February 29th, 1976 at 7:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
The conversation is like a movement back in time. Soon they are pre-industrial. Soon pre-Christian. Pre-Greek. They remove their clothes, after there is no more speaking. Then a long intercourse: broken phrases of what she sees.
Then they come aware of each other again. There is rose light from the earth in the east. It is the moment of morning. They are up and there is a brook, a stream, trees, woods, plants, a beaver, birds, and a strange, almost total, almost primeval quietness. No bank, no road, no fence, no cemetery. But the stream, and rocks, and up a ways the sound of waterfall—and their clothes are gone.
She sees her legs and arms—they are unshaved, and a touch of earth to them; and as she rises from where they have lain, and stands and looks about, there is a strength in her legs, a strength in her arms.
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February 28th, 1976 at 3:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
I am not at heart or in my blood a member of this generation, this century. I don't fit in and I don't belong—it's obvious to me.
But really the choices they offered me weren't good.
Most people are a part of the times they live in—as if manufactured for consumption in their age. Do not be frightened by the words; it means they belong.
But for me I choose this age to live in. I choose it over all others: I do not belong to it but would have belonged less to any other historical age.
This is by far the only really free age—where the people have freedom. From the 1960's to the year 2010 or so—that is it. In fact here in 1976 we've already passed the peak of freedom. But any other age—and what freedom is there for people? Look at Egypt 4000 BC. Look at the early Chinese civilizations. Look even at Western Europe two centuries ago. It is only in the last two centuries that Western Europe has had even a liberal amount of freedom.
I hardly had a choice. Who wants to die a heretic during the early Renaissance? Or be part of the executions in China whenever a new dynasty comes in? Even the old Greeks and Romans did not create worlds of freedom, and tribal Africa was not much.
So that they showed me what there was—and this was it.
And even this period of classical American liberty is short lived: maybe it will manage to last 60 years. Already we have passed the high mark and the decline has started, and little by little our freedom is gone. Even the high mark itself wasn't all that much: but it is what man has to offer.
For people who live in the age as if made for it, the passing of their freedom is no great thing: they were made for the age and not for the freedom. They will follow the age, whatever it does.
But for me, and the others like me, who choose this age over all ages, freedom is our lifeblood or might as well be.
We do not belong to the age; we are vultures sucking after freedom wherever it be.
And so 30, maybe 40 more years of classical American freedom; then three hundred years of despair, and the snapping closed the final hunt of steel traps upon the ankles of freedom.
And after the 300 years?
I don't know. They showed me nothing after: it was not part of what I could choose.
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February 21st, 1976 at 9:30 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
The girl's brown hair might as well have been invisible in the night, so too her brown pants and brown shirt; they were not to be seen. The sky, too, was brown but invisible because of the night; and the invisible stars were hidden by invisible clouds. It was a dark night. And the asphalt road, because of the trees and the invisible brown banks, was a dark road. The girl was sat in the ditch by one side of the road, lain back against the bank. She rested there, like a mute, looking out at the night as if somehow some part of it was within. The night was in her eyes, and brown. Her face, her ankles, her hands, all were brown in the night, against the brown bank.
Across the blacktop road, made of a billion pebbles cemented by men and laid in a river that wound between banks where stood the trees, across it and down a ways towards one edge of night was a fence; and behind the fence, she knew (though she couldn't see them) cement stones, markers, crosses—a cemetery, though not much of one. And farther down the road, a shadow against the two small beams of a car coming, the body of someone walking. Yes it was a body walking, the two feet moving and the arms at the sides and head straight forward, walking, conscious of the car behind it, and feet slapping at the stone where the road met the dirt.
There was the tension between the body and the car, as the car flashed past, 4 feet away, like a massive bullet through the night: a miss.
The headlights shot upon him, like pulsars in the night; and instantly she could see him—the pants brown and the features of his face, and his long hair as he pushed his eyes away from the lights—as if burned by them.
“Hi there,” she spoke out.
His walking stopped and he looked up and into the ditch with his face.
And then he spoke out, “Hi, how are you?” He was stopped, and he stepped into the ditch, almost blindly, a few more steps, and sat beside her, and laid back against the bank. She did not know who he was.
They sat in silence a while.
“It's all pretty silly. All the cars and the lights and the roads and the buildings. And the clothes. And the fences, the houses we live in.” His voice was soft; brown like the night, and he looked straight forward as he spoke, not a bit to the right, not a bit to the left to her.
“It's strange that we do it.”
She was suddenly more mellow and silent than she'd been a moment before. Who was this she wondered. And yet there was nothing strange to the night, which was made of strange things.
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February 17th, 1976 at 5:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
Considering the world we have made for ourselves, I might as well be from Mars.
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February 15th, 1976 at 8:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
I don't know why I react against so many things. I don't like to be so reactionary about things. It's just that so many of these things rub me the wrong way, or violate something sacred inside of me, or turn me off. They do something to me I don't like. And so I am the revolutionary, or the reactionary, condemning half of everything modern.
The truth is I am not a human. And I never was. I am Xlessika Naocp Xwarsi of Mars 3 (the third moon on Mars) planted on earth as sac-human in accordance with the latter Sonarite Phase of the Third Martian Recolonization Directive of the year LD10073 Botan. That I was born naked of a mother in a hospital in Tallahassee Florida was only a formality and cover. And I only violate the sacred trust in revealing this because I know, deep in my Martian heart I know, that no one will for a milli-moment believe me. So be it, because I do not care. I have gotten this earth into me, into my blood and sinews and fingernails: so that it might as well be a part of me and, Mars 3 aside, I might as well be a part of it.
But understand: by earth I mean the bio-planet, so much like Mars; not the mean little man-world created by men.
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February 8th, 1976 at 7:00 pm
by Rastaban (1976)
Ours is a society that couldn't live without music. We love radios, loud bands, albums, records, everything. Our movies have to always have a sound track of music.
(This has resulted in many ruined films, places where silence would have been golden. It happened I saw the movie Jesus Christ Superstar through the opening scenes once when the sound track wasn't on—then a few minutes after when it was. That it was better silent is without question—a more complete experience.)
Our t.v. shows must have music—even the Olympics, as all sports nowadays—is damned with music. The thing is, music is fed into us to create our moods and emotions, rather than us making music—singing—because of them. The whole process is become reversed. Again and again I get fed music which destroys and disharmonizes my mood, and I don't like it.
We have become a people that uses music as therapy for our strains and troubles. We seem to have such a psychological need for it: as if it keeps us sane. It makes our emotions for us, as if we were no longer capable of making them ourselves. As if songs were little pills to bring us up or take us down.
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