We have no religion, signposts or zoos. Our hearts are cold. They bleed no more. It’s all over for flagellation and repentance; the whip and the cane have been tossed aside. Years go by; the cold shells of temples stand empty, the carnival goes on. We are never tired. We make no demands. No cheating, no cheap tricks, no sweating blood. Enough fasting, enough arranging for a better life in a faraway place, perhaps, one day, in another world; enough bargaining, enough collecting brownie points for good deeds and noble thoughts.
We take no notice of others. We barely touch one another; if at all, it’s no more than chance brushing against others, sometimes a gentle kiss, the head snuggled into someone’s belly, stroking someone’s cheek. Physicality is not a forte of ours. Something poured into something shapeless. In our mouths, the taste of corroded steel and salt.
The future lay hidden in the plotlines of tawdry 20th-century science fiction films that, as children, we watched in the shopping malls. In the absence of any other guidelines, we relied on what moronic film directors had dreamt up. We had no time to spin visions of our own. We don’t have sufficient data from the outside on which we could now rely. There are many gaps in our programme. The world is unfinished, some plots stop short for no reason, nothing is profound, nothing is forever.
Be brave! We are not a hallucination as we have come to be considered. We do feel the warmth flowing over our bodies, we do experience a tingling in our hearts. On a regular basis, three times daily at the very least, we affirm our conviction that there is life before death. It is still possible to come across decaying copies of the Bible in hotel rooms. All the prisoners have been pardoned. We have forgiven them. We are the Good.
Mother Mutation. She made our lives perfectly psychedelic. We dream our days. Our days dream us. Not much has been left to do. Time has stopped still. Although, and let me emphasise this point strongly: not for ever. When it starts moving again, we will not be able to halt it.
We are unemployed. We use no currency. Government agencies supply us with manna on a regular basis.
My thoughts are ebbing. In your eyes, spirals are spinning. We are one spirit. In our veins, the blood of Scottish spiritualists and Russian architects; we are the children of the Universe. The new spirit returned as a big, fat ram. It brought salvation to nobody, it died for nobody. We are lying on its skin, inhaling its pungent smell which pierces our nostrils and our eyes. We scream in ecstasy. The next day, we fall into a black hole. There are still bits missing in our stage setting.
The Government of the United States of North America sends us good wishes for Christmas and Easter. I think they do this out of habit and a lack of any better ideas. We are The Sovereign Republic of the Spirit.
What our constitution says is more or less this: do what you must, never cease in your endeavour to get to know your fellow humans, keep calm. We take things easy, nothing is hard. We know one another through and through. Each thought, each deed.
Everything that has been good in us is flourishing. Base instincts, weak will and arrogance have finally died a death. Violence is an extinct species, on display in amusement parks. Yes, we do also have amusement parks. And swimming pools that stretch for miles, along woods. We have temples of meditation – small wooden huts on high stilts that rise above the fields. And we also have our art. We apply it brain to brain, eye to eye. We do not buy art, however; we do not hold it. Our houses are not for storing objects. But museums do still exist. They have a special mission, we cherish them. They are our temples, our arks of the covenant, our chariots of fire. In small, round capsules we note all the glances that people have ever cast at objects. They contain lust and admiration. They contain love. One day we will shoot these capsules into space; they will go into orbit and grow in strength. And it is from them that new life will be born.
We have relinquished all our things to museums. We no longer need furniture, souvenirs (after all, we do remember everything), kitchen equipment or cages for domestic animals. Museums deal with material things. Our homes are where the spirit lives. The spirit has a name and a fiscal number.
Our Republic has no borders. There are no border guard posts, no barbed wire, no sniffer dogs. Migrants flow into the Republic in their masses. Alive or dead, here, they will all find a place for themselves. Our homes are their homes. They can set camp as much as they want in our hearts and our memory, in our spare rooms and kitchens. We celebrate their customs, we inhale the aroma of their cooking. If need be, we break open their fetters and babysit their children. We warm ourselves in their warmth.
We do not get older nor do we rejuvenate ourselves. We do not get tired, yet we do not rest. We are not hungry, even though we are never sated. Our bodies are simultaneously hot and cold. They pulsate. On summer nights, waves of hot air can be seen flowing towards the stars. We are one body. We have millions of eyes and hands. We feel the universe more strongly than the universe itself can presage our existence.
Besides, we now know that we are totally alone. There are no other civilisations. We shall never welcome to our planet any Others, any Visitors, any Star Travellers.
Sometimes in the caves of our cold hearts fire burns, but then our heavy heads start spinning. This is the greatest inconvenience of the state that we are in. Crooked walls, shaking floors, buildings keeling over into ruin. We fall into whirlpools that eject us straight onto concrete beaches.
We do not sin in our thoughts or in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. We are the thought. Our bodies are light. We move graciously, soundlessly, we hover slightly above the ground. Happiness has come to us that has as yet no name. It sucks our bellies, it makes us dizzy. Thought of our thought, spirit of our spirit. An emperor in serpent’s skin.
We know that the world as we know it will end exactly in a year’s time. This leaves us emotionless. We have abandoned all fear. Fear is a vain, petty sentiment. We have eradicated it with Mother’s help.
Glory to the human gaze! Lustful and rapacious. It is from that gaze that new life shall be born, it is in that gaze that we shall be reborn without grief or regret.