumes that humans are this special species who have the ability to rebel and create a civilization which is autonomous.
Nothing can be farther from the truth.

The Nature/Culture binary is a false dichotomy. Living beings are natural beings by default. Nature constitutes them. All the characteristics, abilities and features of every living being has to have some inherent, natural, genetic basis. And it is a known fact that our civilizations’ precarious existence depend upon the whims of nature. (How many civilizations have been razed by natural disasters and climate disruptions? A shit load of them.)

Trees can’t walk, because its not in their nature to walk. Dogs can’t speak mandarin because they don’t have the genetic potential to speak any human language.

Similarly, every human action has to have some natural basis. Even artificial machines like spaceships can only be built by using our inherent potentials. We could invent rocket science because of our natural ability to reason and understand. We could create all the unnatural materials used in a space crafts by using the raw materials found in nature. And ultimately the spaceship flies according to the natural, inherent laws of physics which can’t be rebelled against.

If nature really forbids something, no living being can go against its diktat.

But this statement in no way can be paraphrased as, “Everything is as it should be.”

Violence and cooperation are both natural – – but war and peace are in no way the same from an Experiential or an ethical point of view.
Nature is diverse, dynamic and different. But it doesn’t mean that we have to accept things as they are.

We have the inherent ability to choose and change. And hence, the question of good and bad in no way relies on the natural and the unnatural.(For everything is ultimately natural.)

Global warming is not wrong because it is human made and against the natural order. Humans themselves are natural beings and hence can’t go beyond nature. Global warming is wrong because of its effects – – because of the disasters and immense loss of life it has brought about. But it could only happen because of the inherent, natural potentials of human beings to create and exploit.

Rapes occur in the wilderness; but it can in no way mean that this justifies their ethical validity.

Disease is a natural condition, often brought about by natural organisms. Should we stop making medicines to fight them? I don’t think so.

Equating natural occurrences to an inherent and universal moral order is an old concept. It makes no sense in today’s times because human beings have become a force of nature themselves. Although, the dichotomy between human and nature was always false, but its even more difficult to sustain the illusion in our age. We have the ability to change global climate, make new species with genetic engineering, reproduce with our new technologies and even start an ecosystem on a distant planet.

The dichotomy of nature/culture was essentially based on control. Things like climate, natural disasters and the wilderness were beyond our power. Now, even the most isolated forests and distant oceans are directly effected by human civilization and our collective actions.

In this scenario, to rely on the old ethical doctrine of ‘Natural Order’ can be disastrous. The community of climate change deniers illustrate this point brilliantly. They say that the global climate is simply shifting and transforming as it naturally has. And since this change is natural, therefore human beings should simply let it be and keep on pumping toxins into the world.

It is true that global warming is a natural process. But it doesn’t mean that we aren’t a causing it. Earlier volcanoes and meteors might have decided the destiny of global climate, now human beings do. And it definitely doesn’t mean that global warming is harmless.

This powerful position grants us a unique freedom in the order of nature. A freedom which is certainly not an autonomy, but a practical ability to transform the natural constraints which form us according to our intent.

We can no longer dump the ethical responsibilities on nature. This freedom demands that we think for ourselves, for responsibility is the inherent twin of liberty. It is time that instead of having yelling-competitions about what exactly is the order of nature, we focus on creating an order which actually creates better, more sustainable ecosystems.

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On a side note — CONGRATULATIONS TO USA!

 

Why My Atheism Doesn’t Need The Absence of God

Atheism

We have been told that there is some supreme being up in heaven who looks after us and is all good.
Supposedly he is all powerful – – the master of the cosmos.
He sees everything – – all our crimes and acts of kindness.
Also, he is omnipresent, existing everywhere, all at once, always.

And yet, despite this grand claim of religion, the amount of human suffering only seems to be increasing as the centuries pass by.

Wars have gotten deadlier as humanity learns to create newer and better Weapons of Mass Destruction.

After a brief waning of religious fundamentalism in the middle of 20th century, our dear god has returned to become an excuse for genocides and terrorist bombings.

We live in an era in which the amount of absolute poverty is highest in the history of humanity. Despite this fact, there seems to be a consensus that the fight against an economy of inequality is trivial or boring.

