Fragments…
If you’ve never tasted colours, and I don’t mean with your tongue, there’s a guaranteed way you can… but it requires effort. And sometimes it can go wrong. A$AP Rocky can tell you.
Growing up in a working-class household, with roots firmly in an underclass (here, I wave my great, great, great-grandfather’s life in your face – pursued across much of Scotland, Lower Canada, northern England, and then transported from the docks of Greenwich to Tasmania, to live the final 16 years or so of his life alone on Betsey Island), it’s astonishing that I abhor racism and other stuff. Racism is inbuilt into British society and its notions of British ‘pride’. So is sexism. So is speciesism. So is homophobia. Fear of the ‘other’ a vital component of colonialism.
University wasn’t even on my radar as a school leaver. The working classes are meant to work. Get a good job. Work hard. Save for hard times ahead. Retire and travel until you’re physically incapable of travel. Die, leaving a legacy of a few thousand pounds for your children. Inspiring.
The early years British education system, in particular, forms an apartheid based upon genitals. School uniforms reinforce this (to this day).
Every field you drive, walk, and/or ride past that has animals in is a death camp. Controversial?
Cruelty to animals is disguised by the mechanisms of capitalism. Factory farming of animals is excused because God says so. Eating dead flesh is normalised through massive effort and will, but kept that way through ignorance and selfishness.
Take a moment. Consider your job. In 200 years’ time will anyone credit it as being vitally important to humanity and the planet we live on? How so?
Humanity is not humane. But people get upset when reminded of this.
Space exploration is pointless given our current attitudes.
It is hard to read/watch works of fiction with half a planet starving, with the history of violence on this planet.
That there is an arms industry is testament to human stupidity. Redundant notions of human ‘nature’ sustain violence.
When I have time I will document the various flyers and paraphernalia from (mainly) illegal house party events and club nights. Once, in Blackpool police station, having spent the night in a cell, and having listened to R.E.M.’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ coming from goodness knows where, and with the person in the next cell singing repeatedly, ‘I’m just a mixed-up kid, don’t know what I did’, the arresting officer had the audacity to ask me to supply him with such paraphernalia. My face said it all…
Yet, for all this, I am optimistic that humans will evolve in ways far better than we currently see of them. Veganism, and ending speciesism, is key to this, I believe. Lovely nights out, pondering dead flesh on menus with loved ones. Stopping in the middle of shopping trips to gulp down cow lactation. Chewing on such colourful sweets, held together with the stuff that oozes from cracked, boiled animal bones – yum. Life’s a carefree hoot, until you question everything…
So question everything…
the textual silence project... 