“None are so helplessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. ”
D is for Dragon
Once upon a time, in a twisted castle on the hill, there lived a Dragon man with princess feet, a ferocious mind and a lion heart he hid behind a coded vault, a hundred hurt-hardened walls. When he wasn’t breathing fire over the denizens of his sea, he made sweet music and wrote salty poetry, shared regularly with absolutely nobody. And when he wasn’t reminiscing about the many mermaids tattooed into the skins of his memory, he fought the cyclical flames of inextinguishable self-doubt, down deep into vast depressions of mountainous debt, insurmountable regret. Not without his reasons, he kept most visitors safely at arm’s length.
From the crystalline pools of the twisted castle flowed a river, eastward and winding to the sea. Downriver, in a bungalow beside the footbridge at the bottom of the hill, lived a monkey girl who danced with waves and had a way with words, or so the story goes. When she wasn’t lost in the ripe fruit of an otherworldly fantasy, she wrote stories of revolutionary realities, where all people were free and living harmoniously with the earth came easily. And when she wasn’t caught in the all-consuming vines of her own dream-defeating insecurities, she attached herself obsessively to the infinite possibilities of everything that piqued the intrigue of her insatiable curiosity.
As the undeniable magic of the jungle would have it, and by no certain will of their own, that Dragon man in his twisted castle on the hill had become monkey girl’s most unusual muse. Something about his mouth she just had to kiss. Something about his voice that made her close her eyes and see. Something about his story she knew was somehow entangled inside her own. As if possessed in reptilian trance, his breath beckoned her being through the trees, penetrating as a moonlit melody, mysterious on the breeze.
****
It was 2020, the year that threw us all for a loop. But not just any loop. The 2020 loop was an indomitable ouroboros eating its own tail in perpetual cycles of crisis and control, sloughing its scales with the seasons only to be reborn from the perilous ashes of its incomplete demise. And there we were, all of us, masked, in separate squares, and trapped inside.
With little hope to lean on, everyone grew obsessed with an orange man who lived in a white house; dazzled by the everyday pomp and circumstance of their ringleader whooping up a frenzied crowd, both sides of the fabricated divide hanging on his every word, enthralled by the spectator sport on 24-hour replay inside the red-white-and-blue striped tent. It was a circus in there; and the whole world was watching.
One day, Dragon man journeyed his princess feet down from the twisted castle on the hill and went to the circus. He didn’t wish to watch the spectacle of the orange man from the sidelines, however. Oh, no. With his feet cut open from the trip and bleeding fresh with life, Dragon man had a different trick up his sleeve. Dragon man wanted to participate! In fact, he went to the circus with the sole mission of dragging the orange man off that pedestal stage and out of his white house. Oh, yes. If Dragon man could convince enough of the circus-goers to join him in his righteous crusade against draconian evil, there would be a new, more copasetic ringleader at the helm. Order would be restored. Right and good would be upheld. The hard-won historical victories of crusaders past would be redeemed. The circus would be less raucous, the spectators less brutish, the show more palatable – progressive, perhaps! – even to those who were still bound and gagged behind their masks, allowed the privilege of watching from the gallery gallows, as long as they didn’t cause a scene. Under promises of a better and brighter future for all – or at least a less evil version of the same circus – Dragon man would get the well-behaved spectators in the gallery gallows to participate, too. Only the ones locked in the dungeon, hidden away from the world, and the ones who had snuck into the tent without the proper tickets to attend, would be excluded from the game.
Dragon man believed it was a plan that couldn’t fail. In a way, he wasn’t wrong.
*****
“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns…. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
O is for Ouroboros
Monkey girl, missing the convoluted character that had become her favorite upriver muse, left her bungalow beside the bridge and went forth to meet him where he was, in the fire of an anxious resolve, at the circus.
Less-than-astonished by the scene at the tent and on the stolen land that surrounded it – millions of people from all walks of life flooding the surrounding streets and ticket offices at the entrance, hustling and shoving and fighting their way in to spectate at and participate in what would soon become the fate of the orange man; and in a sense, their own – monkey girl decided to wait outside. Not because she didn’t care about the quality of the air or the promise of a brighter future for those trapped, gagged and masked inside, but because she knew that win or lose, the red-white-and-blue tent, in both cold hard fact and flimsy façade, would still remain and become effectually even more robust with her participation – solid white concrete at the base, golden strings tied to the multicolor fabric walls, pulled taut from the top by heavy hands unseen; a new ringleader validated by the numbers, vindicated by hegemonic histories etched indelibly into the storybook sands of time.
