The Whole is Greater
Shaman of Centraxis 8
“Err…” the Cold Wanderer’s eyes roll wildly in their sockets as he considers the limited options available to the trapped hitchhikers. Ram’yana focuses on the pallid neck of the vehicle’s driver, barely visible above the upholstered leather headrest of the Mercedes sedan. Dandruff dots the curving top of the driver’s plastic-coated animal skin seat and his eyes are totally masked by his dark glasses in the rear vision mirror. “Hey, man…” Wanderer drawls.
The younger Centraxian stares at a point between the short sharp border of the executive’s clean-cut dark hair and the starched white collar of his spotless shirt. He opens himself to receive impressions of their host’s intent as the vehicle races along the remote forest road. The teenage shaman perceives no immanently dangerous intent emanating from the stranger, but can’t maintain his composure or concentration in the surprising shock of this repetitious turn of fortune.
Adrenaline blurts through the hitchhiker’s tensing body and his young heart thrums against his inflating ribcage as the careening of their surrounds slows in his accelerating perception. He drifts in slowed motion through the tunnel of the primitive roadway, covered by a deep green canopy that strives to keep blazing sunlight from the living roots and nourishing fungi of the cool forest depths. The shaman’s green eyes shift to watch the impassive driver’s pale half-smile in the rear vision mirror, while dust streams around the fleet vehicle in a crazy flowing patchwork of sunlight and shade. He’s enjoying this.
The Centraxians hold onto the sedan’s centrally locked door handles until the canopy abruptly breaks apart and the Mercedes bursts into a world split neatly betwixt wide open sky and a vast rolling plain of barren brown land, stretching all the way into the hazy distance. They’re no more than a quarter of a mile from the deceptively forested grandeur of the National Highway - now revealed as a narrow strip of concealing camouflage, retained only to assuage the shock and offended curiosity of passing tourists and voters. The car brakes to a sudden halt in a wide graveled parking area large enough to accommodate a large fleet of trucks.
“This is what’s just off the highway,” the driver announces with banal triumphalism as he flicks the switch of the central locking system. He opens his door and springs from the vehicle with brisk confidence, throwing his shoulders back and conspicuously filling his lungs with salty sea air. The passengers unbuckle their rigid bodies and hesitantly follow him onto a gently rolling naked moonscape, totally devoid of life and utterly denuded of cover in the baking midday heat.
A fine haze of spray in the east signals the nearby presence of the
The dusty hippies bask in the insistent glare of his expectation and the blazing heat of the Sun, momentarily too stunned to reply. Ram’yana turns slowly on the spot, taking in the enormity of the devastation that surrounds him. The ground is devoid of any living thing. There’s no sign of a shrub, sapling, stump or blade of grass and not a single bird or butterfly adorns the deathly peaceful landscape. He can’t even see an ant or a single lost scout of the cattle-infested continent’s ubiquitous legions of flies. The churned soil is a roughly leveled crust of splintery fragments, and the earth is completely covered with an endless expanse of tiny smashed shards of trees. Hundreds and thousands of species of plants and animals have been reduced to a drab carpet of woodchips.
“Err…” Wanderer reflexively crouches in horse stance, uncharacteristically lost for words.
“This is what I do,” the elegantly dressed man declares. His well-polished hand-tooled shoes gleam in the sunlight, unmarked by the dusty soil. “We’re just starting timber extracting operations here. This is only the beginning. Pretty impressive though, don’t you think?”
“Where are all the stumps?” Wanderer finally spits out. “There’s nothing…”
“The stumps are part of the resource. We don’t leave them behind to rot when we log.”
“Log? This is logging? You call this ‘timber extraction’?” Ram’yana finds himself flailing for words as he stares at the murdered landscape, searching for something to fix upon in the bland monotony of ubiquitous extermination. He turns around and his eyes follow the crisp green wall of sheared-off trees and undergrowth that fringes the highway with a narrow veil of primordial splendour. The undulating strip recedes into the far hazy distance and the shaman’s eyes slip out of focus as he struggles with his emotions and searches for appropriate words.
