The Perpetrated World

What do I mean by 'The Perpetrated World'?

I mean what we once called the Real World: the domain of business & commerce; of politics & government; of teaching, learning, and especially of scholarship — that is, teaching & learning in schools, scholarship in the service of making more books, articles, and slideshows for conventions.

I mean the World of Text.

Every one of these enterprises, and the institutions that embody them, is based in text, mediated by text, trafficked through text, backed up by text, created, extended, maintained, and enforced by text — in fact, entirely made up of text.

And text, as we know, is a perpetration — our experience of life rolled up & jammed into little suitcases made of words so they can be transported away from us poor gobbets of meat stuck forever in the Here&Now, without our permission, to anywhere the ghosts need them to be, for purposes beyond our ken.

Worse, our guardians contaminate us with their ghosts from the moment we're born, setting up a chatter that never ceases, so that by the time we learn to talk ourselves we're making up our own ghosts, and end up believing our whole lives long that what the ghosts say is what we are, that what they make us do is our own idea — until it's impossible to even see that what the ghosts want could possibly be different from what we want, or that it could be bad for us to go along with their nefarious plots.

And it is bad for us, and for everything we come in contact with, which we have to rip out & dig up & kill off & move somewhere else to make room for what the ghosts call Our (meaning Their) Magnificent Creations, which are in truth monstrosities of ruination — huge, hideous, dead constructions in which the only life forms left (us) scurry to & fro in the blinding light, bearing more 'creations' for the ghosts from one place to another, & generating more and more text, whose artifacts spawn like pond scum throughout the whole system, piling up to fill every erstwhile empty scintilla of space.

Well, not any more. The ghosts overwhelmed us, the so-called 'system' went chaotic, and then the whole world — text, meat, ghosts, everything — just... well, there isn't a word that can convey the calamity that ensued, nor the sickening silence after that.

What was lost when the ghosts got their way and destroyed everything?

Nothing of value, as far as I can tell. I'm living in the smoking crater of their senseless self-immolation along with that brave, beat-up but unbroken little boy, who knows better than to speak to me, keeping his ghosts to himself if he has any. And so far, I miss nothing of that Perpetrated World, and feel nothing but relief that it's gone. That boy's silent company is more consolation to me than a million million texts could ever ever be. And our brief friendship has given me the courage and the cussedness to keep fighting off what's left of my ghosts until I am at last brought down by the noble failure of the meat.

Point is, nothing important happened, when whatever hit us hit us. I don't know what it was, and I find I don't care what it was. Suddenly one day nothing worked, and then everyone else disappeared. For a short while, it was a scramble to figure out how to manage, but that turned out to be no different from the way it was before, except that I no longer had to consult the ghosts, who were always squabbling with each other about what to do next!

The peace that engenders is beyond price.