As if these human-made atrocities were not enough, our dear god seems to be particularly keen on gifting us more and more disasters of the natural kind.

In the middle of all this shit, some people see the divine will at work to do good. They say it is god’s own mysterious way to redeem humankind. The disasters, genocides, mass rapes and child prostitutes are all part of the plan. They are a symbol of divine grace, according to the religious nuts.

And this is what, I think, justifies 21st century Atheism. If God exists, then he is a criminal. And that is why I reject his demand to be acknowledged and worshiped.

If God is omnipotent, then he is responsible for the millions of live lost in earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis everywhere in the world.

If he is omnipresent, then he just stood by when millions of women, children and men were raped, ripped apart and destroyed throughout history.

If he is omniscient, then he just watches passively as thousands of infants starve to death everyday around the world.

I know religious crazies have justifications for this as well. “Wait for the judgment day or Karma,” they say.
But a being who can stop and prevent these mind-numbing atrocities through his divine powers cannot excuse himself of his responsibility. Giving judgments after the beings he created have committed their crimes barely lessens the suffering of the innocents.

One who stands by even though he can prevent a crime is as guilty as the criminal himself.

And thus, I refuse to believe in the existence of God simply because I don’t see this divine being making a difference. Even if god exists so what? Humanity still has to deal with the world on its own. Praying and worship have never prevented a tragedy. Nor it ever will.

Thus, my atheism is purely a political rebellion. It is the negation of god even if he exists. It is the act of spitting on his face. It is the slap which he deserves if he exists.

Militant atheists like Dawkins simply waste their time debating with theists about the non-existence of god.

Firstly, the concept of God itself is unscientific. God is (cleverly) conceived as something which can’t be completely known. Thus, God can’t be disproved. And despite the claims of physicists, just because science works doesn’t automatically mean that God doesn’t exist.
E=mc2 has no logical connection to God=Non-existent.

Secondly, if God exists then it is even worse for religion. Because in the center of their belief system lies a being who is the most perverted criminal in the cosmos.

Thus, I think atheism should give up the time consuming, elaborate debates about the absence or the existence of the oldest imaginary friend humanity ever created. It should simply position itself as a political rebellion — something which makes much more sense in the present scenario.

Nietzsche said:

“…if God did exist, we would need to kill him off.”

However the 21st century atheist should say:

” God has survived, let’s kill him better in a better way. “

The Soul Without God And Theory

How can I explain?

Words can’t make you feel the deep, spiraling well I felt burrowing in my lungs as I stood in my verandah, staring at the clouds and knowing silently, calmly but profoundly that I exist.

No arguments can justify my fervent faith and devotion which I experienced as I sat everyday in front of my own sacred idols and prayed to them when I was six.

Not a single poem has been able to capture that of pain of realizing that my first lover didn’t really love me back. No verse can really explain the suffocating agony which ripped my innards into shreds then.

People will laugh if  I express that devastating feeling of being betrayed when my gods didn’t answer my desperate prayers at a time when I needed them most.

These are the moments which made me intensely aware of my being and that is precisely why words always feel so impotent when I try to express them.

Some philosophers say that language is the house of being. I think that is terribly stupid. Language might be the house of identity which can be communicated, but being precedes words. It is in fact a precondition of language. This is made obvious in those moments when language’s failure is so complete that it simply crumbles — in those events when we become speechless.

These are the times when life acquires a depth previously unknown or forgotten. It may not exactly be a moment of unbound joy (pain and sadness are just as adept). It may not even be a moment of uncontrollable emotion (people who practice mindfulness will know how calm observation has a silent profoundness to it).

I think these are simply the moments of intense awareness — the point when existence refuses to be ignored by consciousness. This is when we realize that the experience of life has a value independent of any more explanations.

You might have heard something similar from the New Age gurus and spiritual enthusiasts.
When they tactfully evade the use of ‘God’ to explain the meaning of these experiences, they often use words like higher consciousness, the divine, the supreme consciousness and so on.

What I found common in most of the explanations I’ve encountered is that theses moments are theorized as events when the individual psyche ‘connects’ with someone or something larger, higher, placed above the individual in the spiritual ladder.

I not only think that these explanations are absurd, improvable or unnecessary; I also think that they are an insult.