This suit’s the devil incarnate, he thinks before correcting his wayward acculturated thoughts. No – he’s a self-servicing tool of Rex Mundi, the magician decides. Then he adds a leavening of compassion and a pinch of insight to the immature confection of his mental meandering. Not a peon in thrall to some feudal King of the World – no, he’s just another fear-filled, willfully self-blinding mortal, desperate to make his mark on eternity.
“Woodchipping,” the young executive corrects him. “We create woodchips for paper production and a variety of other purposes.” Ram’yana can see that The Man is relatively young, probably not quite into his thirties - hovering on the border of flexible youth and grim fossilisation, from Ram’s teenage perspective. The executive spreads his white-sleeved arms wide and embraces the void. “What do you think?” The Centraxian shaman’s rationality sprints ahead of his coiling emotions and their ungracious rag-tag train of thoughts. This hypnotised running-dog arsehole told us he’s been to a brainwashing training seminar; that’s why we’re here; he’s going to try his spiel out on us! The Man continues blandly; “Isn’t this the best use of the total resource?”
The Centraxians consider themselves environmentalists and conservationists in a time when the term ‘greenie’ has yet to be coined; primitive ecologists, they’ve both read Racheal Carson’s Silent Spring along with a range of works from other bell-tolling researchers. They’re well aware of the threats of pollution, nuclear war and bomb tests, chemical contamination, deforestation, biological warfare and intermittent astronomical and climate catastrophes - among other possible challenges their tribe may have to face and surmount in the coming decades.
Yet their environmentalism remains naïve and rather untrained, so Wanderer sputters, “Totaled resource, more like.” He’s untroubled by concerns about soil erosion, water degradation, species extermination, carbon cycle stuff-ups, sea level rises or climate catastrophes. These likely consequences and all the cascading range of vandalistic deconstructions resulting from nature’s commercialised mass murder are quite obvious to the Centraxian logician, but currently utterly irrelevant. All that comes to the Cold Wanderer’s mind as he stares into the bland corporate face of mass extinction and global genocide is a simple, naïve question; “Why don’t yer leave, say, a third of the trees, so there’ll be something to recover - something to grow back?”
The Man inhales deeply, unreeling the scroll of his memorised script and steeling himself for a potentially hostile reception. Ram’yana can easily recognise the hallmarks of decades of privilege and ego-bolstering success in the executive’s every preening movement - the slight elevation of his chin and the suddenly serious caste of his pleasant patrician features; the surreptitious edge of his curling half-smile as he tugs creases from the arms of his tailored shirt; the way he ostentatiously flashes his opal-studded gold cufflinks at the young strangers in an attempt to demonstrate that the hand is faster than the eye. The Man clears his throat and begins a short well-rehearsed oration, outlining Corporate Lore 101 for his small captive audience.
“Well,” he begins, “that’s one way of looking at the resource and I can certainly understand your point of view - but we view matters in a slightly different way. You have to understand that as a responsible employee of a listed, publicly owned corporation I have a duty to maximise the profits for our shareholders. To achieve that all-important end, we must make best use of the available resource in the most responsible and efficient manner possible.” The executive sees that the stunned young men seem quite able to absorb Corporate Philosophy Idea One, so he continues his oration. “We know that this resource is here now, ready for us to use today…”
“It was, you mean,” Wanderer objects.
“Oh, you mean this? Here? This is nothing.” The Man adjusts his sunglasses. “This is just a trial area.” He attempts to hold his audience as both young men turn around in tight circles, conspicuously drawing attention the undeniably vast area of total destruction. The speaker continues, unfazed by their theatrical display. “So to answer your point, this resource is available now. We know what it’s worth now. No-one has any idea what it will or won’t be worth in the future – but it’s definitely worth our while to take it now. The rest is not our concern.” The Centraxians slowly absorb Idea Two of Corporate Philosophy 101 as The Man takes a deep breath and delivers the Third Idea, the classic amoral Corporate coup-de-gras to any objection;
“What’s more, we have many competitors and we know that if we don’t take this resource now, they certainly will. So there would be no point at all in saving a third of the resource for later. It will only be used by someone else.”
