Not Inert, You’re Uranium

FMS#361 || Faridabad-NCR || July 2018

Listen friend.

Continuous, increased production at continually reducing cost. We humans cannot keep up. Neither can Earth.

They’ll bring robots.

And what will they do about the planet? How will they replace it? Earth is this close to losing it on us humans.

So what should we do now?

We just have to start things over.

Which ones?

We have to reinvestigate why humans started production at all.

Not only started, but accelerated. Why?

There’s one ready answer: To control nature, and to make our lives better.

This answer no longer satisfies. Earth is not inert.

This is something I try to hold in my mind all the time, but cannot sense its dimensions in their fullness.

We experience the liveliness of nature. Got stalled by the rain. Felt peace in the shade of a tree. Fainted in hot summer breeze. Teeth clattered in the cold. Which incomprehensible dimensions of the earth?

Coal. Oil. Uranium. Lava. Earthquake. Begin from here, and earth is not inert.

Why this call to take the word ‘inert’ seriously, and also to displace it?

A predicament is shared by all. A pain from the feeling of being seen as inert underlies everything. And a restlessness that the expression of not being inert comes so intermittently.

I’ve been listening to you all quietly all this while. Don’t mind, but this conversation — though interesting — is a bit abstract. How is our living connected to it?

Inert, incapable, lazy, insufficient. These pervade our life. Just recently, 400 permanent workers found the gates of the factory locked on them. Anger, astonishment. And that feeling of having been seen as inert.

That’s there. Do what you can. Go on. Go to the labour department. You’ll get hollow dates and empty assurances. Go to leaders. They’ll advise that you wrap up and calculate your dues. Go to provident fund officers, and they will say they’ll investigate. And in all this, restlessness will rise, and that feeling of being shrunk.

So transparent, and yet the apparatus thinks it cannot be read.

Its masquerades are exhausted. And we can say we are the ones who have exhausted these disguises. The emperor is naked. How come it was a child who saw this?

Wasn’t carrying the weight of the past. Said it as she saw it.

The apparatus calling us inert is one of its masquerades.

Proliferate. Scattering can only be upended by proliferating. Percolate every story, seep into every heart, permeate every mind, radiate from every thought.

There you go becoming abstract again! You mean 400 people are not less. Spread out. In small groups, meet many at factory gates, at the time of entry, at the time of exit, at lunch break, in tea stalls, at neighbourhood gatherings, in buses, in trains, any place. Be uranium.

Apparatus fears this. You’ve always been that dancer who pierces the masquerade.

Fms July 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd