Geometry for Ocelots

by Exurb1a

I am fully aware of the approaching calamity, do you think me so stupid? But you do not consider the social implications of your actions, you never have. All you will achieve is to frighten the herd.

Technology? What technology could stand up to greed?

She explained, in little terms, the shape of the unfathomable Is. “Okay,” Johannes said.

But each technology gives rise to a new need. And each new need requires a new technology to satisfy it.”

He looked to the years behind and saw a featureless, beige corridor. He looked to the future and saw an identical corridor stretching ahead. Endless hours in the moksha flowers, tilling and sowing, tilling and sowing. Endless hours in the oak tree, drinking and looking—looking and not seeing. Hearing and not listening; forever the perpetual, stinging, unnamed sense at the back of his mind that he lived inside a brain too small to understand or even witness the true beauty of the world, and so the only option left was to languish in the self-imposed illusion that objects and errands and little fears and little hopes were the full extent of being alive, else go mad. And Mama, gone. And the winters cold. And every day just comfortable enough to bear the next, and barely. Then death.

With all her coyness and knowledge-gaps about native culture, she didn’t seem quite so divine to him now. More a woman playing at what a child might think a god.

Urinating one morning he became transfixed with an intricate pattern on the plaster of the toilet and mangled the tip of his penis in his trouser zip. Such is the path to enlightenment.

He wanted to be sick. He wanted to forget. He wanted to go to the moksha fields and burn every last damn flower so his mind was small again. He shouted, “You made me this thing, this new thing. I look and see now. I hear and listen now. I’m sad in ways I never imagined. I can’t sit still. I can’t think straight. Some days I can’t believe I’m alive and other days I don’t want to be alive anymore.

The child longs for the responsibilities of adulthood. The adult, crushed by those responsibilities, longs only to be a child again.”

The worth of an animal isn’t conditional on the tricks it can perform. The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer. If we are animals, fine. But we’re animals capable of goodness, capable of sense-making, and most importantly, capable of suffering. And if our masters wish to ignore these qualities simply because our children taste delicious, that is their prerogative. But our masters should acknowledge our prerogative too, and that is to resist.”

He was mud. He was a mud thing; not apart from the world but of it, a tiny footnote in the great book of existence. He longed desperately to open that book and scour it from start to finish, and come away with the purpose of creation. His will diminished to nothing. His ambition diminished to nothing. Almost everything in the universe was not him, and yet nonetheless, he was universe.

It seemed to him suddenly that self-hate was the result of a misguided attempt to please people one would never meet, and if one did meet such judgemental idiots, one would not respect them nor desire their respect in the first place.

I am alone, he thought. There is no one left in all of time and space who will love me without conditions. I must go into every battle as an army of one, if I choose to still fight. Everything is prickles and barbs. Or worse, no prickles and barbs, but grey. Unceasing, ever duller grey; living as a miraculous animal and feeling nothing; living as a king here perhaps, and feeling nothing. I was ugly before, but loved. Now I’m just ugly. He looked to his mother’s purple sunset. If I stay on this world, every evening I will see that sunset and miss you. I will become a machine with the sole purpose of missing you. He finished the vodka. He took the crumpled parchment from his pocket, put the ultraviolet lens to it—his mother’s unmistakable handwriting still waiting there. His tears had wrecked the text, but he knew the spoiled words from memory.

Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not.

This style of argumentation was officially called “freedebate” but unofficially and most commonly, “pissing nonsense”.

1. The resources of any environment, however plentiful, are limited. 2. The material needs of any technically competent civilisation, however noble, will eventually exceed the resources of its environment. 3. When those resources are depleted, the civilisation will experience total political and technological collapse.

He longed to be back in the garden of teenage torment, in those years when everything seemed horrible and, by comparison now, substantive—if only for having felt like anything at all.

There was no way to know but live through it and reflect later. Then reflect on that reflection. Then die.

Come back, he said to his childhood self. Where are you? Did I kill you? I still feel you near sometimes, or catch you falling out of me. I still like dessert. I still dream of Mama. But I feel so old now and you are so far away and hell, the world is pointless.

It wasn’t the poor who revolted. It wasn’t the rich who overran everything. It was the fat, satisfied middle class, and their fat, satisfied kids. There was no revolution. There was only the promise that revolutions would never happen again and everyone could carve out a comfy little space for themselves and talk to their fridge and own a crystal communicator if they only turned a blind eye to the end of the world. The kids tried candy, and then candy was all they wanted.”

Be kind, and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, please be kind again.

And so we cried we were inevitable, before being killed forever.

Moderation or self-death

I travelled extensively, introducing myself to my populations personally, and gave speech after speech on the inevitability of resource collapse, preaching for moderation. The worlds listened politely, then informed me that neither data nor experts were to be trusted, and might I leave them alone with their mines and starships?

With quiet horror I knew then that the great transition in man’s history was not from illiteracy to literacy, nor from ground-bound to spacefaring, but that invisible, unremarked-of moment when the most dangerous threat to man’s existence ceased being nature, and became man himself.

We started with trying to understand the mechanics of the heavens. We concluded with pleasure cruises and little plastic drinking straws. What had gone wrong? How had we learned to unhear the cosmic music? It was all fact without wonder.

I believe they are the descendants of those few civilisations who learned that dessert need not be eaten after every meal, that on some evenings only one glass of wine is ample, and that a palace may sleep not just a king, but ten thousand paupers. Heaven is only offered to species willing to behave before they get there. And we are not one of those species.”

So, whatever happens next, allow yourself to be warmed, if only for a minute, by the knowledge that not even the gods know what dirt is doing here.”

“That is not true. When you wake up again, you’ll be home, on Gearheart. Madeleine will stay by your side. She will never leave you. You will drink coffee in the mornings. You will light the fireplace in the evenings. You will sit at your desk and still plan to stop bivnik, despite everything we’ve talked about. You will never give up, even at the end. You will remember your mother and your father. You will remember your daughter. More than coffee, more than the fireplace, your memories will keep you warm, even when you are old like me.”