Ram’yana and Wanderer mull over the Three Ideas for a few moments while The Man smiles winningly, sure he’s passed the seminal points of economic reality on to the slightly hostile yet surprisingly receptive young hippies. The young shaman struggles to encapsulate the horde of concepts roaring through him, all screaming to be given voice at once. His mouth opens and closes a few times before his tongue unties itself.
“But what happens,” he asks, “when you run out of trees?” It seems he’s caught The Man off guard behind the shields of his black sunglasses and he’s surprised at the answer that springs readily between the executive’s perfect teeth; “Well, when that happens we’ll just move on to another resource.” Multinational Corporation Philosophy Idea Number Four strikes home with deadly, mind-numbing illogic.
The Centraxians look to each other and silently agree that there’s not much point arguing with a madman who has your backpacks locked in the boot of his car. They return his smile for a few moments, thinking of something innocuous to say - but Ram’yana can’t help himself. “What do you do when you run out of air?”
The ironic and insulting double entendre appears to go right over The Man’s head as he takes a deep breath to begin another short speech that the rebellious hippy teenager intercepts. “You’ve learned all this at executive training school, haven’t you? Do you really believe it all?” The Man freezes, suddenly aware of the possibilities of many kinds of vulnerability in the remote empty landscape. He glances at the reassuring sight of a bulldozer working in the far distance.
“It’s not a local company yer work for, is it?” Wanderer squints at him through fogged glasses. “It’s some multinational corporation.” The executive shrinks slightly within the armor of his shirt, withering beneath the stormy grey steel of the Cold Wanderer’s condescending glare. “If I say what I really think, will yer just dump us here and piss off or will yer give me a fair hearing – and still give us a lift?” Time stops for a few heartbeats as they stare at each other through layers of optical glass and acculturated preconception.
The Man suddenly relaxes and drops his arms to his sides, along with a large slab of his corporate persona. He slouches in the enormous wasteland with his two fellow humans, his head tilting toward the maroon Mercedes. “What do you have on your mind?” He doesn’t really want to be doing this, the young shaman sees. He wants to get something off his chest. That’s probably why we’re here… unless he’s hoping for a challenge to his newly-trained brainwashing technique. Maybe he’s a public relations front-man who’s ready to throw it all away…
“Yer’d be, what, not thirty yet?” Wanderer suggests. “But yer can already see the beginning of the long, slow slide to the grave, right? And yer can see what it’s like for the numb and powerless when they get old, huh?” The furtive astonishment that the executive quickly covers with a fixed rictus of a smile shows the Canadian he’s struck home. “Well yer cain’t buy yer way out of reality, man. Why don’t yer forget all that crap and get out while yer can, get on the side of life instead of spreading death?”
“And live on a commune eating brown rice I suppose,” the driver jeers softly. “You can’t change the world like that, my young friend - you’re just avoiding it. You can only expect to have a chance to exert any influence on the system by being part of it.” The hippies watch as a layer of the man’s unaffected veneer slowly peels away when he notices the cloying smudges of dust on the toes of his well ventilated shoes. He unexpectedly squats on his haunches in the dust and gravel and the hippies automatically assume the same position. “You have to be part of the system to even have an inkling of how it really works,” he continues with a serious expression leveling his thin lips, “to have a decent chance to see what really needs changing…”
The Cold Wanderer leans forward and the inveterate game player makes his next move. “That’s what they all say before they give up and sell out. Yer sure don’t sound like yer want to change the system.”