It is to say, as if, the experiences aren’t worthwhile in themselves. That you have to construct an elaborate system of theories to give that experience some meaningful value. And these constructs are ultimately equally unable to ‘explain’ the cause or logic of any value whatsoever.

What is this special higher consciousness which makes us feel like this? What is this god-like divine and from where does it derive this powerful energy from? If these ‘higher’ beings and energies don’t need anymore explanations then why does the experiences of depth need to be justified by theories?

These explanations merely transfer the experiential valence of the events of depth into something else. It’s the same old religious trick in the garb of spirituality.

Their hypocrisy is often revealed when they themselves admit that words can’t explain the spiritual experiences and then go on to create fun, often cliched theories of spirituality. (Putting faith or intuition above reason is perhaps their favorite one as it allows them to bypass science and gain a few blind acolytes.)

I think that the moments of intense awareness, the moments when life acquires an unspeakable depth are preserved and relived the best without any words or gurus.

I think its time that the spirit reclaims its independence from the shackles of God and theory.

Truths, Experience and the Return of Falsity

When I was a kid I always thought that the deaths in films were real and that the actors who died were actually born again to star in their next blockbuster.

My fantasy fell apart when I actually saw the video of a film shoot in which the hero died 5 times within the span of fifteen minutes.
It was one of my first encounters with the failure of Truth.

It’s amazing how these early life lessons are buried under pretentious, fallacious theoretical bubbles.
How can people — scholars, intellectuals and activists — actually accept that everything we believe to be true actually becomes our reality? (Yes, I am talking about the post-modernists.) If the world really worked this way there would have been no disappointments. Expectations, faith and hope would have never crumbled as easily as it usually does.

Thus, even if there is no ultimate Truth, there sure exists some kind of falsity. There exists a difference between what we think or consider as the Truth and what we experience as reality. The problem simply is that we can’t demarcate between the two — the nature of our ever-changing knowledge doesn’t allow any permanent dichotomies.

And this is precisely why I think we should approach knowing in a different way than we usually do.

The base of Human Knowledge is not knowing.

Our quest for knowing is fueled by this partial or complete void; because, if we already know everything, then why seek anymore?
Remembering this fact is intensely liberating.

Let us not pretend that we uncover some hidden truth in the ‘outside’ world which we can’t even be sure of (as the world, for us, only exists in our perception).
I don’t mean to exclude the possibility that we have indeed discovered some thing which is universal, permanent or objective. But we just can’t be sure of them. Our knowledge is still in process, and this process includes change,rejection and return of truths which were previously rejected. The world was once flat and now it’s round. Who knows if it won’t turn into a triangle or not?

Knowledge and Truth will always be something which we put in. It exists only as Human knowledge. It is an act of our minds.

So let us pretend  instead that Truth is a story we tell which makes sense.
But does this mean that everything proclaimed as Truth becomes real?

Based on our collective experience of the world, Truth seems to be multiple and fluid. But not everything seems to be true. Not every medicine system cures the disease which it itself claims to cure. Not every hypothesis is proved right even when the person conducting experiments believes in it completely.
Newton is reported to have been much more interested in Alchemy than Physics. Why is it that all his time spent in the search of knowledge, only his experiments with physics bore fruit but not his alchemy?
There is a reason why newton discovered the laws of motion and not the philosopher’s stone.

Truth is the narrative which works as Truth.
For any story to become reality, it has to correspond to experience.
If I believe that the sky is green and I myself see it as blue, then that belief fails as my own personal reality. Similarly, collective narrative has to reasonably correspond to a collective experience.

We don’t necessarily need an outside structure of comparison to judge the narratives — we can use their own claims and predictions to discover their Truth value.

By the same logic, Truths can be hierarchic.
Any Reality Narrative which fails less is obviously better than the ‘Truth’ which fails more in experience.If harvest rituals promise bountiful crops and they don’t as compared to the scientific techniques of farming, then the latter is a more reliable Truth for the society than the former. (Whatever anyone wants to believe.)

