Run toward the monster

We live in a time of monsters.

We have always lived in a time of monsters.

The path we will follow in the pages ahead was worn by the monster’s passing. We cannot be sure how many eons that impress took. This road on which we set forth -- unsure who invited us, unsure of pursuit -- is circular but does not lead back to ourselves. Or, better, this labyrinth long ago unlocked itself from time and became a kind of spiral or vortex, where across the shadows you will barely discern (but attend, and you willdiscern) an earlier or a future self, passing, seeking or running, chasing while being followed. 

How did we forget how think capaciously? We somehow retreated into tiny prisons and we called them selves. We pretended they were separate and did not communicate. Maybe only a monster could breach them. We worked hard to forget that history’s long durations open the shared, the vulnerable and the possible. A world of noncommunicating sovereign subjects serves the worst kinds of human power well, serves sovereignty and fascism well, and vanishes our patent commonality. Diminishing worlds, actual or imagined, engender endless contests for dwindling dignities, contests that too often destroy what they attempt to reclaim. Surrender decency, freedom or shared happiness to carceral capture and it becomes hard to think beyond force and violence and competition, so that futurity becomes anchored in mere austerity. We deserve better. We want our utopias back.

The path the monster treads shows a way forward, even when it loops back.

You cannot assimilate what keeps rebuking your prospect. You cannot theorize into containers of the merely known shards and bodies that will not remain stilled. Monsters, treading their circular or vorticular trails, heads buried in a book, always reading, reading: monsters remember what was, what is, what “we” (whatever that indeterminate first person plural offers) could undo or become. History in motion, hazards too restless for totality, monsters endure, bind, hybridize, create. We’d be fools to downplay the monster’s danger, as we are fools to downplay our own, to our own kind: we are unkind creatures who ought to imagine better. Long study will reveal to anyone that running from the monster is useless. You won’t escape, you can’t, you’ll stumble or you’ll become your own worst enemy.

Run toward the monster. A trail that is a spiral has no outside to which to flee.