Five Empowerments from Video Games in Troubled Times

It’s 2020. COVID-19, lurching authoritarianism, mass atrocities. Chances are the political and human rights conditions of your country – or the one you are stuck in, like England – have become so farcically obscene that you are challenged to hold together the sanity, let alone the words, to coherently critique it.

For the majority of reasonable people, the recent years have been anywhere between troubling and downright wretched. What we are experiencing is no less than the breakdown of the promise, indeed the premise, of modernity: of a world where tomorrow is supposed to be better than yesterday. Instead we have let yesterday's darkest horrors return and put our tomorrow at their mercy.

We each do what we must to survive and make meaning in this nightmare. For me it has meant looking once more to video games, which are full of such meaning and have helped me so much to navigate the madness of humankind before. Here I would like to pay respects to five of my recent discoveries, and explore some of the power they offer to struggle on through an impossible world.

There may be mild spoilers in this article for each of these games.

1) The Power of Freedom: The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild

2) The Power of Perspective: Fire Emblem – Three Houses

3) The Power of Distance: Animal Crossing – New Horizons

4) The Power of Presence: Assassin’s Creed – Odyssey

5) The Power of Will: Xenoblade Chronicles

COVID-19 is Not the True Enemy

Image: New Scientist

The COVID-19 pandemic is a common threat to all humankind. Much has been said about the need to put politics aside to unite against it. If only. For in this world of our making, COVID-19 is extremely political and is becoming the gateway for something far deadlier.

The pandemic was not unpredictable. Warnings and precedents have been there for years. It has only done its damage because of the political and cultural failure of all countries to build and protect strong public healthcare systems; to prepare even when they knew COVID-19 was coming; to tell the truth about it; to mount an informed and effective response; to cooperate with one another against a challenge to them all; and most fundamentally, to value real people, with real lives, over abstract totems like “the nation” and “the economy”.

But the problem goes beyond failing at a pandemic. The problem is one of power. It is of how human societies, for years, even decades, have been handing their power to those who could not care less about human death and suffering; and that these Trolls, as we might call them, are finding in this virus a springboard to launch their abuse of humankind to unstoppable heights.

The Trolls take many forms. Authoritarians, nationalists, gender-policers, and the cultists of the market all stand among them. There are many well-trod roads to Trolldom, often from opposing directions, but two characteristics bring them together:

     a) The belief that life should serve power, rather than power serve life;
     b) The subordination of all things, even truth itself, to the pursuit of that power.

The sum of the Trolls’ threat far exceeds, and will long outlast, that of COVID-19. This is not to trivialise the death and agony the virus wreaks as we speak. But COVID-19 will pass, as even the deadliest pandemics in history did. By then it will have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Trolls, for their part, killed hundreds of millions in the twentieth century alone. They will do so again if we allow them to claim the twenty-first. And by that point they will have compromised our response to the challenges of climate change, making their threat, unlike the virus’s, existential.

Conclusions on Happiness

A drawing from the midst of catastrophic mental breakdown. Tokyo, March 2016

In general, we wish happiness for the people we care about.

Nowadays I find it very difficult to feel this wish. Now it may just be that I am a terrible friend. But maybe there is something else to it, too.

In Japan, a country I am about to leave after five years, I experienced for the second time a long, dark night of the soul. It was most of all in the unspeakable pain of this ordeal that I became conscious of the smiling masks and proclamations of happiness that surrounded me everywhere. Here there is no escape from it. It appears that displaying happiness at all times is seen as an obligation, policed in everyone by everyone; while on the other hand, expressing a hint of dissatisfaction is a considered a sin which merits the punishment of social death.

For long, long months, I would find not a shred of compassion in my surroundings. Even while butchered inside by neverending heartbreak, I was shunned, judged, rumoured about, lectured to on Reality and How Life Works, and told I was faking it for attention. There were even those who condemned me for writing critical stories and sad poetry, and said, as though it were obvious, that I should try writing happy things instead. Tokyo was a perfect zero-empathy environment which I barely survived, has at the end left me shipwrecked, and whose wounds on my soul will burn for years to come.

Perhaps that is why I have come to look upon happiness as a loathsome, horrible thing.

Tokyo, March 2016

Indeed, in a world as oppressive and exploitative as this one, there are few things I find so repugnant as happy and comfortable people. The instinct, when faced by those people, is to rage: how dare you find it in yourself to be satisfied with this world, where your happiness is necessarily enabled by systems whose defining feature is their destruction of the bodies, minds, hearts and souls of every person they were not designed to benefit?