And the narratives whose claims lie outside the realm of experience by definition like the existence of God, life after death, heaven and hell will become less legitimate as a common reality when other narratives exist.
Narratives which can be judged inside lived experiences are always more reliable because we can check it’s falsity (or the lack of it). Narratives whose base claims are undetermined are dangerous because when it reaches its fanatic heights, people with other beliefs have no way of negotiation — you either have blind belief in them or you are branded a betrayer, heretic or a conspirator.

This in no way means that such narratives are illegitimate. They shouldn’t be completely excluded. They just can’t be relied upon as COMMON Truth, on the basis of which a WHOLE society can make its decisions.

I am not really suggesting that we create any rigid structures. All Truth, it seems, is probable. As we haven’t experienced the whole of existence, proclaiming any narrative as the ultimate TRUTH will be a fallacy of presumption (same applies for the rejection of the possibility of any permanent Truth).
Knowledge should always be open-ended because knowing is always in process. As long as we live we are experiencing beings.
Knowledge is merely a pattern we put into these experiences, which enriches them, binds them and in turn create new experiences in our consciousness.

Personally as a knower, my ultimate aim isn’t to find out the ‘TRUTH’. Especially when the existence of such a truth itself isn’t absolutely assured (although essentially the question remains open).
I see life in terms of experience and hence, to me such narratives are a way to gain a depth in experience.
To unite scattered feelings, events, memories and thoughts. To combine them in different ways. And to experience those different combinations in different ways.
Perhaps this is too much philosophy for one post 😛

–Dee

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WHY SO MUCH PHILOSOPHY?

My first answer to that is — Why not?

But I understand why many people are wondering about this question.

We all are children of post-modernism now. We all have known the “anything goes” motto in some way or the other.
Initially it does feel liberating.
I was a fan too not a long time ago.

But then reality strikes.
The dark side of this is that no one can really counter the fanaticism which has slowly saturated our world. And I am not only talking about people with guns, scriptures and suicide vests.

There has been a general taking away of liberties all over the world. Our existence is in threat. Even the existence of our planet. And we don’t have anything to fall back on — to counter such threats in a substantial way.

One may question why this taking away of freedom is a bad thing.
To them I reply, that question’s answer doesn’t really lie in some high-brow theoretical argument, but in plain experience.

And yet until we put them into narrative, we will always be silenced by the fanatics.

The following posts are my attempt to at least try creating a position through which we can fight back —

Trying To Escape 21st Century Nihilism By Finding Out The Inherent Purpose Of Life
https://deerayolia.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/the-inherent-purpose-of-life-is-absurdly-clear/

Attempt To Create A Charter Which Isn’t Too Rigid But Which Gives Us Some Guidelines To Fall Back Onhttps://deerayolia.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-new-charter/

Baboon Banter About Judging People

Judgement

“Never judge a person.”

We have all heard this phrase. We are bombarded by it in social media, popular memes, sit coms, our friends keep repeating this and even our judgmental relatives have started parroting the same fashionable advice.

Although I agree with the accepting spirit which informs the thought, but to follow it as a life-rule is absurd.

All of us have to judge if we can trust a person or not. We have to figure out if the other human being is friendly or hostile to have a meaningful relationship.

If you don’t, you may find yourself lying unconscious on an unknown street mugged, raped or even murdered.

Judgment is necessary for survival. It’s a life skill.

But there is a world of difference between judging and pre-judging.

The latter is about presumptions, prejudices and stereotypes.

It’s not based on the knowledge about the person per se, but about the ideas and formulas one has already imposed on them without checking if they are true or not.

Commenting on a person’s style on the basis of the clothes they wear is judging.

Labeling a person ‘slut’, ‘gay’ or ‘stupid’ on the basis of their clothes is pre-judging because there is no direct relationship whatsoever between the labels and the clothes.

Most of the arguments I hear against judging people is that every judgment is subjective.

It is. So what?

It doesn’t mean that we don’t judge people; it simply means we don’t treat our judgments as divine, permanent and universal Truths.

We keep the possibility of being wrong open and modify our judgments when we actually are.

I agree that we often don’t know from where people come from, their personal history, their internal struggles, demons and anxieties. We can never really know a person completely. We get to see only a part of their lives.

And so we should always be aware of this and remember that our judgments are only about that part of a person which we get to know and not their whole being.

I may criticize a person for having anti-liberal, conservative views about individual choice. It doesn’t mean that I see that person as a monster.

