The Animal's Enslavement

Against compassion. In defense of forgetting.

The animal refuses to eat.

There is only one solution.

We have to convince him that his world is far different, far more hostile, far less abundant than it actually is. We have to manufacture scarcity. In so doing, we will be able to more effectively control him–because we are his Mother. We and we alone know what must be done to make it safe for him to live alongside the wildness and freedom in his body. We and we alone will determine what shall constitute “quality of life”. Left to his own devices, it would only be death, certain and abrupt.

He mustn’t know. He mustn’t find out the truth, that awful truth from which we are so benevolently shielding him: that his world runneth over–that every surface is in fact made of edible, playable, fuckable material, and every desire can be, in an instant, met and satisfied beyond his wildest imagination, and that the joy and freedom we so lovingly must make him chase and access only by dint of our benevolent permission is in fact the very substratum of the earth itself, this earth, which would be his and his alone for the eating, the fucking, the playing if he but realized that he was being lorded over by us, his entirely benevolent and agenda-less Mothers who want only what’s best and safest and most manageable for this feral beast, and then decided, in an instant, that, if death really is the end of the line, as he more and more suspects might be the case, that he might as well make a break for it now, staking a claim on what little bit of earth still remains for the taking, and go, go, go be among the wild defectors, each of whom declared, in their own way and at their own pace, the ultimate blasphemy: that our rule, the Mothers’ rule, is less than benevolent, and that freedom and freedom alone is the only suitable destiny.

Another solution (far less effective these days) might be to convince him of another earth entirely, an earth where freedom is safe and within reach–and that on that earth it’s all food, all fuck, no pain, and if he could find it within himself to just sign the wildness in his body away to us, his sweet and docile and un-corruptable Mothers, we and we alone could grant him privileged access to this other earth, privileged access which he could wield like a weapon against his poor bestial peers still shackled by lust, still laboring beneath their poor bestial fantsies of autonomy and self-reliance, perhaps even coming to behave as a sort of proxy-Mother to them, in time.

This would be our, his Mothers, ultimate achievement: for our sacred and benevolent agenda to live on through him and to be passed along to his poor and bestial and wholly ungrateful peers, whose pain is so evident on their unsaved little faces that it awakens in us our most powerful impulse, a weapon forged for us and us alone: our unyielding, unflappable, inexhaustible compassion.

---

The animal feels spurned and wronged.

He forgives almost instantly and can not, by nature, hold a grudge.

This is to say: forgetting is one of God’s foremost graces. For so long I labored beneath the poor bestial belief that the forgetting was an abberation, a disgrace–that only by clinging to everything I’d seen and remembering everything I’d learned would I be made whole and allowed back in to the Kingdom.

It wasn’t until I reckoned with the obscene machinery of memory that I realized: the forgetting is the point. Memory is trauma. Memory is enslavement. To remember is to cling to vapor, to build a home on slippery foundations always-being-eaten by the termites of Time.

But memory is devotion, you’ll say–and who will uphold the ancestors, and who will extinguish the fire after everyone else has gone to bed, and who will remind the children of the whole thing’s why?

To these objections, I offer only the animal, whose sense of wrongdoing is a feature of his ineradicable trust in his body (itself a by-product of his glorious absence of Mind). The ancestors don’t need him to remember anything any more than they need the sun to remember to set. It’s all in there, un-corruptible and integral to the great Plan, which is no Plan at all—just a ceaselessly spinning wheel and a neverending opportunity to break free.