©1999

notes from overground, 2051 CE

… in the air, we live, drawing our sustenance, our Oxygen, from the atmosphere, like Spanish moss, in this our ‘New Jerusalem’, our high-strung quarter of freedom far above the glitterblade streets of the Ghetto.
… in our welkinworld there is little pollution. Below, the air is the hue of smoking sulphur, mostly because of the dung fires people light to cook and to combat the cold — there is little work or ‘industry’ there (apart from burying the dead) and the windless streets have long been dug up for the stunted crops of the poor. Far away we can glimpse, above the rooftops of the ‘condemned’ towers, a citadel gleaming in the smog like a spray of phlox. That is where the Total, whom we call the Parasite, live.
… we are clean, we are airy, we are healthy in the sun. Our well-Oxygenated wastes are dropped strategically to help fertilise the crops below. We wander freely along our arcing rope-bridges, talking of many things. We are never afraid of the height, the height we are born with like the birds who peck at morsels from our hands, the height above which women bear, any more than a person fears the distance from their eye to the ground. Seldom does anyone fly.
I stepped on an acorn once
… we live in suspended nests of rope made from hemp we cultivate in hanging gardens. We shelter within tents of hemp-cloth. We grow our own food, highdroponically. We collect rainwater before it hits the foul air beneath. We sometimes, nevertheless, have to climb down into the Ghetto, where the majority dwell under the sway of the fire-gangs who preach the reactionary utopia of Phlogistonia, as they do all over the earth. There we trade, and there is a festival for a time, and the ragged children sing.
… our children, the children of the union of the air, are expert climbers. The web that extends from the roofs of every early Millennium skyscraper, which extends in many levels, is a-scurry with them, and they are building higher and wider all the time, indeed as our people are doing all over the earth. Our growing web, which extends illegally into the countryside, and whose warp and weft break through the ghetto walls like the roots of weeds, is strong enough to support our myriad villages. Here we have even a tree, a tall, Oxymoronic eucalypt growing in a great hemp-concrete urn of soil on top of the tallest tower, under which we meet to make policy, like the Aeriquois of old.
… I will not talk of our art, our culture, other than to say it is richer than the spring blossoms of Oxygen upon our tree of life. But we — we are a small close-knit and well-armed band, a human spider-colony that can sting, though now and then we admit new members from the Ghetto below, or dissenters who fly from the citadel, whether of the shark or of the pilot fish. For it is we …
I am sixteen and today I touched a corpse
… it is we who mediate between the Total and the poor majority, we who are forced to compel those beneath us to live in choking semi-darkness, we who yet are tolerated by most of them for all would prefer to dwell among us, and how could that be if our aerial cat’s cradle were destroyed?
… for we do nothing out of malice, but out of necessity, the necessity to overthrow Phlogistonian necessity. The small hand must rule. As the philosopher said, el pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido. We came, most of us, from below; we staked our claim; some of us, as I have said, return below to supply the people with food, medicine, and, most importantly, knowledge.
no, the corpse touched me
… we are the learned ones, the ones who keep alive the philosopher’s words of cabbages and kings, the declassee ones who remember history — each one of us holds the total understanding of our union in his or her head. Those who escape the citadel, we have found, know nothing of history. Their ‘media’ do not speak of it. The Total force-feed their people with triumphalist propaganda — ‘love of money is the root of all good’, ‘he who says organisation says oligarchy!’, ‘Phlogiston, not Oxygen!’ — that is to say ‘advertising’. They encourage a wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed outlook that cannot see the obvious, that Oxygen is all. Once, we know, the world was endangered by a bolshevik war that would destroy all life on the planet, then for some reason (a matter of contention among us), that threat was taken away. After that, the system we call ‘crapitalism’ became total, giant ‘corporations’ of aristocratised ‘crapital’ replacing by degrees the previous centres of power, which were the ‘governments’ or perhaps the ‘unions’. Today there is only one centre of power, the Total, and it cowers in its forbidden citadel, a few kilometres from our web. Its members are the ‘See-Alls’ of the largest corporations, now virtually one.
the baby’s hand slipped from the bier onto mine
… they control the dying woodlands and the agribiz. They control the acid seas and most of the air. They ‘sell’ to (that is, trade with) each other, rarely to the people below. When they became total, most collapsed because they could not sell at all as the people became destitute, because destitution entails a lack of their ‘money’, their permission to live. The biggest survived through conquering state power using the 19th century delusion of Phlogiston (or ‘Neoclassical Economics’), and now subsist on the work done by their fantastic machines, which produce everything, using waste and the product of the mines as ‘raw materials’. Their off-duty guards often raid the Ghetto for urchins and other slaves (they need little labour but hunger for human flesh), and each time the Spearhead of the Ghetto breaks out to burn the checkpoints with Oxygen and spread the diseases of the people. (The Total have yet to genetically-engineer themselves into total immunity.) The envoys of the Total, of that which we call the Parasite, which is what they call us all, come to ‘apologise’ after that, through us, for the depredations of ‘rogue oxygen-abusing elements’ (Oxygen among them is illegal), since disease is what they fear above all. Apologies are cheap but often seem to satisfy the majority, even though thousands of them are always slaughtered.
cold as puddle-ice in the sun
… every week or so a hoverer hangs high over the Ghetto, dropping food parcels, sometimes laced with the Phlogistic poison 20:80. These are donated by the Total Philanthropy Foundation. When they became total, the Parasite drove the people of the earth into the Ghettoes and starved them into eternal submission.
sixteen and immortal I am, sixteen and frozen with the guilt of our Oxygenic union
… the murder of children is unendurable. I may fly tonight.
I am sick at heart and would write no more.