Rob Anybody
For those of you that find Rob Brezsny intolerable...carry on. Otherwise...
This made me cry.
I feel closer to you when I imagine that all of us are collaborating to fight
monumental dangers. The telepathic links among us heat up when our
emotions register the possibility that a global cataclysm could wipe us
out.
That's why I think of the nuclear bomb as a gift. It's a terrible and sacred
taboo that mobilizes our love for each other better than any other
symbol. It's the superhuman profanity on which all life depends and
against which all values must be tested. Shadowing every one of our
personal actions, the bomb is the fascinating blasphemy that won't stop
ranting unless we're all very, very good.
In the quiet abyss of our imaginations, we unconsciously worship it,
believing in its extravagant potency as if it were a god. It is the most
spiritual, most supernatural material object in the world, a fetish that has
the power to literally change all life on earth instantly and forever. We
agree to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its apparition above all
other apparitions. No other spectacle inspires more perverse attraction.
And yet it's secret. How few of us have ever stood next to the magic
body of a hydrogen bomb in a missile silo or laboratory-breathed in its
smell, touched it, communed with its actual life. Its presence among us is
rumor and mystery, like flying saucers and the afterlife. We hear stories.
At night our dreams turn the bomb into the philosopher's stone, the pearl
of great price, the doppelganger of the messiah, the violent ecstasy of
religious conversion. Our blood is alive to its alchemy, alert to its offer of
the blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We recognize the bomb as
our impossible teacher because it harbors a dangerous light that seems to
mimic the sun.
It's ours. We made it. We imagined it into existence so we could
remember that we are all one body. When I fantasize the bomb vaporizing
me into its pure primeval heat and radiation, I remember that you and I
are made of the same stuff. The bomb frees us to imagine that we all live
and die together, that we are all born out of Adam, the indivisible
hermaphrodite god of our species. And we can return now because we
never left.
We need the bomb. We need the bomb because only the tease of the
biggest, most original sin can heal us. The bomb is a blind, a fake, a trick
memory we're sending ourselves from the future that shocks us better
than all the abstract devils.
Let's call the bomb a love that's too big for us to understand yet. Let's
say it's the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that wants to cure
us so it doesn't have to kill us. Let's say it's the last judgment that
promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means.
*
We have genetic potentials and divine powers so undreamed of that they
will feel like magic when they finally bloom. But they may remain partially
dormant in us until we're terrified not just of our individual deaths but
also of the extinction of the human archetype.
Bless the fear. Praise the danger. O God of Good and Evil Light, let the
ugly power fascinate us all now. Let it fix our dread so precisely that we
become one ferocious, potently concentrated magician, a single guerrilla
mediator casting a spell to bind the great Satan bomb. There will be no
nuclear war.
This made me cry.
I feel closer to you when I imagine that all of us are collaborating to fight
monumental dangers. The telepathic links among us heat up when our
emotions register the possibility that a global cataclysm could wipe us
out.
That's why I think of the nuclear bomb as a gift. It's a terrible and sacred
taboo that mobilizes our love for each other better than any other
symbol. It's the superhuman profanity on which all life depends and
against which all values must be tested. Shadowing every one of our
personal actions, the bomb is the fascinating blasphemy that won't stop
ranting unless we're all very, very good.
In the quiet abyss of our imaginations, we unconsciously worship it,
believing in its extravagant potency as if it were a god. It is the most
spiritual, most supernatural material object in the world, a fetish that has
the power to literally change all life on earth instantly and forever. We
agree to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its apparition above all
other apparitions. No other spectacle inspires more perverse attraction.
And yet it's secret. How few of us have ever stood next to the magic
body of a hydrogen bomb in a missile silo or laboratory-breathed in its
smell, touched it, communed with its actual life. Its presence among us is
rumor and mystery, like flying saucers and the afterlife. We hear stories.
At night our dreams turn the bomb into the philosopher's stone, the pearl
of great price, the doppelganger of the messiah, the violent ecstasy of
religious conversion. Our blood is alive to its alchemy, alert to its offer of
the blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We recognize the bomb as
our impossible teacher because it harbors a dangerous light that seems to
mimic the sun.
It's ours. We made it. We imagined it into existence so we could
remember that we are all one body. When I fantasize the bomb vaporizing
me into its pure primeval heat and radiation, I remember that you and I
are made of the same stuff. The bomb frees us to imagine that we all live
and die together, that we are all born out of Adam, the indivisible
hermaphrodite god of our species. And we can return now because we
never left.
We need the bomb. We need the bomb because only the tease of the
biggest, most original sin can heal us. The bomb is a blind, a fake, a trick
memory we're sending ourselves from the future that shocks us better
than all the abstract devils.
Let's call the bomb a love that's too big for us to understand yet. Let's
say it's the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that wants to cure
us so it doesn't have to kill us. Let's say it's the last judgment that
promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means.
*
We have genetic potentials and divine powers so undreamed of that they
will feel like magic when they finally bloom. But they may remain partially
dormant in us until we're terrified not just of our individual deaths but
also of the extinction of the human archetype.
Bless the fear. Praise the danger. O God of Good and Evil Light, let the
ugly power fascinate us all now. Let it fix our dread so precisely that we
become one ferocious, potently concentrated magician, a single guerrilla
mediator casting a spell to bind the great Satan bomb. There will be no
nuclear war.