The judgment will only be about certain parts of her ideology. There is no reason why other aspects of her being won’t pleasantly surprise me.

The need for judgment is very clear. If we don’t judge terrorists and rapists we don’t have any grounds to stop them and we end up with a fucked society.

However, always judging other people for the sake of it is foolish, time-consuming and exhausting. Not everything is necessarily right or wrong, good or bad – there is a neutral zone when people are simply different.

Judging a person for having different tastes in music, clothes and ice creams will simply be stupid and is often not needed.

I firmly believe that our judgments should help us figure out people, life and ourselves. But if it makes us confused and miserable then it becomes counterproductive and cumbersome.

Lastly, to end with a cliché, I also believe that we should mostly judge ourselves first before judging others.

Richard Dawkins, There Are NO Better Rapes!

Date Rape Better Than Stranger Rape?

Context

Why Why?

Why Why?

 

If you dive deep into the abyss of Reason and have that insanity in you which drives you till the very end of your wits,

You will eventually ask:

Why why?

What what?

How how?

The questions will start questioning themselves. The circle of Reason will be complete.

There will be no answers. And that will be the real dawn of truth.

The Gypsy In The Sewer

Metal bars stuck around the hollow of his stomach since the day he was born – it never went away.
The nomad was abandoned, his mother was the drain. Everybody knew the stranger from the underground.
The gypsy roamed the international sewers trading a part of him with the merchants from the surface.

If you were to be one of them, you would definitely ask, “Where is his gut?”
And there would be none.

Let your name be Alice.

A louse crawled in his flowing, gray hair and Alice ignored it, pretending to be disgusted by the sewage instead. Perhaps she wasn’t pretending after all. Alice was genuine.

A leash held him in. The jail was made up of metal pipes filled with the black bile from the surface which their citizens couldn’t stand. It was made to prevent the traders from stealing the nomad.
The Gypsy from the sewer smiled from the enclosure.
He could stand us. He could stand anything.

The people liked him because he was the only one to ask, and they wanted to tell.
His eyes would gleam with the sheen of dreams, as if his tear ducts collected your stories.

He remembered each one of them.
He remembered the time when the two towers fell as the bird went blind in the middle of the city.
He remembered the boy who left tears on his shoulders when he told him about his brother who left.
When that girl gave him daisies, he asked her how she found them and he still remembers the garden in her backyard where she played with pythons.
He hasn’t forgotten the wall which fell when the cold years went away.

When he slept it all came back.
He walked through the garden, breathing the dust from the towers, looking for the brother who was lost past the broken boundary wall.

In his sleep he lived on the surface, amidst the part of the lives the people left behind.
He worked the hardest in his dreams. Breaking and mending the weak, creaking parts – making a whole which functioned.
He found the answers to the questions they didn’t even know they will ask.

When he awoke, the answer was found in the cage of his stomach.
Each time it was different.
Once, it was the bonsai tree with thin, paper leaves.
The merchants took it up to the surface and planted it in their cities. The plant grew into a metropolis.
Then he made a red star and it made the wall which crumbled.

A tiger cub sat curious in his stomach when Alice told the nomad about her cycle which broke. The cub’s piercing eyes searched her face, maybe looking for the tooth which went missing when she fell, or imagining the white fluid dripping down her lips and eyes. Her stomach was yet not fat.

His pupils dilated, its throat vibrated – its purrs called to you, Alice.

When she finished telling her tales, the other merchants handed him the money.
The cub was squeezed out of the cage.
It trembled with hesitance. Its tiny claws dug into the metal of the pipes.

Alice picked it up; the tiger’s licks left wet, red trails on her neck.

The merchant group walked away – ready to fuel their machine of civilization with dreams that they would distort and promises they couldn’t keep.
This one would be good for a decade.
After which the merchants will return to buy a part of the nomad again.
It’s best for business.

Alice glanced back towards the gypsy again. His cage lay hollow, his eyes caved-in.
He will never see his cub alive again.
The surface which thrives on his organ implants bars him from living his own dreams.
Or does it?

Alice strutted away.
A leash has its way.
A louse still hangs on his silvery strands which may never shine with Sun rays.

The light awaits the nomad.