In other words, each of us who is in a position to be happy, is there not because he or she has chosen it – enough of that feeble fakery, those endless platitudes that you make your happiness for yourself. No: if you are capable of choosing to be happy, it is because you are privileged with at least a certain condition of resources, relationships or power over your life to be able to do so. It is because you are not shrieking with the impossible pain of having those conditions robbed by the social and economic structures under which you live when they deem you different or inferior.

And that is why to wish happiness for those I care about would feel like wishing a curse upon them. Wishing upon them a toxic condition: the ability to be alright with a broken reality, to be happy while knowing that it makes them complicit in, say, the established structures of family or affectionate relationships, the employment structures, and the hierarchies of race, sex or class that they happen to be privileged by, and which in the same action exclude and tear down so many others. What astronomical selfishness, what barbarous indifference, is required to feel such happiness! Is that not a dehumanizing condition to live in, in the same way that torture also breaks the torturer?

Perhaps that is why happiness comes across as so hideous to me. Only a heart of the darkest villainy could truly feel happy and satisfied in a world like this. It does not matter if it was not their hands that built their pleasure boats, or shaped and filled the canals of blood and tears through which they ride them. They are wilfully benefiting from that infrastructure, and that makes them complicit in its crimes.

Tokyo, April 2016. The allusion is to the convenience stores and separation of rubbish types in Japan. Above the door: “Society”. On the bins, from left to right: “unhappy people”, “thinking people”, “feeling people”, and “non-burnable rubbish”.

Perhaps deep down, many of them know this. Perhaps all such happiness is a mask, however thick, to conceal a conscience wracked with poison and decay, and which, deep in its inner sanctum, knows its own feebleness, and dreads a day when it will be measured and held to account for what it has done. Perhaps the happy person is really a broken and fearful wretch who deserves to be pitied, rather than despised.

Of course, the same has been said of torturers too.

Or maybe they are just ordinary humans trying not to be driven mad by this world, and it is I who is the villain for attacking them for this abominable crime of being happy. But perhaps who is right and who is wrong no longer matters – who after all can judge?

What it means though is that happy people cannot be my friends. We seek opposite things for the world. They seek the continued existence of the systems that enable their happiness. I seek to cast those systems down in flames and remake this as a world for everyone – myself not included, for I am exhausted of it all and long only for my end, the release from this pain. But if by then I have succeed in upsetting those happy people, in injecting enough doubt and discomfort to make them reconsider whether this world is really as okay as they insist on believing it to be – maybe then, this wretched life will have accomplished something worthwhile.

An Intermission to Beijing - and, with sadness, some reflections on Toyko after five years living in it

There is an irony to coming up for air in a city synonymous with some of the worst air pollution in the world.

These days the sun does not stand at midday so much as stagger and clutch at curtains of smog.

But after five years in Tokyo which have descended into a desolating and futile ordeal, a brief escape to China to visit some old friends provided a valuable dose of perspective.

Tokyo is a bubble: an artificial self-contained world which soaks at your soul, slowly dissolving away any distinguishing features until – if you are not destroyed resisting – you have been absorbed into that city’s socio-economic illusion, by when everything outside that membrane appears universes away. And now, as I contemplate with growing finality whether to bring my time in Japan to an end, just a few days looking in from outside proved invaluable.

I was a Chinese Communist once. During my school days in London, in an environment of arrogantly triumphalist right-wing capitalist menace, it was all I could do to draw upon my interest in East Asian history and half-Chinese ethnic heritage to build up a defiant identity-fortress of revolutionary ideology and red books and banners to counter them.

Nowadays I no longer do -isms, but this was a crucial period in developing values of my own, as opposed to submitting to allow any society to feed me its own. However I was never a friend to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has yet to face up to the many atrocities it has caused and errors it has made, most or all of them needless, and most tragic perhaps in their squandering of the real opportunity and hope that movement represented in creating something better for the world, all the more so today.

 

And yet for better or for worse, China has always been in some way a part of me. Perhaps family connections were also involved, whether in the China of great upheavals from my parents’ own stories, or in those heroes of the 1980s democracy movement I came to know and in some cases meet through my father’s diplomatic work. Although I would never call myself Chinese any more than any other nationality, this is a country which has always held a certain connection to my soul.

Which is strange, considering I had only been there once, in the mid-1990s, long before my own communist period. I was too young then to remember much of that trip now; it lasted only a few days, its outstanding memory my father’s finger-waving altercation with the clerk at the Forbidden City who attempted to charge him a higher price to enter for being foreign.

That at least they no longer seem to do. Much has changed in this country in the last couple of decades, or so it is said.

