The “Wealth Virus” Tires and Morphs Into an Eye (5)

Painted Over Clay

© Eso A. B., 2012

The quote from Odin (see blog 4), does not suggest that Odin was hanging on a tree for nine windy nights, because he was a symbol for a  phallus either as a tree or his- her- sex. However, Odin/ John/ Jane may have hung there, because without such an experience of devoting “one’s self to one’s self”, he-she feels lost and not fully in possession of themselves.

The image or, rather, the poem, may refer to the captain tied by his rebellious crew to the bowsprit of his ship here, here, and here. As a crew member of the planet Earth, I would tie to the bowsprit the oligarchs even if the bow is predestined to sail into a rock or sink to the bottom of the sea. The bowsprit is the king of the ship’s nose for and of the future.

One may feel lost when one is wealthy, as well as when one is poor. One’s material status has little to do with being self-imposed. Being self-possessed probably has a lot to do with the sense of being in charge of one’s fate. Being simply rich or poor may turn you into, say, some particular color. Yellow for rich; green for poor, but color does not tell you what to do with yourself. Yellow, for example, could be blowing about like the sands across the Sahara dessert or hide as gold nuggets at the bottom of a stream, while green could be greening like grass and forests.

A broken branch may hang off the main branch for nine long days before the wind dries its woody fibres sufficiently for the next gust to blow it to the ground. If Odin was such a branch, the nine days could have taught him what it is that he is a part of, and though he die and fall, the tree remains. As the poet said: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”— Audre Lorde.

To hang on a windy tree, myself to myself, for nine nights may also be like watching myself in a mirror as the wind wrinkles my face beyond recognition. [Actually, as a twelve year old, I sat at the port bow anchor hole of a German transport ship with my sister for three days, both of us determined that we would spill into the sea and have a chance to swim to the shore, when a torpedo hit the ship. I can still see slicing into the grey Baltic.) The exposure time of Odin is long enough to impress any Godless man with respect to the atheism he proposes, and if he still does not after the experience believe in God, will at least be able to sacrifice himself to himself.) The result for most ordinary men will be to see themselves as a mask.

How else can I appear to myself after nine days hanging on a windy tree? The result of such an frighteningly intimate challenge of being left alone for so long is to become an eye one sees one’s self for ever. As another poet said: “The eye you see is not an eye, it is an eye because it sees you”--Antonio Machado. Such an eye has magic, because it is not simply ‘there’, but it is there because it has evolved from whatever was there before there was an eye.

This phenomenon is slso similar to light receptor cells in our ears. The cells are similar to the cells in our eye. The Finns, who in their Nordic clime never have enough light, put a small light bulb in their ear, to feel they have lived their day to the full. Perhaps one may say that the brain contains similar cells, because it quite literally has hung in the wind to itself for not only nine days, but for the entirety of the evolution of life.

Perhaps we are coming to a day when our brain and not we, our-my ego, will speak for ourselves and myself. This could mean that a “better” human being is on the horizon, because we will act on the evolutionary impulses of the eons of survivors, not on our egotistic impulses mimicking some unfiltered “order” signaled to us by professor Žižek, advertisers, or our better sense being short-circuited by military order.

However, let us return to the experiential lesson of hanging for nine days in a windblown tree. After nine days our eyes may look like shriveled mushrooms. Perhaps they will look like dried out sardines on the beach, that we may pick up still entangled in seaweed. We might even put it to our nose and smell it.

It comes to mind that that is what a Wealth Virus may smell like, and if you eat the sardine, you may not only be poor, but a starving dog that has survived a shipwreck. Or you may be an oligarch walking the beach early one morning and picking up what you see before you just for the curiosity of it. In other words, you are doing what you are doing not because you are an oligarch or a sardine eater, but because the man or woman in you, a several million years old virtual being converted into genes, is doing it.

When imagining such scenes and finding them not making particular, but bizarre sense, we may decide that life is a play in a play that we do not know the role for in a theatre we not chosen to act in. The play does not make sense, because—the rehearsal that expects us to be hanging on a tree for nine days and nights is nothing but a stretch of memory compared to which an animal falls into a trap and the trapper is too drunk to come check his traps and relieve us of our pain by killing us.

No animal can be imagined to write himself a poem: “For nine days and nights, I was trapped myself for myself.” Animals sooner are known to chew off their leg. Would a man (as that animal) saw the bowsprit? Imagine being in the theatre audience, and the play calls you to watch the animal do that in real time.

What vision or visions would then come to our mind?

* * *

One will not find many books where its author tries to convince his readers that trees and human beings are as bound together as an animal to his legs.

This is where, that same author will return to the subject of deforestation and the decapitation of women. If the women are identified with trees, and if the soldiers do the deforesting-rape, because they are on the Maharaja’s payroll, would the men rather not have sex repeatedly than repeatedly chose its alternative?

This is the vision that then comes to my mind.

The maharajah killed 363 women who were hugging the trees to try protect them from the saw and axe, because the maharajah wished to be a greater oligarch than he already was. He had the Wealth Virus infection more than bad.

The men, the maharajah’s soldiers, decapitated the women for many days—day after day—until the maharajah’s order was completed. Then the commander of the regiment came to the maharajah and reported: “It is done, sir, as you ordered”.

The maharajah then rose from his couch, told his woman friend to remain there with her legs open, and went up to the mirror on the wall nearby. He looked into the mirror to see if the woman had obeyed him and if the commander of the regiment was masturbating. When he saw the commander standing uncertain over what to do, the maharajah asked: “You waiting to hang? ” The very moment the commander showed the maharajah his erection and pulled the skin, the mirror in the Jodhpur castle had an orgasm and shattered in 363 slivers of glass, which all flew into the Maharajah’s eye.

It should be no surprise that this is how the story ends. This is how death looks when you look into the eye of its eye. That is how the Maharajah of Jodhpur died of the Wealth Virus.