A few blocks away from the bells and whistles, smoke and mirrors, elephants parading around the room at the behest of both the orange man and now also another man whom Dragon man and others thought would do well enough to lead the circus, monkey girl soon found herself in a world of many worlds, her curiosity piqued in the whet of intrigue at the sights before her eyes and the earth beneath her feet. It was a world of possibility; of dropout dreamers and their dropout dreams; of new-old stories being written into fruition via mutual aid, consensus, intersectionality and horizontal leadership, one act of solidarity at a time; of beings and bodies who would not be bought but rather believed in the power of all the things they had already been doing for centuries, to survive well on the outside. Not without its own challenges, monkey girl soon learned, this diverse world of many worlds embodied ethics of care, camaraderie, community, conviviality, hospitality, justice, and freedom; a shared politics of sovereignty and autonomy, “fugitivity as separate from settling”, an inhabiting of “crazy nonsensical” modes of being, a refusal of the options as given[i]; and a collective “nowtopian” recognition that they could create new structures into reality but never participate in the goings-on inside the tent, as long as the tent itself was still standing, and on all that stolen land.
As Dragon man rallied up a blazing fire of consent to oust the orange man from his white house at the circus, monkey girl danced between the swinging branches of ideas, insurrectionary actions and daydreams, mingling with the bees cross-pollinating across multiple yet kindred realities. In this world where many worlds were both possible and actually happening in the here and now, monkey girl never felt more at home. Dragon man would deem her delusional in the privilege of her hypocrisy, her white ticket dangerously wasted on a fictitious allegiance to the groups of crazy outside the tent, when she could have participated in the most important event at the circus in the ways he and others like him decided were right, real and true. Monkey girl was sad he couldn’t accept her version of truth for what it was, but did not waver in the subjective integrity of her beliefs-in-action, even when they were wildly unpopular among the ones she loved the most.
As the day of reckoning neared inside the tent, the air grew thick with anticipation. Spectators clutched their different-colored tickets which determined how close they would get to the orange man and the other man, ticket price differentials the conclusive factor in how much of a say they would have in deciding both the future of the circus and the whims of the man who would be its ringleader. Soon, the place was a roar of screams and shouts, both in favor of and against the orange man. As the spectators became the spectacle, strangely enough, whether they loved him or hated him, the roaring crowd breathed fresh life into the orange man, as acting ringleader, to preside over the circus as he wished. Of course, those bound and gagged in the gallery gallows or trapped in the dungeon had little-to-nothing to say in the matter; and behind their masks, most of the rest of the spectators, despite their spectacle, could barely be heard. Still, Dragon man carried on in his righteous resolve, believing that eventually, as long as enough people participated inside the tent, good would triumph over evil and he could return to his twisted castle on the hill having done something worthwhile in the world.
Things got silly before they got better. Monkey girl and a few of the other crazies living outside the flimsy circus walls got a wild hair to see if there was anyone trapped inside the tent who wished to escape and join them instead of participating against the orange evil. To their pleasant surprise, many people wanted out. Many people didn’t think the options as given were good enough. So they started digging, down and around and through and out. At the entryways, people were still flooding into the circus, tickets in hand; but from the dungeons and gallows, sidelines and back bleachers, other people were breaking free and draining out, slowly but surely, and mostly underground.
“I don’t want no part of yo’ tired ass country club, ya freak bitch! ”
Finally, Dragon man’s climax moment had arrived. People inside the tent with tickets white, pink, black, brown, red, yellow, and many rainbow shades of grey, waited in baited breath as the orange man was replaced by the other man as the new-and-improved ringleader of the circus. The orange man cried foul to rile up the self-proclaimed supremacy in his white-ticketed fan base, and eventually went, kicking and screaming, not to prison where he belonged but of course, more civilized – he was a former ringleader after all! – back to his penthouse in the tower of his name, his own castle overlooking a city of lights, an ocean of broken dreams. Meanwhile, the orange man’s well-armed fans would not be as easily deterred, and would not leave the circus without a fight. Mayhem befell the crowd inside and many people with pink, black, brown, red and yellow tickets were killed, raped, wounded and maimed. The circus police did little to restrain or punish the perpetrators or protect the victims before the orange man’s militia fans made their way into the streets, hurting others outside the tent as they ran back to their basements to play videogames and buy more ammunition for their pointy white-masked rebellion.
