Project Purple

61 - Team Leader

There are different ways of seeing.

The structure that defines our lives has rotted. The regimented borders and limits that have governed us, that have disciplined the rampage of existing things, have collapsed. Our age old distinctions between the Same and the Other have atrophied.

I was shown an old Chinese encyclopedia that had divided animals into: 'a) belonging to the Emporer, b) embalmed, c) sucking pigs, d) stray dogs, e) frenzied, f) having broken the water pitcher, g) that from a long way off look like flies'.

The same things, but different categories.

It's in this wonderment of another system of thought that we will survive. We must learn to see.

If we don't, we will, as a species, blind- freeze. Whether a tropical island or the Arctic, we all live in that blinding, frozen world of snow, and we have no way of thawing out. The Rhizome provides an anabiosis-a restoration of thought, of speech, of life.

That's what we're doing-We're helping others to thaw out, so that they'll see we play on a field of categorical possibilities every day of our lives.

Maybe they'll find me; she's resourceful enough. But I really had no choice: It wanted me. Was I a dark horse? The odds were high against a little milktoast like me surviving. But it knew I'd placed well with our early Pilgrims, because they had no doubts; they transcended all theological preoccupation-by not allowing dissent. Had they spent as much time debating with each other as their European contemporaries, they wouldn't have been able to found a nation. They needed that overriding singlemindedness to overcome all the unpredictable perils of a wilderness.

That's why I killed the Cowleech.

He would've told her everything. We would've had to start all over again-or, maybe, eliminate them both. That's what they kept whispering to me through my diary cam, only to me. The Rhizome needed me to prove that I could make the right decisions; that I too possessed the singlemindedness to lead.

That's all I can say for an explanation. I can't explain to you why I have a sense of belonging, or why it wants someone like me-someone ugly, lonely, odd, special. Because I'm a nice little piece of the puzzle. I fit. I understand.

Looking out on the water, there are no other boats, no platforms of any kind, to escape the scenario that's come for them. If someone could swim across the channel to that one buoy, then perhaps... But I don't think it's possible. Hopefully, we'll have solicitors. Hopefully, there is utilizable data here.

But looking down at them, at the blood in the water, listening to the screams of the fat guy, and of the girl with the bad complexion, I note their panic is wasting time; they must make quick-thinking life or death decisions-by relinquishing to the primal fear-because the tiger sharks have just appeared.

It's time for us to motor off, to leave them to their fate.

It's time for them to whittle down to that basic instinct.

When we're caged, when we're put into what seems impossible situations, we squeal, we claw, we eat the flesh of one another-until we escape, or until we die. And if we can endure what may seem at first unendurable, then this opens the possibility of overcoming, of triumph.

It's this shamelessness that we possess, the shamelessness of daring to hope, which makes us champions. Even if our hope unravels us, turns us into monsters, we're able to leave that world behind, churning like the wake on this boat, to move on, to challenge the new frontier.

That is what they're really after, that very precious American attribute-the beauty of our aspirations. That is what they really want. Because we all live in a Rhizome. Our true selves-our essences, are invisible, hidden, in the Rhizome.

If you can, just turn over any old stump-Look underneath... Can you see? Can you see the worms?

Life above ground; the hierarchy, the system, it all withers away. And soon it's like it was never really there at all. Life above ground decays. It nulls. It's irrelevant.

But what lives below, what wriggles in the soft wood, it not only endures, it blossoms. It makes us better. It makes us stronger.

And it's coming.

Thank you for reading this draft; it needs some tweaks, but it's nearly complete. Your comments will help me with this final revision. 

mg

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