Revolution (21 page)

Quantitative Easing is a typically euphemistic piece of imperialistic lingo. It does, however, have the advantage of poetically inferring the application of a lubricant before a shafting.

Dave DeGraw here, like his Occupy cohort Dave Graeber, points out that resources are present, here in the abstract, symbolic form of dollars: “$.” This is a concept that refers to assumed wealth. Graeber said we could cancel the debts of everyone instead of just that of an elite. DeGraw says we could use the money to create employment for loads of people and “ease” life for ordinary people, not just an elite.

Both demonstrate that the system and its language, ideologies, and practices are volitional, not absolute. We are not discussing gravity here, a seemingly irrefutable law. It’s just an idea that works well for the people who say it’s the only idea there is. Like gravity for elites. If it was up to them the rest of us would be floating around or paying through the nose for lead booties.

This is not a worthy humanitarian argument to aid the destitute, normal people; literally almost everyone is getting fucked.

“As bad as unemployment is, even among workers, almost half of the working population earns less today than people making minimum wage did in 1968. A stunning 76 percent of the U.S. population is living paycheck-to-paycheck. While U.S. millionaires have $50 trillion in wealth, an all-time record number of people are toiling in poverty, hunger, prison, and severe debt. When you fully grasp the situation, you realize that this is the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.”

It’s important to note that this is not a problem for radicals, or lefties, or hippies. If you are a person who breathes air and are not reading this on a bejeweled bus with eighty-four other plutocrats then this corrosive, outmoded doctrine is affecting you.

Even if you are a billionaire, a multibillionaire, if you are Roman Abramovich or a Hinduja or Dick Cheney or George W. Bush (only joking, he wouldn’t read a book, hahahahahahahahahahahaha), you are of course part of the whole of humanity, about to realize that individualism was an old, primitive idea, that materialism is a bric-a-brac concept for toddler brains, that we are at a moment of history where consciousness is going to coalesce, collectivize, return to the whole.

Where the business of being human is going to become something wonderful, unrecognizable, so we must relegate the mundane to its rightful place; the practical, fair allocation of resources and the preservation of the planet must naturally be prioritized so we can all get on with the exciting stuff: communing in unknown realms, summonsing new ideas into our reality.

The answers are all around us, cluttering up the culture like a magical amulet ignored in a junk shop.

I
F YOU GREW UP IN A SECULAR BUT PREVIOUSLY
C
HRISTIAN CULTURE
, like I did, then these ideas were blandly recited in assembly, draped in antiquated code like a verbal doily, making it seem like some tiresome ol’ crud at a fete. The Lord’s Prayer:

The first word is “our”: We have a shared provenance; we come from the same place. We have one father. Clearly not biologically, but they didn’t have words like “biology” then. I wonder what words we lack now. What label-less realms evade us for want of a consensual symbol.

Right. So we all come from the same entity, or “father.” Now, where is this guy? He’s in “heaven.”

Is that a place in the clouds, a place of silent reflection within all of us, a gay nightclub on Charring Cross Road in the nineties? The answer is yes to all three, but more importantly it implies a realm or dimension that is “not here,” not knowable but from where we as children of this father emanate.

Perhaps it’s a subtler electromagnetic realm beyond our understanding, from which all tangible phenomena is emitted. In Sanskrit, all characters are connected by a single line; the individual “letters,” “words,” “sentences,” and “concepts,” therefore, demonstrably
have the same genesis. They all come from the pure line, the total, unimpeded form.

“In the beginning there was the word” is how a very popular, relatively recent book commences. All came from the vibration, the vibration of unrealized infinite possibilities. Tap any physicist you like on the shoulder and they’ll tell you that we are made of stardust, that the component elements of everything on our planet and in our bodies are made of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. So is the sun. So are all stars. In their “give us one miracle and we’ll describe the rest” version of events, there was a big bang, or a giant vibration, or a sound, or a word, then all things came into being. This to me still sounds divine.

So we all came from one place, an unknown dimension that is loving, or at least benevolent, like a father. Now, there’s a bit of patriarchy thrown in there to subjugate the evident superior power of feminine creative energy. Anything that gives birth to something by our understanding is feminine, but let’s give the people who wrote the prayer a break; they were probably men and were following orders. Also, at some point it would be nice to get beyond dualistic concepts like “masculine” and “feminine,” because they’re a bit old-fashioned.

The prayer, or “thought code,” continues:

“Hallowed” is a word that really hasn’t made the cut into the contemporary lexicon. It’s probably the most antiquated word in the prayer. Whoever says “hallowed” now? No one. It might be in the title of a Harry Potter film, is it?
Deathly Hallows
? Is that one of ’em? I dunno.

Either way, it just means worthy of reverence and is a bit hard to grasp by the individualistic, repressed, unevolved, sense-bound consciousness. It’s special and pure. Fine. Even the name of this father in heaven is radiant, with some magical, ethereal, tricky-to-comprehend quality. Got it.

This realm, where the creative force is, where we came from, that’s all “hallowed,” is coming here.

Bloody hell, look alive—God’s on his way. It might be an incantation, like we’re inviting this realm to be realized in us, through us, through our bound consciousness. So don’t panic.

Yes, it was that, an incantation. Don’t worry, God’s not on his way in a fiery chariot of judgmental rage. We can manifest God, this divinity, this creative vibration, here in this dimension and make it correlate with its subtler original frequency. We can download it. Really all that means is, stop fucking about with things that don’t have meaning, like money, Dior boots, and blowjobs, because it’s stupid and detached from original intention. Not bad, just compartmentalized; do it if you want, you have free will, but if your intention is contentment, you’re wasting your time with all that.