Other expensively white-ticketed circusgoers emerged from the mayhem relatively unscathed, and proudly on the right side of history. The orange man would be remembered as an abhorrent tyrant fallen from the grace of anyone with half a brain, and they, as the valiant public who had used the hard-won tools at their disposal to restore the rights and respect of the circus they loved so dear. Circus goers with tickets of other prices and colors would bury their dead and tend to the wounds of their maimed, as they had done for centuries outside and now for the few decades or so that they were allowed to go to the circus. As they mopped their kin’s blood from the floor, some would proclaim victory and high-five Dragon man as he made his way out of town, head held high. Others would return to their work in the streets outside the tent, knowing that the journey was far from over, and that their time inside was but a chicken scratch on the circus edifice that kept them bound, gagged, masked and still otherwise enslaved.
****
“On my stroll to my voting place on Election Day in early June, I rounded a corner of City Hall and saw not only two dozen armed National Guard troops but a black woman slow-riding her bike in wide, dreary circles that created a miniature ouroboros, bringing her closer and closer to the fenced line of soldiers that drew me in, too. As she completed her first arc, I was able to read the sign taped to the handlebars. In red, white and blue letters it read, “No YOU do better.””
“That’s like that Fred Hampton shit: he’d be like, “white power to white people. Black power to black people.” What I think he meant is, “look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” ”
“There is but one evil party with two names and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. . . Democracy is dead in the United States…. Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord . . . this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest.”
G is for Goodbye
As for the fate of monkey girl and her favorite muse, it would be a politically romantic tragicomedy befit for both a modern Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. Monkey girl would dance herself across a wave and into a different bungalow beside a different river en route to a faraway sea. And Dragon man would return to his twisted castle on the hill to build his fortress back up a little taller, taking a moment each day to laugh at monkey girl’s ludicrous swinging hither-thither dance from branch to do-something-that-looks-more-like-doing-nothing branch, ha-ha-ha-ing himself, at her expense, all the way to the bank. Every four years, he would journey in pilgrimage back down to the circus; she would disappear once again into the underground, dancing to the rhythms of the worlds of possibility outside the circus walls and everywhere in between. And from their separate corners on land and in the sea, they would each be convinced they were doing the right thing.
In a way, neither of them was wrong.
And so, in the looping abyss of 2020’s unforgotten demise, while they might have danced together a little bit longer for the world to see, monkey girl’s unwillingness to join the circus crowd proved ne’er to be redeemed. So Dragon man set her swiftly ablaze, writing her off on pages like kisses on horses into the sunsetting horizon beyond his paperback sea, their unwritten futures burnt to a crisp long before they might have made an otherwise formidable jungle team.
But in the fiery ouroboros of his own cyclical death-and-rebirth, tail-eating disdain, Dragon man failed to anticipate that the skin beneath monkey girl’s well-weathered fur would be resistant to his soul-scorching breath of flames; and, even in goodbye, she would survive to write him into the delusional fantasy of her forlorn fairytale, just the same.
*****
*All characters and events in this story are fictional; any likeness to real life is strictly coincidental.
On Symbols and Etymology
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol adopted into Western tradition through Greek mysticism, depicting a dragon eating its own tail to represent cycles of life, death, and rebirth, as well as fertility and the transmigration of souls. The Greek origin of the word dragon comes from the genitive drakontos, meaning serpent or giant seafish, and is translated literally to mean “the one with the deadly glance”. Related, the word draconian pertains to the ancient Greek politician Draco, as well as in reference to extremely severe or harsh laws, and Drakon, the archon responsible for Athens’ 6th Century BCE code of laws, mandating death as punishment for minor crimes. Also of Greek origin, Western liberal representative democracy is understood as evolving from Greece’s early experiences with direct democracy dating from the 5th Century BCE. Born of the words demos, “the people,” and kratos, “power”, democracy in Greece included three separate governing institutions and promised “equality before the law,” while only 40,000 (male citizens over age 18) of the 260,000-person population in Athens (including 150,000 slaves) were legally allowed to vote. And finally, the noun “Greek” itself has long been used to refer to “unintelligible speech or language, gibberish”, and the phrase, “It’s all Greek to me”, meaning, “I can’t understand it at all”[ii].
“Cassius. Did Cicero say any thing?
Casca. I, he spoke Greeke.
Cassius. To what effect?
Casca. Nay, and I tell you that, Ile ne’re looke you
i’th’face againe. But those that vnderstood him, smil’d
at one another, and shooke their heads: but for mine
owne part, it was Greeke to me.”