Let them come! O people empty your homes of those hard-won possessions and administer your joys and woes in the crumbling arteries of commerce. Time be abandoned, conference unfettered, agitation unhinged. Furnish the aprons with rainbow-coloured figurines and crown the lampposts with hibiscus and laurel. Restore nature to its equilibrium in this, the reckoning of human business. Summon preachers to bewail and repent at regular intervals before the leviathan. Let state officials and justices of the peace line the route, having first stripped the tapestries from the walls of their villas, and hand the proceeds to the rudest of congregations. Assemble your armies, if only to bear witness to the rising, and to the sublime power of your redundancy.
Behold! On the horizon of the great plains spring up vast skyscrapers, swaying like syringes stuck in the arms of giants; javelins of Academus mark the site where future beings will practise new modes of thought. Alighting in these giddying Babylons, the masses will descend their caravans, at once relieving themselves of their burdens in random gestures recalling the decisions of medieval parliaments. Entire cities will be renamed, and in each district a willow tree planted in praise of the seasons and the necessity of herbal medicine. Furnaces will be built for the burning of baseless merchandise, raising aloft steeples of soot to create magnificent purple sunsets. No rancour or resentment will be detected, as once foes partake of nectarean banquets, and waiters abseil from walls of glass and steel, balancing their offerings on trays of gorse. Police will be no less immune to truth and reconciliation and, with popular consent, ready to assist wayfarers, the elderly and infirm.
Sexes be countless in our asylum, numbers real, families and pronouns optional, along with all personal histories and the collecting of taxes. Where money raises doubt or suspicion, subject it to pacific inquiry and, where disputes arise, begin athletic games along the avenues at dusk and on through the night; until, finally, a new law is established. Where hatred and bitterness once did rule, may a sensuous ministry prevail: of love, pleasure, desire and their proper mingling, such that solipsism and selfishness are rendered no less repugnant than impossible.
And our dreams! Down with the obscenities of virtual reality, whose gadgets and prostheses will be swept away without trace into volcanic repositories. Society! Open your good offices and people converse in a kaleidoscope of dreams.
Jason Barker is just
Featured image: Plaque of the Ergastines (“weavers”), from the east frieze of the Parthenon in Athens, c. 445–435 B.C. Louvre Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
