And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?-W.B. Yeats
A mass is all we have and all we are.
Not the masses. Not a class to be gathered and organized, thought of outside of ourselves but part of us at the same time. A mass. We, the detritus of our condition, formed in one huddle.
Where movement happens, it happens in fits and starts, legs and arms dragging against the ground to shuffle. Pushing and pulling, breaking glass and straining to escape the facility. Holding its own contradictions within itself and lurching.
We cannot hope to unify, but we can congeal. We can dissolve boundaries and structures and form an entity which holds each of us in its tangle of limbs and biomass.
We are a fatberg just like those that grow under the streets of London, Baltimore, and every global city at the nexus of capital — a product of history, but not an agent of it. Do you have a better idea?
“Mass, work” — more of a plea than a strategy. We know this will not be enough, but we have no other weapons in our arsenal. We have no hope to be in control — but, wasn’t control overrated all along?
We want to be the monster of Carrion, a power-fantasy for our current condition. Screaming through vents and wrecking the havok that we know is deserved.
But at the end, we assume a human form and exit to the world above to confirm what we have known all along — something beat us to the surface. Perhaps another mass of a different character, perhaps a virus.
We’ll take a walk, catch some fresh air, and see what’s going on.