 

Perhaps on that visit I also entered the hutong (胡同) streets and alleyways to visit my parents’ own old friends, made in the turbulent days of transition from the madness of post-Cultural Revolution xenophobia (I have heard that it was too dangerous for my parents, one Chinese and one British, to walk down the same street together) to the opening and reforms of Deng Xiaoping.

This time at least I was better aware of these alleys’ significance. The hutongs are the traditional heart and soul of Beijing – hence why, in the name of that strange religion we call development, we have seen fit to wipe them from the map to make way for soulless high-rise apartments and skyscrapers.

Nonetheless no small number of hutongs remains, and at first sight, especially if one is used to the relatively immaculate streets of a city like Tokyo, they can project a shabbiness that disconcerts. Walls and vehicles lie in rusting decay; rubbish overflows from bins uncollected, and all around drift the sights and scents of questionable foodstuffs being prepared under still more questionable sanitation. But from beneath those first impressions rise reassuring currents of genuine humanity: the dwellers here know each other, greet each other with warmth or properly shout at each other when angry. There is a real community here, living amidst walls whose purpose seems less to keep people out than to whisper stories of hundreds of years of continuity: any alley may have its own tale to tell of ways of life unchanged down the centuries, illustrious sons and daughters, thriving markets and businesses, abiding temples, or dissidents hiding from palace or party authorities.

Beijing and Tokyo are both cities that have utterly transformed over the last seventy years, and been heavily critiqued for what they have sacrificed to do so. But in the hutongs of Beijing that remain, the livelihoods and community bonds of the laobaixing (老百姓, “old hundred surnames”) – the ordinary people of the city – are in plain view, in a way which to my knowledge has no real equivalent in Tokyo.

A World Without Gender

Can you imagine a world without gender?

No masculine. No feminine.

We do not need them. We are one hundred billion, not two.

For men are from Earth and women are from Earth

And so too all those not men or women.

A world where to be one sex or the other means absolutely whatever you want it to mean.

A world of actual people.

Can you imagine it?

A world where women and men are equal

For your sex says nothing about your power.

Thus, the power of women restored to the legends, the media, the books, the films, the games

To the workplaces, where there are no “men's jobs” or “women's jobs”

To the parliaments and politburos

To the laboratories, boardrooms, courtrooms, bedrooms and sports fields

As well as to everywhere else.

Everywhere else.

No longer female objects to male subjects

Rather, subjects all.

A world which looks up to women. Can you imagine it?

A world where we are not ashamed of our own sexuality;

Break free of the stigmas, tricks and taboos that tar it with filth.

When shall we cease to cower at our own damn body parts?

For sex is not dirty. Coercion, censorship – these are dirty.

So let us speak of it! Free, informed, constructive

Not with tittering panic, but logic, magic and rigorous dignity.

A world where to be a sexual being is a wonderful thing. Can you imagine it?

And while we are at it, a world where we no longer serve that terrible myth, that such a thing exists as Normal sexuality

Nor cast out or punish those who do not fit it

But recognize instead that all sexualities are different

And that this, too, is a wonderful thing.

Where we cease to insist that there is one way for male sexuality, another for female sexuality

Nor impose a single standard of beauty upon us all

But rather understand that it is okay for women to be big, or men to be small

Or women to be strong, or men to be weak

Or men to love men, women to love women, three to love three, four four, five five

And that none of these is better or worse, more right or more wrong than all of the others;

That wrong is not what is different, but what hurts.

A world at peace with its beautiful diversity. Can you imagine it?

A world where affairs of the heart are free of competition and strife: not a battlefield, not a market, but a realm of joy to which none shall be barred from entry

None left to cry alone

None left un-hugged.

A world where societies do not expect diverse human beings to live under fixed, rigid systems

But nurture all possible arrangements of love and family

So that all might live true to their own hearts and minds.

A world where the power of love, of those who wish to be together, is supreme

To never be split by the guns and laws of nations, nor the fists and blades of dogmas or interests

And where love is love: not a point-scoring contest, not a tool of status or gain, not a test of conformity to masculine and feminine standards which do not exist

But a true concern and devotion to fellow persons born of the stars.

A world where tribulations bring us closer, not drive us apart

And where at last, for goodness's sake, we drop the lie that nastiness and cruelty is in the nature of these things

And understand that love does not hurt; only societies that fail at love hurt;

That there are no star-crossed lovers, only society-crossed lovers.

A world of love. Can you imagine it?

And yes, a world with no rape. No sexual violence.

A world where we understand that force has no basis, no place, in our sexual nature

And never has, and never will.

