Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:5

SEASON 1, EPISODE 5

Endings/Beginnings from Tim Coleman

Courtesy of Creative Commons license. No changes made.

From Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D

Oral History of the Pralaya, preserved in the regional encrypted archives around NYC and DC

Simon: It was the removal of all of that…you know the whole job, body, and pooping thing which gets in the way of the art. Everything became flat and quiet again for a little while. You didn’t have to worry about the collapse of civilization. It just happened…quietly. That’s the only way I know how to describe it. We all just woke up and decided to stop pretending that everything was still working. It was the loveliest week of my life.

It was flat and quiet for a little while, but then it got really fucking scary. People had to make some serious decisions. We all had to make some serious decisions. I mean fuck it just happened like a few years ago. We don’t know if those decisions are the right ones yet.

Dr. Yacob: I was that exact professor all of those anti-critical race theory American parents feared. I was that exact African indoctrinating their children’s precious minds. I was there to decolonize the whole mess they had made.  

I remember three weeks into it, after it started to become very difficult to get food in the stores, when one of my students, this white girl Samantha from Kansas, asked me if all of this was the “karma of the colonizers.”

I thought it was a cute notion from her yoga mat. But I told her in all earnestness that yes, this was a reckoning of some kind. But it was more than just political science. It was something from beneath, something from inside everything. It felt like Mother Earth herself had taken control of everything from the inside of our consciousness.

Salona: There is a great transformation going on. The zeitgeist is now acknowledging the body. The avant-garde has become accessible to all. “He will break up the world of karma and of normal relationships…”

I always used to meet my friend Hanson at this backalley pub in Edinburgh, the Scot’s Soul and Egg. He would always say to me that everything could be explained about the world today and where it’s going by looking at the cover of Wish You Were Here. He had to first explain to me what that was because our musical tastes were entirely contradictory (he would do this often with English rock musicians-how many times he would remark after the third pint of bitter that life is really just “salvation a la mode and a cup of tea.”)

Copryright Pink Floyd Records

“It’s the friction of capital and of carbon. Of course the man is shaking hands with his future self. The one who has lost his capital and is being burned alive by the carbon. Of course it will collapse. It’s baked into the design of it all.”

I loved Hanson because he was just morbid enough without it becoming really dull, like the way real communists speak and write. That flat monotone theory-speak. Hanson had a lot of colour to him. And he was an amazing painter. His landscapes of the sea were so evocative.

Time circles back on itself at all times and in all places. I knew this was going to happen. A lot of us did. We could feel it before it was coming. Those vibrations first and foremost in the body. These feelings which sometimes felt a lot like birth-pangs. She wants us to know. She needs us to know, because the thing about Gaia, about Ma, is that she would never abandon her children. If anything, at the very least, we will become compost.

Krayg: I remember trying to order COVID home tests. It was roundabout January 2022, right before the pralaya. I lived in a basement flat in D.C. When I tried to order the tests, it said that the household allotment of four tests had already been claimed. By the folks in the much nicer flats above me, the ones with sunlight coming through their windows and the roof decks.

I went up to that roof deck after they all had all fled a few months later. They still had their COVID tests laying around, which I took, although what good did they do anymore? A virus was the least of our worries at that point, although at any point again it may become so. 

I would go up there and write when it was safe to do so. I had to write now. Suddenly I was hungry to do so. When the whole dance ends and a new one begins which no one really knows the rhythm to, you have to try to make that rhythm. I felt it was my civic duty. I hope it’s okay to share some of them here

“My inertia is my anxiety. My anxiety is my inertia. I know what to do, but I can’t do it. Terminal-stage capitalism-I have to purge it from my being. Because it is the log in my eye. I have to be able to create, I have to be an artist now. What I see around me, what I see from this roof, is not a need for more toughness. Well…no…toughness is important, but not that kind of toughness which comes from guns and muscles and bravado and all that Jesus and John Wayne crap. That’s why the Capital is on fire in the distance (those fuckers got in again but no one was there this time).

So yes toughness is needed, but the toughness of the artist. The artist who refuses to accept things just as they are. The artist who isn’t afraid to break and smash in order to regenerate and heal. The artist who fiercely defends every being who is alive. The artist who fiercely defends the sanctity of death just as well.

I hear them now more than ever. That’s what upwelling inside me. That’s what is emerging inside me. There is my future self-my queer self? I don’t want to be that presumptive. I have to read more queer theory and talk to my queer friends and colleagues. But that is what most closely describes what it feels like. Not necessarily queer in the sense of sexual preference, although I would argue we’re maybe all a little queer in that sense. But queer in the sense that the binaries we idolize really don’t matter in any kind of deep way. Categories and boundaries and classifications and hierarchies-the whole bureaucratic fetish we’ve been on about for centuries now. None of that really matters. All of that is the cage we’ve built around ourselves. I mean for Krishna’s sake all of that just melted away anyway. Proof of concept!

It’s like what Barad argues: the whole universe and beyond is ultimately a magnificent cauldron of eternal creativity, but you do need to focus the apparatus to get some meaning you can grasp, even if that meaning is never truly ultimate and always contingent and relational. But that’s the literal rub. We’re always being embraced by someone.

I have a wolf and a monk inside me. They’re both rather primal. They both need their time and space. They all have the time and space they need now. Now, if they can just really help me love my neighbor as myself, because that isn’t theoretical right now. In all the little fiefdoms that have arisen after the collapse of the big dogs, it’s relationships which are the most lucrative currency now.”