lightning garden

There are ways of killing and hurting that leave no mark. Everyone has heard the one about phonebooks; that's not true, but not every blow needs to land in order to hit. There are ways of building that require no foundations, and ways of taking down that leave the walls still standing; ways of hunting and stalking that leave the prey unaware they were the quarry even after they have been eaten...

No culture has ever denied death as strongly as ours, ever been as singularly obsessed in the reification of its own endless powers of production, seduction, impregnation, yet as nervously committed to sterility. Ageless man-whore baby satyrns with child wives stretched to the sizes of buildings, of nations, made of plastic and neon. It is not true that we fear death or that we grieve it; both of those would be ways of relating to death, and we have none. A memorial to us is merely perpetual life support: wear a poppy, so that they who died will always remain in agony, so that the eye resting on the moment of our victory will never shift and see the carnage unfolded and the hundred years elapsed. We cannot permit the dead to be dead. Graveyards must be paved over and replaced with a thicket of holograms. The beautiful, youthful king falls in love and enters into the Underworld, and we avert our eyes. We cannot deal with cycles; we cannot accommodate the death of a rockstar.

There are ways of bleeding out that never spill a drop or stain a solitary fibre. Immaculate forever, clean and shiny like your phone that two years from now will be a landfill. Infinite growth: the line forever rigid and strong. No cycles, no coming; we are a society without orgasm, without deaths petty or great. Infinite lust without fulfilment. Build a shrine out of your lover's bones, O maiden. File your teeth and sharpen your iron nails and wait, for there is surely meat coming down the darkening road. Hyena-men compressed thin and two-dimensional loll their tongues and spectate all the ills of the world, condemn the victims, and vomit outrage at the concept of change. Crawl up the steps of the pyramid made of skulls and kiss the crotch of the twitching near-dead body grasping the reins of power frayed thin like cobweb.

We are the greatest society that has ever existed. We are the only society that has ever existed. We will always exist; we will never change. History is our history, the history of hours, and it has ended, it is ours, we contain it, as we contain and containerise all.

There is blood coming out of your tearducts. Vomit and spit stain your makeup. Wrap your heart in cellophane and immerse your skull in a bath of resin. Be like us; be forever.

This vignette has previously appeared in OGDO III.