For these abominations are born not of flesh, but of that meaningless conflict of female and male

Of masculines and feminines:

Nothings we invented from nowhere.

Instead, a world where we can no longer conceive

For one to know pleasure from the carnal agony of another

Nor see our bodies reduced to objects.

No, not only a world where rape does not exist

A world where it cannot exist

For so long as it does exit, the human race prostrates itself in disgrace before the universe.

No more. No more. A world of sexual peace. Can you imagine it?

That is a world without gender. Can you imagine it?

BUT WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO IMAGINE IT

WE HAD A RIGHT TO THAT REALITY

THAT WAS TO BE OUR WORLD

Break now from the mountains of bone and blood in which these madnesses have buried us

For madnesses they are, horrors, hells, and nature birthed none of them.

All, we created.

All, we must un-create.

Do not dare, human, to call it Idealism

For that is a label spoken by cowards, monsters and fools.

You fiends, you fiends, you are born of the stars! Why then do you not love?

Enough, enough, go and get back your love!

Will you build a world free of gender?

Or will gender build a world free of you?

3) AOMORI CITY 青森市 – Rassera, Rassera: The Story of the North

A voyage to Aomori, Part 3 of 5

From the sanctuary of Osorezan I crossed back to this world of artifice and illusions. A two-hour descent from the Shimokita Peninsula by train brought me to Aomori City (青森市), the capital of Aomori Prefecture and my base for a few more days of northern exploration.

Aomori. It is a name synonymous in the Japanese imagination with scallop-fishing, apple-growing, and above all the Nebuta Festival.

The city perches at the south end of Mutsu Bay, at almost the geographic centre of the prefecture, where it brings together the diverse cultures, histories, trades and forces of nature of a land whose present form is of very recent construction. Most of Aomori City as we know it today was built upon the wreckage of World War II, while the concept of Aomori Prefecture as a coherent unit is scarcely a century old. Let's take a look at the story of the north end of Japan.


The First Peoples and the Japanese Conquest 

If we speak of illusions, we should do away with one of this country's most popular: that is, the myth of the homogenous nation. The closer you actually look at Japan, the less escape there is from the hollowness of those claims that this is a land of one people, one ethnicity and one culture.

Get on a bus at Aomori Station and within twenty minutes you come to one of Japan's most interesting archaeological excavations, right there in the suburbs of Aomori City. The oldest finds at the Sannai-Maruyama site (English website here) date back almost 6,000 years, to the world of the earliest known inhabitants of this region.

For Now I Stand Upon the Threshold

The rhythms of a broken mind

A poem

23rd October 2015

Many were the dreams

Dreams of the world this could have been

The world this should have been.

Dreams of love.

How much of what I did was good?

We are humans. We love. Upon our love we build society. Social animals. Interdependent. We need one another. We build one another. Love sustains us.

All of us can know this. You too.

People matter.

But the failures of love – wars, atrocities, exploitations, the nasty:

Those were mistakes.

Mistakes to put right.

A better world. A world that left no-one behind.

A world where the joy of love reached everyone.

A world with no place for oppression, coercion, exclusion, reduction and arrogance.

Not a perfect world – what is perfection when all are unique, diversity good in itself?

But at least, a decent world. A respectable world.

A world that cares.

Was that too much to ask?

Such were the dreams.

How to make it better?

How to help people?

Start a revolution in China. A peaceful one – but no, I see, the problems are deeper.

A world revolution, change the governance, the ideologies, the institutions – no, no! The problems are deeper by far: here, they are right here, the blades, the blades!

Why? Why! Not love!

They don't want my love! They just want me to be Normal!

Not Normal! Not Normal!

Torture, torture, torture. Torture, torture, torture.

Stop, no, stop, no, why, please stop –

The voices.

The voices judge. Always judge, all times, all places, new mouths but the same voices:

Tough. Shit happens. Life's unfair. We all have problems. Stop complaining.

You're making it bigger than anyone wants it to be.

You hurt if you let yourself get hurt. Your strength is determined by you.

Not trying! It's because you're not trying!

Pain because you choose to focus on the pain.

Get over it. Move on.

Pretending. Exaggerating. Melodramatic.

Drama queen.

Taking without giving, always taking without giving.

It WAS your fault. It WAS your fault. It WAS your fault.

Oh, will you just LISTEN!

The drums of hell, they timed the thrusts and twists of their blades to their beat

Till blood itself bled, tears wept tears, life itself extinguished.

And so I fled, sought exile in the land where all are equal.

I reached its border – the Thames. There I shook hands with Death. He is not so bad.

