Abandoning Mother

The bathroom is filling up with steam, as I take my razor but leave the cream. I will need my blood to be dripping down like little streams, providing the symbolic backdrop to my final act, my closing scene. I’m not a sucker for drama, rather the opposite in fact. But I’m about to cause a major trauma, and my people need to understand why, so I cannot stay abstract.

I’ve turned this room into a masterpiece of emotion and reason, to ease the inevitable commotion and prevent the feeling of treason. Every detail here has a meaning, and therefore every detail is dramatized. Not because I want it to, but so that my message is crystallized. Or at the very least, not immediately compromised.

Ever since the Final Wars, I had started favoring pen over sword, so it is not without irony that in my final writing, I find blood to be its necessary ink. I can see it in front of me. My blood spread across the wall in a metaphorical full circle. My right arm in the water, turning it into a gory pool of lifelessness. My left arm hanging over the edge of the copper tub, with my fingers decisively pointing to the sealed letter on the tiled bathroom floor. Sealed to assert that my suicide was not an act of impulsive desperation, but a very conscious deed of damnation. The act of a Captain, not a coward.

The letter is my director’s cut, to explain every facet of my decision and every variable in my equation to the skeptics and rationalists. I actually wish the letter was enough, but unfortunately, the true tragedy of the rational voice is that it is presumed emotionless. So I need that drama and that non-verbal language to transfer meaning. That need used to be one of my grandest sorrows. I thought it made our species a bunch of morons, not living up to their potential, but consistently blinded by the tangential.

It was my daughter who taught me that this need for symbols is simply human and that emotional people can only truly listen to emotion. When I told her in confidence that I found that outright pathetic, she answered me that I was downright unempathetic. Would she be proud of me now? The boots, the little streams of blood, the circle on the wall, the copper tub, the heart-shaped locket.

But will it be enough? Or do I ask myself that question because I fear this whole play is just a bluff? And I want to call it. Or am I just afraid? Afraid of being judged post-mortem? Judged as a Captain who abandoned ship before it set sail for new fortunes. A parent who abandoned her children. A human who assumed the unholy role of God. Somebody who made the world imagine again, but then turned out to be a fraud.

Is that me? Who am I? And who are we? Am I the number π? Irrationally at the center of a circle that has to become full and infinite? Is that why I have to die? Or is such thinking profoundly illegitimate? What I do know is that I did not ask to become the face of the Final Wars, and then after the hope of a falsely proclaimed new era for humanity. How could I refuse to captain the ship that would bring us to our new planet? It wasn’t vanity. I saw a world in despair and tried to make it imagine again. Then interplanetary travel became an option, and I was tasked to become an alien among men.

It had been about a decade since the end of the Final Wars. Hundreds of millions had died, but nobody kept scores. There was no victor, you see, or an evil defeated. No new era of hope greeted or a quest for justice completed. Those wars had not been prophesized. They had been guaranteed by about every sensible fool on Main Street. That’s what made that long-awaited Armistice Day so bittersweet. The feeling that not much had changed, that it was just a matter of time before the kettle would again overheat.

The wounds on mankind’s soul were open and wide. Except for the rich, almost everybody had been a draftee. Men and women alike, they were stuck with the sticky memory of fleshy debris. They were all in shock, and soon started grieving the very existence of humanity. Some of them denied. Some of them wanted to continue to fight. Some of them tried to see the light. Many of them just cried. But nobody got to acceptance. How could they have? Acceptance requires a story, and there were no convincing storytellers left. This is where I stepped in, without invitation, without hesitation.

I told them how these wars had been foreseen. It was a complex chronicle, but it started somewhere with the advent of the Anthropocene. A new era, driven by machines, and the desire to be seen. Making us addicts to oil, and to the sweet taste of narcissistic dopamine. It was greed that planted its seed. Not to be freed, but to succeed, so we had to concede, to that American dream, so obscene that we didn’t hear Mother Earth scream. We disrupted the Gulf stream, dried out our lands, temperatures so extreme, they turned springs into sands. But even hurricanes and forest fires, couldn’t stop those climate deniers. Science took a hit, and then it took revenge. Instead of compassion, humans turned to self-defense.

All this while there was wealth enough, just too concentrated, which made us agitated, and only more frustrated when our jobs became automated. Centers forgot about suburbs and cities forgot about villages. Just everybody protecting their own privileges. The Anthropocene, a whole natural era constructed by us: Ego’s slaves, driving extinction waves, killing corals as fast as morals, and murdering bees all while preaching a phony peace. As food ran out, and water ran no longer, the war route became inevitably stronger.

