After the Law

I do not see you, for I am not allowed to look at your differentiated, individual faces. Looking you in the eye is not necessary to my address and would be superfluous to my sense of decorum. By speaking, which is all that I ever do, I am making the rules. Therefore I am blindly addressing an audience of phantoms, an imaginary, undelimited mass denying the presence of any rarefied individual. In this, however, you escape me and flee; you get into trouble and you refuse to conform to my preemptive norms. For better or for worse. You escape your destiny and my mediation of your place in the crowd.

It’s important that you, specters, know that I am not really blind but rather willfully refusing to look upon you. My purposeful non-vision, however, also allows me a kind of pre- or pro-vision, since I have already understood that you will try to flee from me beneath the cover of my self-imposed darkness and evade my embrace, the coddling that can also smother, the milk from my teats upon which you might conceivably choke. Remember that I am always ready to pat you on the back to bring up that burp, to coddle and rock you some more, should this happen. I have so many ways to address my own failings—and your failure to live up to the standards set by my makers. For that is my function, primarily: to coddle, to embrace, to surround you with my words, and to unite you, through my phantasmagorical presence, in my never-ending self-aggrandizing and self-justifying discourse.

Alone, you will make of yourself a subject for my discourse, clinging to your rights, no matter how much they abuse you, waiting at my gate for that personal gaze, that face-to-face encounter with me that you long for, in order to justify yourself before me: an encounter that will never come because I will not open my eyes and I will never be able to see who you are that has come calling.

If I do not know who you are I can never help you except by accident. Often I function by uniting and separating the imaginary rows of good and bad citizens out of your swarming masses. I lift some high and lower others very, very low in order to create a balance between interests, it appears--barring the a-priori interests of my makers that name some things “rights,” other things “privileges,” and still others “crimes.” This is because those who have created me have seen you; they have seen you at each others’ throats, trying your best to draw and to drink each other’s blood. This is another of my provisions, a sight upon which I know I could never bare to look, but about which I will never stop talking, never cease trying to prevent inside of my own borders. The rest of the world can go hang.

Listen. Are you listening? Then my words have created you anew, represented you as this citizen-ghost amidst an audience created by its own need to be an audience.

My feigned blindness is the trickiest of all of my attributes because it presupposes that my makers shall be exonerated from the violence of my creation due to my supposed fairness to all, for all. Yet, the makers of such institutions always stack the deck, always seem to keep at least one card up their sleeves. The casino always comes out ahead because besides the black and red pockets of the roulette wheel there is always the zero. The house always builds itself around you, keeping its edge.

Destiny, too, can be controlled, merely by setting such systems in motion. The trick is that my creators have convinced you that this edifice of words has been built for your own good, for your own protection. Just about everything sold to you for your own protection is actually flirting with your self-destruction. (Just as firing a gun causes so many more problems than it ever solves.) The system has become adept at destroying those who protest against what has been sold to them as their own good even more vigorously than it pursues those who have broken its laws.

1/2013

Florence