Rhizomic Thinking
One wakes up every day to the sound of water gushing through their ears. The sound makes them tremble and shiver. It’s not agony, nor fear but the sheer intensity of existence. So many possibilities in the realm of statistical anomaly that this day could have been the day they entered the metamorphosis, symbiosis, decay, or as simple as death.
One would want to die cool. One should show dying is not the end, nor the beginning. It is not a state, the particles that make up for your breath to pronounce the word death are giving so much joy to so many things, it doesn’t deserve this reputation.
One would think, one is not going to die, this is just a phase. One is not the only one going through this. The world eventually stopped rotating, the sun blinked and died and someone else was still alive. To go through life and not die, is going through life and being dead.
But one is not like everyone else. Nobody else. Different set of DNA, different set of circumstances, different set of choices and here one is, nothing but a mistake, a manifestation of all the particles that has left this world and all the particles that are still in the world, who never chose to be. A conscious mistake.
The death, the horror, the pain is not in the process of dying but in the process of living, in the process of existing in a world that has been defined by people who are long dead, a place where one has been made to stay, a place where one’s worth has been decided by a society that
Partakes in this existence of the One, the capital one. Culture feeds off its own creation, the cyclical traumas that no professional can resolve. Here is a recipe for you: close your eyes, crack an egg on thin air, and let gravity do its job. The fabric that envelops reasoning is the bundle on the back of a scavenger. It goes all around without you noticing it, only small doses can make its acts justifiable, if not you know it is exploitation.
Now, a poem.
a fishing story
by Mia S. Willis
in this one, i am a sheepshead;
a freak of nature and hard to hold onto.
in this one, you cut open my stomach.
gasp when you find blood instead of sand.
according to the legend, i carry the ground in me,
so it makes sense that i want to go back.
in this one, my skin is just a shawl of scales.
just a raincoat.
just something to keep the salts separate.
in this one, you push your fingertips past my teeth.
i bite down.
my empathy atrophies.
you curse the day you caught me.
in this one, we are not careful what we fish for.
the sea is not a wetter sky.
in this one, i am the deadliest catch.
The Violet Weather
He ended up the same way he started out. Alone.
His past remained intact, a collection of mementos, the diary of a man who didn’t deserve to live in his own skin:
Jim. Another soul who sought death. Maybe I should have let him die. Maybe letting him go would have saved me. I don’t know. All I know is, I couldn’t let him go. Not when I had the chance.
A part of me is disgusted by what I did. Another part of me doesn’t care. I still believe it wasn’t my fault.
Jim wanted to die, and I wanted to live. I did the best I could. I tried to do right by him. I wasn’t a bad person, even then.
Yeah, maybe I was. Maybe I’m still fucking bad. But I
But I can replace the name Jim with Tim, or Pam or Laura or Selin. The name is irrelevant when you know the person or the thing carrying that name does not hold a singletude. The uniqueness we assign to momentary dreads or ectasies of life crumble down in the politics of the body. You can’t assume this to be your own, when your skin sheds pieces every second and the book that you are reading or longing for you to turn the first page since many months is turning yellow by the sharp light that is entering through the window of your apartment.
The switchbacks you follow blindly hoping to reach the summit, seeking that feeling of the world being pleasantly-diminished. Each turn replaces a tissue within you, the path constitutes of complex knots of rot and growth. The air is warm but you are not quite sure if this is what you want. You look down and the start seems so far away. Then you realize that the things rely on each other to create meaning. The meaning in the purest form, but also the meaning of scale. The subjectivity of the scale and the awe it creates with its stark contrasts. You from far away are the tiny figure in the middle of the road, but looking down to the lichen growing on the rock with a timeframe that is far more greater than you existence, asks for more attention that in everyday life feels almost ridiculous.
There is no single scale which the nature can be observed, when one steps out of the antropocentric world, the idea of small and big collapses on each other.
A single violet raindrop can fill a whole lake, when it falls slowly and makes the water look like a mirror. The same drop can also fill a puddle when it falls from the sky in the form of a storm.
You are not aware of the scale in which a raindrop falls down from the infinite sky. You just see it fall down from the sky. That’s the only part of the nature that you can see.
When the raindrop falls on you, you start to wonder what it would feel if the same drop would fall on the whole planet. Not just you, but also the birds that are flying around, the trees on the other side of the road, your car that is parked in the garage, the building you lived in, the students in their classroom, the neighbors on the other side of their window that seems to be so close but so far away, the airplanes in the sky, the animals out in the woods, the the the.
This is enough. But also it’s never enough.
The italic text was concatenated using GPT-3.
You can check the visual output of this text, used as a prompt for DALL -E through this link: https://youtu.be/pKBcaGm7E5k
Quick note: I love this poem by Mia S. Willis and I do not own the rights and I hope she doesn’t get mad and sue me for this, peace and love to you Mia, keep on writing stuff that makes my chest shrink, please.