The increasingly beleaguered executive stares into his reflection in the clouded surfaces of his shiny black shoes. Then he tilts his head to the ground and removes his sunglasses before turning a transformed visage upon his interlocutors, his unlined pale blue eyes open and vulnerable as he speaks in quieter tones of sincere reflection. “Look, fellows, I have responsibilities, you know? I have a wife and a young family and I…” He wavers and Ram’yana slips into the breach; “And you want them to have a future, naturally? With trees and fresh air and real quality of life - the same world that your grandparents left for you?”
“That’s a very glib little speech. It’s very easy for you to say when you don’t have a family to take care of or a mortgage to service - or anything else to worry about.” The Man recovers some of his dignity and the rising intensity in his clipped tone borders on outright anger. An inhalation of outrage fills out the exec’s tailored shirt as he springs to his feet, his confident equanimity expunged by a flurried flush of consternation. “When you don’t have kids and a wife to keep or the expectations of your community or anything to think of but your own… pleasure - when you don’t have to consider the future or anyone but yourself...”
All three men suddenly become aware of their respective vulnerabilities as they realise they’re exposed to the potentially wild passions of an unknown stranger amid this remote scene of desolation. But the young shaman likes to think it’s the other man’s innate humanity - and not the impetus of querulous fear - that prompts the executive to squat back on the gravelly ground just as swiftly as he’d stood to yell down at the younger men. He places his sunglasses on his knee, his eyes fixed on the earth as he recovers his aplomb. The Centraxians wait before him, forming a triangle with the young executive at the apex of their foci.
“The future?” Ram echoes. “Is this the way to build a future – by destroying the planet?”
“I think that’s a little extreme…”
Ram’yana interrupts, unperturbed by The Man’s tension. “Trees aren’t timber, you know. Did you ever hear that old saw about ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’?” He continues in a breathless rush before their driver can respond. “An individual tree is a single nerve cell – but the forest is an immense living conscious being made of millions of different creatures – it’s not just a stack of timber. It’s constructed like the human brain and nervous system…” The young shaman leans toward the co-opted young corporate. “…and this place you’ve brought us to is what a lobotomy looks like from the inside. A forest is more than a bunch of trees – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“Oh come now – conscious? Even if we assume…”
“Assume that the precautionary principle is pre-eminent over your simple indoctrinaire corporate philosophy in every respect,” the Cold Wanderer interjects. “You’ve heard of it, I suppose? No? I guess they don’t teach you about logic in business school either.”
The executive stares at the Centraxian general with semi-respectful surprise as he realises the bearded young anarchist is not a completely uneducated moron. He looks toward the splinter-covered soil and the words slip from his lips in a rapid stream as unconcealed concern begins to wrinkle his smooth brow; “I really didn’t want to be doing this, you know, but my career was all arranged for me… laid out and waiting. I’m like a train running along well-laid tracks - my life’s all planned out for me. And yes,” he stares at the hippies and smiles as his eyes flare at the Cold Wanderer, “I have heard of the precautionary principle – you’re exposed to the idea very quickly in forestry studies. It’s a relative concept.” He wipes his brow with his blindingly bright sleeve. “It’s too late for me to change career track now, even if I want to.
“Do you want to?” Ram’yana doesn’t let The Man off the hook. Am I acting like a dog, pushing him further when he’s already laid down his mask and revealed his dilemma? The executive loosens his necktie, and the Centraxian prince fixes on its design - an array of golden crowns on a navy blue field – as his eyes drill into The Man’s incorporated soul. “I don’t know,” the suit replies as his Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “What do you think you’d do in my position?”
Wanderer’s response is reflexively quick; “I wouldn’t ever be in yer position – wouldn’t ever want to. You think yer bargaining your way into a position of power when in fact yer so powerless yer have no freedom at all…”
“Ah, but I’m the one with the car, aren’t I?”