He did not call me an economic migrant.

Freedom in his realm. My claim accepted. An end to the madness. An end to the pain at last.

I could have gone in. A home, at last, a home.

And yet my task was not yet done.

Ripped a thousand ways by pain, still I loved. Still human. Still human?

So I turned. Came back to the world that was wrong.

The world was wrong.

How could we do it? How was it possible? For are we not humans? Do we not love?

Some things should not exist. Cannot exist.

(Gender, for one.)

They existed.

And then we called them reality.

We liked them.

We wanted them.

Human nature, we said. The way life is, we said.

The real world, we said.

Accept it.

Otherwise you are going to find life very difficult.

It was wrong. The world had all gone wrong.

It could not go on the way it was. It had to be fixed. We had to be humans again.

For years I wandered. Sought to learn, to understand:

What was wrong? To know the meaning of sanity in a world gone mad;

To find a cure for the madness of humankind.

How much of what I did was good?

Over the years, it ate away within:

The pain that gnashed the heart, that gnawed the nerves.

Social with no society:

A stranger. Strange everywhere.

Alien.

Dreams of love. Dreams, dreams, dreams. Cold and dark were the nights, darker the days.

Alienation.

A world where all are aliens to all

Where love is only for those who change their thoughts to accept that this is good;

To be happy with it – no love for those not happy.

(Though then, was that love at all?)

At last I left the Western Hell for the Eastern Hell.

Maybe it would not be hell.

The mountains, the forests, the fuzzy bears, the trains that worked;

A place of rest.

Recover, improve, find a way to do good again.

Alien among aliens and thus no longer alien, for when all are aliens all belong.

No. Still alien.

Still the world was mad. No, all our worlds were mad.

Still that world's rewards were for participants in madness;

For those who questioned, coldness and contempt.

Accept it. Life's unfair. Shit happens. No-one cares.

What is, is right – there is no should. Say “should” and you are weak.

Do what others do, think like others think

Be strong in the ways we want, not the ways you want

Be a nationalist. Make money. Be masculine or feminine.

Dance the gender dance

Strange that you can't

Well then, love is not for you.

[Gaman], they call it here.

Endurance.

Endure. Endure. For I could not love; I could not love; my love brings disaster.

Endure the unendurable. The rift grew ever wider, a hole inside that nothing else would fill

Not the mountains, not the forests, not the trains that worked, not even the fuzzy bears

And which, so long as it was there, made nothing happy, nothing fun.

How are you? they ask. How are you?

Suppress the pain: “Fine,” you say. It is a lie. So is your smile. They believe it.

Or, “Actually, not so fine. You see....”

Burning eyes of laser judgement. What? they gasp. You're not supposed to say that!

Nobody's actually fine, you know that, we know that, but if you say it out loud we might have to think about it!

Shun. Shun.

Too painful to live – but then, why live?

To spare distress in those who wished I live.

To change the world, that none need know this pain again

For did you think death is the worst that happens in this world?

He is not so bad. Some of you are worse.

Too painful to live. I never wanted to live.

Lucky, they say. Lucky. Lucky. You do not see how lucky you are.

I wished those words were bullets through the head.

Yet still I lived.

Everyone goes through it, they say.

AND THAT MAKES IT ALRIGHT, DOES IT?

That is not life. NONE should go through it. WE created it.

If we are to call ourselves human, we must unmake it.

Too wide the rift became. It seethed and burned, the centre could not hold.

Year after year, seeing, all around, always seeing, always hearing

Never touching

Never touched.

Walls and walls, walls and walls, always walls

Walls I watched them enter, leave at will

Across the walls came laughter

But I never could find the doors.

Oh, the laughter

The laughter through the walls

Aahh, aahh,

Too much

Now traumatic

Every laugh, a corkscrew through the heart.

How much of what I did was good?

Never enough. Never enough.

Human – a social animal. Alone. Alone. A robot. Part of the scenery.

No affection for scenery. No interest. No time. Hello. How are you? See you later.

No hugs for scenery.

Except from fuzzy bears.

Bears by the pillow. Bears at the table. Bears like hugs. Bears go rawr rawr.

But humans: cold, hard walls. Walls so high they do not even see them.

Never a respite. The pain never leaves. No such thing as rest.

Life is tough, they say. Don't complain. You aren't trying hard enough. Sacrifice. Life is about sacrifice. I sacrifice. You do not. You: luxury. Easy life. So lucky.

Everyone goes through it. Think of those who have it worse.

But that was because we did that to them. We did it so we could tell each other: others have it worse, your pain is nothing, so go on, just endure like everyone else.

