prayers to aliens

if theres anything i feel strongly about its that any novel worth its weight in digiglyphs should have prayers in it

so heres prayer number thirtynine

 

                  dear aliens

                  we know a lot of us have been suckerpunched by lines like

                                    a little lower than the angels

                                    made in the image of god

                                    subdue the earth

the goal of the human soul is conquest perfection security superiority

the human subject is active and therefore exercises agency while the nonhuman object is passive thus nature and nonhuman animals are available for human exploitation

humans are intentional rational premeditated while animals are instinctual

unless you become a warrior youll be crushed and forgotten

humans are exceptional due to their superior language and toolmaking capacities

humans are manifestly the highest rung of the animal order

oh alieni

we know you laugh at us

we diminish oppression in one sector only to transfer it to another

we do and think the most horrible and irrational things and then surround them with virtuous clichés and this confidence game is society

we narcissistically believe whonymitys more entitled than other creatures and artifacts

we accomplish nothing but destruction but are so inept we cant restrain ourselves even when weve lost faith in our accomplishments

we know our institutions loves families religions philosophies arts actions attitudes thoughts are built from the elemental particles of fear deception indolence and greed and stories and ideas so infantile were wholly unworthy of the comforts that grace our lives and the walls that keep the darkness out

were endlessly fascinated by our lives  our every petty joy and misery  that new pimple on our butt  and care more for the comfortable cat that suddenly appears by our back door than we do for the millions of animals we incarcerate torture slaughter and devour each year

we are a worthless and disgusting species  not even a blip in geological time or a modified register in the consciousness of the universe

 

and the aliens shrug and briefly materialize

from their abstract geometric planes & games

and vaporize the one who prays

knowledge, unknowledge, and the immaterial orders i

another human says to me after a community arts festival that ends in white-robed humans, in shadow play and the translucent heads of mythic creatures, gliding, chanting, like humanoid and earthbound clouds, among candles, on and at the base of hills, polyglottally, through a lukewarm late summer evening of threatening rain – looked like a cult to me.  i reply, as pee-wee herman said, one person’s cult is another’s party.

that herman to my knowledge never said this and if he did in contexts so far from mine that we could say he never or barely did, if i assume at least temporarily my context as standard.  that i can and do say to my knowledge.  that i never replied as such.  that the other human only approximated my above quotation of it.  that the image(s) in your mind – if there be image(s) – birthed from these words likely bear little resemblance to what i saw, and these words to other words that might have been birthed from the presumed and ostensibly indisputable actual event, hardly proves but equally hardly dispels the spinning, expanding, morphing, collapsing limits and boundlessnesses of what we learn, and how, and what we don’t.

i am interested in the supposedly existing thoughts of chuang tzu, wittgenstein, kant, hume, foucault, artaud, kristeva, the boys, the non-boys, the non-girls, the girls, and as is well known in non-existent circles, the non-humans (which some have argued include the humans).  but no more interested than in the voices at my co-op’s picnic table, the pebbles in the tiny teeny bitty itty zen garden before me in this café, the repetitive semi-articulations of that lover, or the molasses of the morasses of the marsh mists of the appearances of my mind.

in the paragraph above that begins with another human is all knowledge, all knowledge’s deconstruction, the materiality and immateriality of all things.

in the paragraph above is just another pebble in this zen garden stretching before this and that i to the stars, unseen monks raking, unseen monks constellating, unseen monks whispering, of the infinite love of each pebble, of the sum of all infinities becoming nothing in that way nothing is become.

in the paragraph above i see a ghost of a girl tumbling down staircases of burning manure, men of ostensible maturity and power blanching to fear, for they are seeing saint bernards too large to be saint bernards.  and i want to say – some of me wants to say – i am the girl.  but i cannot.  i cannot for reasons too complex and beautiful and stupid to name.  the reasons are too long.  reasons are always too long.

in the paragraph above is the paragraph below and if you don’t see that you’re dumber than a geriatric cat and i strip you of the name human and turn you into a pebble and you are thereby sanctified in the garden of silences.  these are the paths of knowledge and the signs of the immaterial orders of freedom.