“That’s the kind of poor excuse fer a refuge I was expecting yer to take, sooner or later.” The Canadian removes his glasses and blows on them gently before cleaning the lenses with his cotton shirtsleeve. He squints at his protagonist as he continues. “Company car? Can’t even touch the leather – have to coat it in plastic. Not actually yer own, eh?” The Man’s lips firm into a narrower line. “And if it was, it’d be another mortgage around yer neck anyway, right? So why not use it to take yer family to some better life? Man, this country is paradise! Yer can’t go on fucking it all up like the rest of the world! This is the place to bring up yer family!”
“You don’t know my family,” the executive replies with an obvious effort not to sound plaintive, “or what my life’s like – the problems I’m up against every day. So please don’t think you know what’s best for me…”
“Actually,” Ram’yana interrupts, “we’re primarily just trying to stop you from destroying our planet. The rest is natural compassion for a fellow being, but the most important thing of all is that you corporate guys stop trashing every place you can for filthy lucre.”
“If I wasn’t doing it, someone else would.”
“Maybe – but either way, at least it wouldn’t be you. At least you’d be able to live with yourself with a clear conscience…” The hippy shaman responds with Alternative Philosophy Idea Number One. “You’ll have better dreams, too…”
“I sleep very well thank you…” The Man thrusts himself to his feet again, but staggers in the glaring heat for a moment as he places his sunglasses on his nose and continues. “…in a very fine bed in a tasteful house with a beautiful, ravishing wife who loves me.” He regains his composure and adjusts his tie. “I have three fine children and another two cars at home that are mine – and my lovely wife and I have another child on the way. Can you say the same?”
The Centraxians climb to their feet and dust themselves off. Ram’yana sees the barb strike home in his companion – and feels the dull echo of its thudding impact in his own heart, feels momentarily wracked by the consternation of his puzzled loneliness. It’s the baby in us all, he reassures himself, male or female, crying for its mother… the wish to be loved… But the spike still strikes home. …and to love…
“No doubt your wife profits from all this as well,” Wanderer sneers through his flesh wound. “No doubt you and your family live very comfortably.”
“Well,” The Man says, dusting imaginary particles from his trousers with swipes and slaps of his hand as he turns toward the Mercedes, “whatever you think of it, it’s an extraordinary sight, isn’t it? Not many get to see this, you know…”
It’s hardly surprising. A few hundred yards of cosmetic fringing regrowth shields this rather private corporate exploitation of ‘public’
Woodchippers pay a few cents per ton in royalties after government subsidies are taken into account, as the Friends of the Earth and a handful of other impoverished environmental organisations have been pointing out at protest rallies and market stalls over the previous few moons. For only a few cents a ton, private companies get to cart off and shred irreplaceably unique remote ecosystems - whose plants and animals aren’t even surveyed, investigated or documented before they’re exterminated. When road building and maintenance costs and infrastructure demands are taken into account the government actually pays money to have its forests dragged off.
The Man has donned his visor and is impervious to the Canadian hippy’s arguments. Wanderer recognises the moment to play his last card. “To misquote the wise Native American leader faced with the extinction of his tribe, ‘Only when you’ve killed the last buffalo, poisoned the last river and felled the last tree will you discover that you can’t eat money.’”
The Centraxians are both slightly concerned that Wanderer’s series of cold declamations and Ram’yana’s pedantic entreaties have placed them in jeopardy of being abandoned in this lonely parking lot, to trudge back to the highway with their heavy backpacks. Ram’yana is faintly surprised when The Man turns and speaks to them as he reaches the driver’s door. “I tell you what – I’ll take you another hundred miles or so, what do you say? And there’s some whisky in the car if you fellows like a drink. Eight years old.
“Let’s not talk any more about politics or other bones of pointless contention, what do you say? I want to hear about how you live, and where you’re going.
“What are your names again? I’m John…”
A True Story.
- R.A.
See
http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/
images - author's
This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a link to the original along with this notice. If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment! Thanks for reading this far…
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Please add your perspective to the collective mind NOW! - Prince Ram'yana