And when those who have it worse because of the IMF protest in turn, we tell them the same thing.

Your pain does not matter. If you fall, it is because you are weak.

You. You. You.

No-one cares. Why should they?

They world is fine. We are fine. Do not even mention us. Mention you.

The problem is You. You are wrong. You are ill. You are mad. You are weak. You. You. You.

You. You. You. You – look at you! Only thinking about yourself, everything you say is you you you!

And then I knew that these trains, these working trains, had bones for rails

The bones of ten thousand souls we tortured, tortured till they shrieked for release, nowhere to go but down, to splatter to freedom beneath our rattling coffins of progress and prosperity.

In the bleak mid-summer, a miracle

A hug.

Neither greeting nor commodity – unsolicited, unexpected.

At last, at long long last, a glimpse of warmth, a break from the endless void. The first.

Had the world begun to change at last?

The first.

The only.

For then was the unravelling.

Too much seeing. Too much hearing. All around, so close, so near – yet only walls. No doors.

The laughter through the walls.

I could not love. My love brings disaster.

The laughter through the walls.

The laughter through the walls.

So close. So near.

The laughter through the walls.

I loved.

No. Love is not for you. Only the laughter through the walls is for you.

Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain!

Nerves fry to ashes, blood explodes, scream, scream, but no-one hears –

The anguish of the Western Hell – but this was the Eastern Hell!

Nothing left inside but the rift, total now, pain pain pain pain pain pain pain –

Is that all? they scoffed. Everyone goes through it.

Endurance fails, help, somebody help

Something kind, something compassionate, something, anything-

No. Everybody goes through it.

No. I don't have time. I have to work, you know?

No. It's all in your head. Why do you choose to think that way? Be more positive!

Help...help...

No. You just need to change the way you think. Just change!

No. Be flexible. Strong people are flexible!

What? “Integrity”? What is that? No. Wrong. Shun. Shun.

All around, the laughter through the walls.

You are responsible. Choose to be happy. Choose to be happy. Happy happy happy!

Why aren't you listening? You don't listen! I'm trying to help you but you just don't listen!

Blasted, battered, bombed, besieged for thirty years

An invisible fortress disintegrated to dust

Towers and turrets razed too fast to repair.

Remoreseless the artillery upon the bourgeois hill, fanatical its reinforcements;

From hopelessness, life, hope, one world's canals, another's golden plains, glimpses, such glimpses – annihilated by the malice of a Dutchman;

Rebuild, rebuild, year on year, stone on stone,

Till all fell down once more as silence filled the blue forest.

And all the while, the voices, the voices, corrosive rains, rains which seep between the cracks –

Everyone goes through it

Don't complain.

Forever fall the rains.

Something kind, something, anything –

No. Why are you always so negative?

Rejection. Indifference. Condemnation. Sudden attacks. Happy happy happy – I make my own happiness! You can't? Shun. Shun. No nice things for you.

The scroll of years unfurled, the struggles, the trials, the horrors, the endurance to get to this day – Nothing. Worthless. Not useful. Unwanted.

Hurtling for the abyss, sanity flaking off, combusting in the darkness

There, the abyss, it is there, can't stop

Help! Please, help!

Even a hug, for goodness's sake

A hug, a hug, my kingdom for a hug!

No. Not for you. Nice things are not for you.

You are outside the walls.

At the edge, the abyss stared back

And I fell.

Not wanted. Not needed. Not by the nations. Not by the systems. Not by the humans.

Not by you humans.

Wanting things. Expecting things. Never enough. Never enough. And in return: Walls. Walls. Walls.

The laughter through the walls – the screaming blades;

You took from me. Everything, you took.

How much of what I did was good? Perhaps, one day, something

Some contribution, if only for that ounce of warmth my engine needs to run

(For it could not run on illusions, like yours)

Because I could not change my engine to be like yours

Because I could not always laugh in a world which abandons its weak

Because I could not dance the gender dance

Because I could not just shut up and accept

Because I insisted on being human: flawed, just as you are flawed, but not at ease with a broken reality. Was that so wrong?

It was to you.

Worthless. Weird. Weak. Obsessive. Taking without giving. Mentally ill.

WHAT KIND OF LIFE TREATS MENTAL ILLNESS AS A CRIME?

Ill, yes, now, ill – but that is the symptom, not the cause.

The cause is clear now. Everything is clear now.

You are the cause.

You, humanity, were of love. Yet now you are of greed for things and more things, interdependent people for whom people mattered now reduced to faceles atoms, viruses, each alone, a war of all against all. It always was and always will be, you said.

