Rank & Defiled
Then this happened. Usually this kind of statement is followed by a picture of an engagement ring, a puppy or a baby, sometimes it’s a car and every now and then, it’s keys to some sort of abode. A few weeks ago, I scrolled into such a post on billionaire Twitter and it pointed to a random mass shooting. Mindless and numb, I kept scrolling. Hours later, I sat down to process the experience of feeling such numbness at what is an entirely preventable human tragedy. I find myself thinking about the day I’ll scroll into the headline about the first black mass shooter. Having reached this low point, let’s go with this thread.
Health warning; what follows is (an almost) verbatim bipolar soliloquy. Deep breath.
Nada today. I am full of nothingness for the notions of what constitutes approval or otherwise of this news that here we have another first, last, regular, random, exceptional, whatever. The first to do what has been done by those who occupy the highest rungs of society. Those who define the doing itself. The first is thus chained to preserving what they have attained by the sweat of their brow and not their own path. Fettered for life to follow the lead of those who preceded and not their own path. Their light buried.
Might try again later. Might even love around and find out. Who knows what remains in store for the day, this week, even this life? How many days remain to greet the sun, to kiss the ground, to bask in the warmth of a sunny afternoon; to swim in the ocean. To awake with joy for a new day and to grasp the tendrils and threads that unfold and weave themselves into the experiences of a daily life. One lived not just lived through until the last day. How many days remain of sitting with the questions of; should I call, what might happen and am I going to let this terror holding me in stasis keep a hold over me? Why do, why not do, why even question what is fulfilling to your being and being alive, not just living.
As ever, if we knew all the answers, we might find ourselves elsewhere and not here. But here we are and there we wish to be and it is the space between the where we are and where we wish to be that defines the limits of how we see and know and engage with the world and its vagaries manifest inside the dull mindsets of the prevailing socialisations and politicisations.
What is possible, even how we construct and consider what is possible is only possible within the deep memories of our entire past, every lived reality and often, the smallness of what we have reduced ourselves to in human form. Tidy consuming units inside an all consuming system of unbalanced exchange of monetary value for time.
In this vortex of claimed, fabricated reality with the apex repeatedly manifest so that everyone can know exactly how high up or low down they are on the ladder of worth. Of belonging, of being, of humanity’s entire being, reduced to a convenient set of steps occupied by the most holy at the top and the rest below. Depending on where your race, skin colour, hair and other accidents of birth place you, you might someday aspire to be the first to occupy a space that for centuries before was occupied by the most holy on the hierarchy; but only if you’ve been the good for a long time. Being the good means you rose above your station. You clambered and crawled over the rank assigned by birth and circumstance and overcame. You conquered all those obstacles that the most holy never even have to consider. And you kept your peace while you did it. Not once resorting to letting your birth or circumstances determine your destiny to be the first.
In fact, you now represent the whole race sitting in that same chair warmed for centuries by the most holy. This is your success and proof that the entire system is meritorious, not loaded in favour of any single one. Least of all the most holy. After all, the entire culture, religion, economic system and even death is based on their ideas. They invented everything from philosophy to the light bulb and they developed everyone else on the ladder below them. Without the most holy, would you have roads? Farms that produce millions of tons of mono-culture GMO crops every season? Would you even have art? poetry, theatre, films, cameras?
Sure, it’s all very well to be sitting here in a coffee shop owned by the most holy working on a computer invented by the most holy and complaining about the system; you’d be stuck under a tree in the veld if we, the most holy, did not come here and claim this land as our own.
Rest assured, the conversation (if you can grace it with such meaning) always ends with: And anyway, if you disagree with this system, tell me — what is the alternative?
Now imagine this child. Fated by birth and other natural issuances to early marriage and likely a profitable corner store is now on a seat warmed by the most holy for a century. For if this child of the soil can overcome so much and rise so high; then let the rest of you lazy turds not tarnish their rise with your claims that s/he represents, not us but those who have warmed those seats for centuries, the most holy on the ladder of the thing we call society.
Making choices while there are days left to graze in the sunshine is surely a privilege of those not sold on the idea that this rank and file structure is the ultimate of what we are, who we are and especially why we’re here. Unlearn. Everything.
Rank & Defiled is by June Uno. S/he was unmedicated and serenely lucid while AWOL from a chamber of horrors sold to us as cutting edge medical science.
© June Uno for Oppi Stoep as narrated to Jesh Baker. All rights reserved, 2023
