Civilization is the Vamire God

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered vistage lays, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well these passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains, round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

Civilization, that demon God of madness, power, and war. He floats ethereal through the mind of man like a smog born of the overzealous industriousness of his hands. In a dark irony he has tried to clear the fog from his eyes only to fill his mind this putrid smog. Stranded within this dense smog of his own creation he knows not where he is, nor remembers who, and feels alone. We all know where civilization lies and where it does not, but we fail to know also where its boundaries lie and what defines them. Though still enmeshed within its confines I have come to see it for what it truly is; a prison. For I have looked between its barred windows to the life that lies outside. Nay, the outside that is itself life, the inside the undying death. Inside of these glimpses, have often looked back over my shoulder, back towards the confines, it is from this vantage point that its boundaries take on form and contour. The walls of its citadels are constructed with the brick and mortar of words and beliefs. Built to the precise blueprint of logic by many hordes of devout monks to its sanctity. Each a specialist in its unceasing construction. Each a specialized cog in this mega-machine. In its phallic towers, as if to penetrate the heavens, the bells of manifest destiny sound. I hear it, despite my loathing, all the time, for it is broadcast from every word. What does it sound like? The civilization, this death cult. It sounds of the drone of power plants and the roar of the highway. And the crunching smashing sound of clear cuts and construction. It’s the sound of guns sirens and jets. It is the shallow backdrop of elevator music, and the cacophony of a million talking heads talking to themselves. It abhors the silence necessary to think, and so, my thoughts are clouded and elude me. I see it, geometry of grids, squares, and boxes inside boxes. It is like a fishing net, thrown upon the earth to catch our lives and take them for its own. Or a mold creeping across the landscape and the meaningfulness of it. I taste it; a copious blandness, that numbs and sends jolts of temporary highs while it sickens me and rots my insides. I am addicted to it, as I often try and fail to tear myself from it. They call it food, but it is not food. It is a fake food that we stuff our faces full of while we continue to starve. Oh how I smell it! What stink! It is the musty smell of rot and of death. It is a hot repulsive smell of tar, oil, exhaust, and plastic. It makes my stomach coil and my head ache.
But more e than anything I feel it. Deeply like a sword plunged through the pit of the soul. It’s that omnipresent fear that staves off total revolt. The rage at the fact that the chains remain. That it remains and nothing changes. The pain! Oh the awful pain. It’s the pain I have endured and the scares that remain. The suffering of others that we all know is going on. The incomprehensible amount of accumulated suffering and pain of all the genocide and extinction of our bloody history. The void. The utter loss, and the becoming numb. But under all this, behind it, is the immense feeling of sorrow. That total sorrow. All this, and for what? Nothing but even more of the same. We, our species, stand here with the blood of all life on earth on our hands. We are all responsible for this, the biggest extinction event in the entire history of earth. It could possible take us to extinction as well, and for what? Yet we continue. We all wish to die, it seems. One can see all this in the eyes of all the humans crowding these monuments to our mass suicide we call “cities.” We are all in pain and to varying degrees insane. I am sure of so little, but I know in the depths of my being what has caused all this. I know it all too well. It is my enemy and it is civilization in its totality and has always been so. It is the rightful enemy of all that truly wishes to live. Why do so many plants and animals resist it, these dear friends of mine derided as ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’? They do this out of necessity, circumstance, and the will to live.