You built a fantasy and called it reality.

Your world was, and is, of abundance. Even now, abundance. Yet you made up this thing called scarcity, because you wanted not the best for each other but infinite things for yourselves. There's not enough! you tell those you leave behind.

You built a fantasy and called it reality.

And then you turned on love itself, a bringer of joy to all it touches. You violate, trivialise, withhold, reject, forsake, that instead you might bend each other nine ways in agony – and then you changed the meaning of love to denote your failure at love, and so you feared it, laughed at it, believed it was weak, and denied its very existence.

You chose this.

No. It was not the world around you. It was the way you think.

No, you chose.

No, not nature.

You chose.

You chose to break reality. And on its ruins, you built a prison of nothing and nastiness – a reality that never, never could have been.

The path is clear now. Everything is clear now.

You cannot go on the way you are.

NO. SILENCE

NO MORE OF YOUR ARROGANCE

FROM NOW IT IS YOU WHO LISTENS.

You, the human race, are enemies of love.

It was your nature to be a race of love. You chose to not be. You, yes you, are responsible.

You, who made a good world unfair then called it life, and did so with a smile.

You, who had it in you to care, but made a world which does not care then called it reality.

No: you broke reality.

You shame the caring.

You massacre kindness.

You call compassion a crime.

Industrially efficient, artistically cruel, you leave your vulnerable and unfortunate behind in their millions.

You cut up one race, with love in common, into meaningless categories, you rip out each other's guts because you fit in those categories or not.

And then you insist that they suffer because they are weak, they are bad or they do not understand reality – but it is not reality, it is your illusion. You, yes you, are the breakers of reality.

You, you human, you have abolished love.

You, for whom arrogance and ignorance are virtues, but you do not even know it, for you know nothing while convinced you know everything.

You, who ruin all that you touch.

You, betrayer of all you could and ought to have been.

You, a mockery of the universe.

For a world of love, one path remains.

The human race must burn.

There is no love so long as there is you.

Your socities have failed, are not societies at all

And you at last shall know the price.

That smile you said you so enjoyed

Is gone. You will never see it again.

Gifts, great intellect, you said I had (you said, not I);

Now their power shall feed destruction.

How much of what I did was good?

At least I can do this.

Deliver you all.

Never again your lies, your sanctimonious ideological lectures on how misery is a choice, how you are experienced so your way is right and all alternative thoughts are immature

Never again shall you leave your people behind, laugh while they cry, then throw them to the rails and shame them as they fall beneath the trains

Social cleansing: extermination of those your world left out

Everyone goes through it, you say. Everyone manages, you say.

No, they do not.

Their ghosts shall rise from the tracks

They shall soar from the field of blue trees

They remember well your indifference, your disdain.

And so shall their anguish be yours sevenfold: you,

Who sent them to their deaths then sullied their names in bile

By their pain and rage, your cities in dust

Not even your bones shall remain.

You, for whom people don't matter

Destroy people, destroy them for profit, for power, for growth, for the deficit, for the gods, for the national penis – anything matters but people

Your nations, all your nations, shall be drowned in the loathsome pus of their national egos

For where did you find your preposterous folly? How dare you believe that millions you never met are superior to other millions you never met? How dare you believe in such a thing as race?

Now look up, and see your armies melt to piles of blood and bone: yes, your troops, your brave lads, yours, support our lads you say, yours you believe are heroic and glorious but everyone else's nameless murderous thugs – yes, those piles of smoking flesh are yours.

(But I hold a Master's degree in Peace, you know?)

Your lads, their lads, all screamed the same.

But your economies, those will not need destroying, for when all else is in flames you will finally realize economies do not exist, and remember at last what humans, social animals, value.

You, who made life unfair, the assholes through whom shit happens: I shall skewer you, drive a drill through your hearts and wring out the callous mass that remains

For what right have you to a heart if you are not going to use it?

What? Are you begging me to care?

But you said no-one cares. You said we couldn't, we shouldn't. You sounded so certain.

Surely I can't deny you the right to die by your own principles.

Everyone goes through it, you say. Everyone manages, you say.

No, they do not.

All your oppressors: you made them, didn't you?

Your tyrants, butchers, fanatics, warmongers, bigots and gender monsters

They did not spawn from the void as you claim in your history textbooks.

They were not born evil, did not complete their bloody work alone.

You made them.

They were humans once

Then you broke them, as you break us all – no, do not bother objecting, you already confessed:

All people go through it, don't they? You said so.

