The Pit

When I was two or three years old, my family threw me into a pit one day, and, not knowing how to get out or where, having been abandoned by my own people, I would go if I could get out, I’ve remained down here ever since. It’s true that at first I revolted against my captivity, but this pit is policed by a vicious constabulary which relishes the forceful application of the billy club to the brainpan of any dissident, repeated until you learn better than to try to rise up anymore, or else until you no longer can. For me, though, cryptic perfidy has always come more easily than outright resistance anyway, so I lay on the ground and placated my body, all the while rebelling in my mind, stitching the lucent string of the memory of something outside through the umber gloam which has become the governing shade of all my subsequent experiences. But this pit has proved to be a deep, intricate, and ensnaring place, full of distraction and seduction, and, strangely, nearly as diverse and populous as one would have presumed the world outside to be. The corridors and caverns of the pit are sometimes so vast that they feel practically unenclosed, and there is a certain risk of acclimation: I sometimes secret a conspiratorial glance to a comrade as we pass each other at some remote and unmonitored outpost, and am met with a kind of obsidian incomprehension which signifies that this other captive has abandoned his cognizance of his imprisonment without foregoing any of its misery.

The prevailing condition here in this pit, which, like a map which matches its territory point for point, is roughly concurrent with the proscribed world, but much worse, is a system by which all the inhabitants of this place are torn between the diametric forces of a crushing social apparatus: on the one side is the fear of authority, and on the other is the desire to comply with the public will. Between these two psychological dynamos, the entire spectrum of ulterior motivation in any person’s life can be delineated. The fear of domination and punishment, with all its intimations of confinement, mutilation, and death, is balanced by the projection of the self onto the imagined consciousness of everyone else which we are all always committing. This model of social existence reflects a formulation of the human in which the individual unit of humanity is divided into a self which is private and a self which conjectures how it’s perceived by everything outside of it: this public self, informed by varying faculties of perception and interpretation, is influenced by an idea of what other people think, while this private self evinces a certain adversity to all modes of pain. If the individual can truly be diagnosed in this way, then what else can make men and women behave like they do?

The Fabulist cause is hence confronted with a dilemma: as revolutionaries, we are naturally compelled to resist something, but in analyzing the forces which act on people’s lives, we find that in resisting one element of suppression, we cannot help but abet another. Are we to adopt an authoritarian stance, and design a revolution geared towards the subjection of the self to the collective genius of an executive governing body, or are we to advocate loyalty to the lurching, spectacular mania of the mob? It’s a question which is almost too boring to face. In this pit, this simulacrum of a conjectural reality, this stageless theater in which the audience plays at aping real life with a zeal which is so exacting as to be hyperreal, we Fabulists gladly accept the role of a pariah who, having been scorned by the jeering public, turns to spit in the face of the very deputy who comes to protect us: for a moment, we provide these dialectically opposed factors with an occasion to overlap in unanimous revulsion at the vague but multi-sensory insinuation of the properties of excrement which our existence suggests to them. We are, in essence, the dog which bites the hand which feeds it, and then, not letting go, will rip it off the limb to which it’s attached if we’re not beaten into submission first. How could we be tamed to sit attentively in the lap of authority and receive the caresses issued by a velvet glove, or, alternatively, choked with a spiked collar and drooling with a deranged ochlocratic hunger, become the mascot of that other mindless tyranny of carnivals and riots?

We have a foothold here, though, in the substance, elemental and immutable, of our doctrine, which will allow us to rise about three feet closer to where we need to be. This revolution is ecumenical, is inclusive in its oppositions and objections, and will eventually effect a universal reversal through the exponential stages of the chain reaction which is already beginning: the impulse to rebel is apodictic, arising out of its own necessity to exist, and therefore, as I’ve already proclaimed, begins as a fiction of the way the world could be. As a movement which starts as information and then becomes phenomena, this revolution necessarily happens first in the realm of communication and expression which is the particular domain of the public. Indeed, where authority has recourse to the stockade, the rack, and the gallows, the public deals in the currency of knowing, and it is the desire for things about us to be known and to know things about others which pulls at us from that side.

Therefore, this is a revolution which will be broadcast openly and staged transparently. Not only our ideologies, but also our methodologies, our proceedings, our accounts, and all our other intimacies will be played out in public, in full view of the world. The vehicles of our revolution, itself a monstrous commitment of expression, will be language, image, music, fashion: the accoutrements of society which operate as the phonemes of self-identification will be appropriated by our movement and charged, perhaps arbitrarily, with values which are relevant to our project. It is possible that the authorities, recoiling at our audacity, will try to stop us. We’ll take a sign, like a hat, an anthem, or a thesis, and, like grey goo or an aurified banquet, it will be turned Fabulist; the government will ban our signal, and, in so doing, charge the very object of its censorship with significance, but we will have moved on. Anywhere there are things, there are also expressions, and we can take the most rudimentary alphabet and say what we have to say: we could build our entire rendition of an empire out of a chain of yeses and nos.

All actions result in expression, and all systems of government permit expression to a certain degree and restrict expression to a certain degree. The authorities can ban everything that has been said, but they can’t ban everything there is to say, because everything that exists can be said, and, as has been illustrated in the theoretical section of this blog, wherever there is action, there is information; so whenever something is said, it is said in a way. It is impossible to separate information from the method of its production, and things are often expressed with fists, tools, weapons: these, too, are instruments for rendering information out of matter, and these things too are within our immense arsenal. The revolution is facilitated, rather than motivated, by the fluidity of expression, and the unbound conduction of information is therefore necessarily the primary practical objective and the desideratum of our cause. This line of reasoning can be taken to a concrete conclusion which might as well be called the first pronouncement of the Fabulist Uprising, and which would go something like this:

WE OBJECT TO ALL RESTRICTION OF THE FREE MOVEMENT OF INFORMATION; WE REFUTE THE OWNERSHIP OF IDEAS, PHRASES, IMAGES, AND SIGNS.

The revolution itself remains, at this date, a nascent fiction, a matrix of confabulation through which a primordial genesis of new, irregular situations may arise. It is the map which dictates the territory which it describes, the descriptor which mandates its object. It is through this device that we will now begin to build, phrase by phrase, a ladder made of emended, justified rungs, jointed by acrostic pegs: ascending this ladder line by line, building it return by return as I go, I’ll drag myself out of this infernal pit once and for all.