During the Wars, I guarded the biggest water treatment facility in the world. I protected it without mercy, while the city vilified the suburbs as lawless wastelands, also without mercy. The outlaws died of thirst, as the cities splurged. Like my water, the injustices were crystal clear, but the elites turned a blind eye, and faked a deaf ear. So, I took matters into my own hands, and dropped flyers over the borderlands. “Listen to me when I’m at my most vulnerable”. It made my patrons in the cities uncomfortable, but I did not care, and on Christmas Day, I walked out of the gates. Buck-naked, wearing just my boots to protect my feet from the boiling earth. Showing my fellow savages that we’re all born in the same suits and we will all die in the same dirt.

One week later, I returned with a blueprint of a water rationing agreement. The first of many. Rationing had always been controversial. It was completely opposite to the basic premise of modern 21st century capitalism: free markets were based on what people desired, not what they needed. This process had accelerated in the 21st century when average became mediocre, and when the civilized world got this really filthy fetish about growth and accumulation, a feast of monetary masturbation.

I thought that my agreements forced my patrons’ hands, and that with the prospect of peace, they reluctantly accepted. But really it was just a useful opportunity to support their plans, with their intentions politically deceptive. Faced with a people so depressed, they pressed me to help them reconcile, give them hope, make them smile. So, I told them a powerful story, about morality and mortality, about Mother Earth’s confusion and our potential for evolution.

I first told the story of Salvador Dali’s copper tub. This was an artist who claimed that all creativity is shared, but once rich, also became morally impaired. Instead of caring like a good shepherd, he spent his richness on buying the copper bath of King Edward. The King had received it as a gift from a Parisian hotel, to wash away the whores’ smell before meeting his wife. Ever since, a copper tub was synonymous with an immoral life.

Then I told them about our obsession for immortality, which makes us prone to our inner brutality. But we are not meant to live forever, and the only infinity we’ll ever know is in our laughter together. And when our living is coming full circle, then that is alright. Besides, we don’t know what holds the night, and that unknown should make us humble and virtuous, rather than egotistical and torturous. Our true meaning after all is caring for each other, even when we suffer. And our ultimate destination is even greater, by returning to our Mother Nature.

But that Mother had gotten confused and angry, since her children abused her so badly. “How could we ever heal?” “Is there still time?” So, I told them to never underestimate little streams, because they can grow up to erode mountains, make space for something new, and create a more harmonious surrounding. But young streams need to be protected, not neglected, and doing that is each our choice, and when we’re many enough, we create a powerful voice, a new paradigm.

And that new paradigm, I told them, comes down to us and the humanity we choose to define. Structures may be rigid, but we are not frigid. Heart-shaped lockets are for the secrets closest to our soul, but to build a new world, we need to relinquish control, show more who we really are, and what conflicts us in both mind and heart. And when we then feel a lighter touch, and have an unjudged conversation, only then can we ever be in a position, to build a serene and peaceful nation.

Immediately after the Final Wars, I believed every word I said. At first, I thought that is why the cities’ patrons made me a moral authority, but later I discovered it was just to reincarnate the feeling of human superiority. They had discovered an inhabitable planet and were planning to leave our own, and the armistice and water agreements were a brilliant gambit, to make sure they set the tone.

You see, the cities’ elites were already criticized, and leaving our planet mother would cost a whole lot of resources. But if they could get citizens energized, then maybe they could temporarily join forces. Make them imagine a new and exciting life far away, a reset as it were, and then promise nobody would have to stay, and get a Captain they would trust for sure. That captain was me.

But then as years passed and preparations got underway, my hopefulness took a blast as I saw our new foundations decay. Like so many times before, men were not all equal, and now that showed once again, when they started booking tickets for our grand human sequel. I tried to fight it, but failed, and I could only observe how the dark side of our humanity once again prevailed.

And so, my simple question is that if it is the rich who can leave us with our mother to die, then really, why? Why should we leave? Why should we keep our species alive? Who do we have to deceive? What should we sacrifice to survive? Should we really kill another ecosystem? Because that is what we will do. Or might it be more a sign of wisdom, if we accept what is long overdue? That we should leave together, but not through space. Instead, for once, be collectively the better, and put to rest, our human race.

Some may think I am playing God, but I think that would have been me captaining that rocket. Now I’m nothing more than a sinful human, dying buck-naked in a bath, with dirty soil in a heart-shaped locket.