So we do need food. I mean, we have bodies, so some bread would be nice, or pasta or veg—anything, really, I’m not fussy, but I will need some grub at some point. Interesting that it is “us,” all of us. We are a community of people, and we would like some bread. It’s not “give me some bread and fuck the immigrants.” We ask on behalf of everyone.

Also, we only need the bread today, in the moment, in the present. The future and the past are only relevant to the limited, animalistic, reductive view of reality that we indulge in to our detriment. We don’t need ten years’ worth of bread, either, “in case”; just our daily bread will do.

We will fuck up; we’re just people, expressions of a higher consciousness, permutated through a physical dimension. I mean, we need bread and everything; we’re flawed. Please be compassionate to us, divine creative power, within us, without us. It reiterates “us.”

Ah, so there are conditions—we’ve got to be forgiving too; it’s not a one-way street, this compassion; it’s not perfect. We ourselves will have to let go of our perceived transgressions—or trespasses, which I saw in incredibly literal terms as a kid and thought referred to scrumping or hijinks.

This is a bit confusing. After everything that’s preceded it, after all this righteousness, why would him “leading us” into “temptation” be likely?

Perhaps it is at this point that we acknowledge that it is not an external, abstract entity that we are addressing but our own nature. In the past, I thought it a bit simplistic to consider hunger, lust, and aggression as inferior to grace, love, and service; by what barometer can we begin to measure? If all these qualities exist in our nature, how can we divide them up and apply tags like “good” and “bad” to them?

Aleister Crowley and all the pagan, devil-worshipping types extol a far less challenging “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law” philosophy. I gave it a whirl—hedonism, indulgence, animalism—and I believe there is an essential difference. Those impulses, when acted upon, create competitive and destructive conditions. Personally too, I found that those impulses were deviations from the source.

Often I’d think, “I must have some heroin” or “I’d love an orgy,” then I’d act on that and be surprised by the lack of fulfillment. I believe natural instincts “go awry”; what was I really seeking when scoring and using heroin?

Heroin is an opiate; opiates are painkillers. I was in spiritual pain. I have come to believe that the reason I was using drugs was to treat a spiritual malady.

A flailing, disconnected tendril searching for connection and, failing to find it, I had to be sedated. When I began my life in abstinence-based recovery, living one day at a time without the use of drugs and alcohol, the impulse that drove me to seek out oblivion remained.

I believe it is the impulse for union that is denied by our atomized and secular culture. The flailing tendril then took on a somewhat obvious and visually apposite course of action to fulfill this longing for connection.

It’s kind of transparent: The symptoms of addiction are like the behaviors of caged, pacing animals, a response to an unnatural condition.

Does it sound a bit phony when I say that in my Grand Prix of priapic glee I was actually seeking salvation? Does that sound like something you might hear in a Southern Baptist church or a South London gospel gathering or, worse, a treatment center for sexual addiction?

My research in this area has been quite thorough, and I’d say my findings are quite conclusive. I’ve engaged in scenarios that from the outside looking in, when I was an adolescent in Essex, would’ve been indistinguishable from Eden. Looking at a papped shot of myself emerging from a London nightclub at 2:00 a.m. with a blonde on each arm and shades on, I can still be deceived into thinking, “Wow, I’d like to be him.” Then I remember that I was him.

Brought up on Frank McAvennie, and
Benny Hill
on the telly, and
Carry On
, it’s easy to understand how a mental plan is formed. I can’t unsee the truth behind the photograph, the reality behind the veil. That night with those two immaculate girls, delivered from
Babestation,
*
via some club in Hanover Square, did not feel like it looked.

When I got back home to the house that I’d dutifully purchased and done up like a space-age Byron would’ve: flocked black wallpaper, shag pile carpets, Jacuzzi—ah, the Jacuzzi, lowered in the garden by a crane that gurgled like an oracle in my garden, murkier with each new sacrifice. A TV in every room, a yoga studio with a wipe-clean floor. But unless you do the yoga you don’t get a wipe-clean mind.

The girls come in and drink wine. I don’t drink wine, so I don’t spill wine but they do. The humanity will not be silenced as we kiss; nagging angels burden me with their invitations. Glasses get broken like promises I was given, given then and given when I took these ideas on board.

Kisses are exchanged and lips get derivatively bitten and I am unsmitten and unforgiven, and when they leave I sit broken and longing on the chaise. The glass window above the door says No. 1: Number 1 Gardnor Road. It casts a shadow from a streetlamp, and on the wall it looks like “No 1”—“no one,” as my mate Matt observed, and I am alone but for the cat.

Even though when it works, after I rip it up in front of 3,000 at the Brixton Academy, and I head back with a netball team from Essex, all Fays and Tracys refracted from Grays and “Faces,” after the mandatory Jacuzzi I look up at them from the quilted mortuary slab of my chamber as they pick over me like thwarted but amused surgeons. I watch them through anesthesia and pray amnesia will help me forget what I’m doomed to regret. Like perfumed and glossed vultures, they peck my carcass, and a
petit mort
is insufficient; I am like Frankenstein here, assembled from boneyard parts.

Other people’s limbs and thoughts, stitched together and jerked to life.

Why is this not working? Was Sam Fox lying? Is Hugh Hefner lying? Is everybody lying? They look like broken toys to me, like an unlicensed Pitsea Market ET whose finger don’t light up, given to me, sat on my knee.

I don’t want to be led back to that, I want to be delivered from evil.

I
F YOU CAN TRANSCEND THE LIMITS OF THE INSTINCTUAL AND ANATOMICAL
self, you can become part of a kingdom of unified consciousness defined by power, glory, and eternity. This is a journey I have made, but enlightenment is not like a summit that can be scaled, then perched atop of, like a jolly mountaineer with rosy cheeks eating a pork pie. It is a commitment to live in the moment.