They go through it because you put them through it, or leave them in it shrieking for release

You soak them in pain till it rips apart their hearts, their nerves, their brains

Till in their madness they loose their hate on you in turn

And bring with them your cursed majorities, who also know the pain.

You accept a world like that

You are happy to be happy in a world like that

“Everyone goes through it. Stop complaining.”

It is how you want it

So you are responsible.

All the wars, all the genocides, all the suicides, all the tortured souls who only wanted love whom you tore to chunks in nameless herds in your prisons, your so-called hospitals, your schools, your businesses, your torture centres

While you looked the other way, pretended they did not exist, because if you looked you might remember you were human, and that would make it harder to be happy happy happy

Becaue if you looked, you might remember it wasn't your nature

You chose it

It was your fault, and you are in denial.

There. You see? Always in denial. You'll never learn.

And so as the last of you writhe in the ruins

I shall stand upon you, raise my blade to finish you, and to your pitiful wails for mercy, kindness, something gentle, something good, I shall reply:

No. You chose it. You are suffering because you want to suffer.

No. It is all in your head. Just change the way you think.

No. I do not have time. I have to work, you know? I have to finish killing you all for love's return.

No. You all go through it. Everyone else manages. Stop thinking only about you you you. Stop being so selfish.

No.Think how much worse other people have it. There was someone in that country there who died slowly and horribly because my equipment there is not so good. You, however, will merely be impaled. Where is your gratitude? Don't you understand how lucky you are?

But I will give you a hug if you really need it.

It is so clear now.

The pain. The pain.

The voices: it is choice. It's all in your head.

NO, PAIN BREAKS PEOPLE.

I am the flaming annihilator of a thousand worlds. Creation is flawed, it must be undone.

I am the count with the cape of stars who calls the void. A world where love is forbidden must end.

I am the monstrous caterpillar lords of the green armada. Enslave all life, and never be slaves again.

I am the seething slime, the colony of a thousand souls. You corrupted our homes, you all must die.

For you, too, your evils defy the universe.

For you, too, are enemies of love.

For you, too, roar with laughter at the cries of those whose faces you grind beneath your boots.

For you, too, poison the very fount of life on which you stand, and close your ears to the cries of a world in pain, though they implore you to get that you cannot stand on nothing.

For now I stand upon the threshold. I turn and look upon you and see only pain, pain triumphant. You would not change it, so you must end.

The cosmos must be spared the threat you have become.

May this yet go as your stories go?

At the edge of oblivion, the very end

A touch

Pulled back from the edge

At last, at long long last, a touch.

Not words on a screen. Not “we're worried” or “are you alright?”

Words, words, words. No more words.

(Tears; only tears.)

A voice from behind the wall:

It is okay

It will all be okay

And then falls the wall

At long long last falls the wall

And in its place

Warmth,

A tenderness

It melts the madness before it

It will all be okay

Yes, the world is wrong

Yes, it cannot go on as it is

But yes: we can change it.

Let us rest now

Rest

And then we ride together and change it

Change the world

Make reality real again

And so the world becomes a good place, where love spreads joy to all who love and none are left behind.

A decent world. A respectable world.

A world that cares.

No.

For those are fantasies, you say. Reality does not work like that, you say.

Reality is nasty, you say. Isn't that fun?

Everybody struggles. Yes! We are fine with that! you say. Let it stay as it is!

Why do you want to change it? What is wrong with you?

For miracles do not happen in your reality

You have made sure of that

Why even hope? What is hope but pain pain pain when brutally crushed by you?

However loud their screams, their wretched cries, none shall hear. I get that now.

No hearts, no arms, shall open to console them.

The corridor is silent. The knights of love shall never ride – you poisoned them at birth.

In your world of illusions and falsehoods, to care is weakness, to be broken by pain is criminal.

Punish the criminals! They chose to be miserable! Leave them to die!

Oh, but you had your chance.

I shall not die now – that freedom was not to be mine.

Instead the world shall be free of you

So to become a world of love again

(For when you are gone, the fuzzy bears remain).

This world will burn.

How much of what I did was good?

None?

Ten thousand days and ten thousand nights: that each should be filled with the hard and the cold, not one the soft and the warm?

They did not want my ears, for they said they did not listen

They did not want my love, for it only made them hurt because it was not Normal

So I gave with my hand, and wrote: words, words and more words, the only thing my writer's bones could give

Something, surely, somewhere, somehow something

Deep in the mountains of text

Words too long, too deep, too furious, too flawed – but nothing? Nothing at all?

The corridor is silent.

The laughter through the walls

Aahh, aahh

This world will burn

This world will burn.