Bending the Void - Blaugust the Twelth
This is an extension of an earlier post this week: Expertise is a hungry beast and you're just the handler. I asked - are we, really, just the handlers of expertise? An imbiber of knowledge? Passive barrels of swishing thinking?
Hoarding knowledge is just another kind of classismâa smug vampirism of the mind. The crapulent scholar floats above the husks of the learnèd before them, thick with the blood of stolen thought. Expertise without expression is rot. Information wants freedom.
Information is freedom.
I have a pen, nib at the ready, and a bad idea. Somewhere, a fascist weeps, but Iâve already dipped, and the scratching nib becomes a metronome to my rebellion. The words arrive staccato. One. At. A. Time.
I love writing by hand because it leaves a scarâa literal distortion in once-pristine pulp, eager to be marred. But what does it mean to leave a scar on reality itself? The logical end of expertiseâknowledge and ideas fermented into a volatile brewâis not to archive, but to detonate. A swift thought to bend the fabric of the universe.
Let us not hoard.
Two Schools of Reality Vandalism
School One â The Scholar
I am a hapless void-scholar, hopeless even. You, Dear Reading Eye, are here to watch me gasp at the chaos within and coax it into a peculiar, infectious madnessâone that insinuates itself into your mind, and from there, into the minds of others.
The Scholar wields a nib cut from meteor iron, ink distilled from patient starlight. They spend decades tracing invisible sigilsâproofs, papers, protocolsâso faint you only notice when gravity itself begins to slouch. Their dents are glacial: patient, continental, inevitable. You donât hear the spray; you simply wake one morning to find the constellations spelling an alphabet no one taught you, yet your compass agrees.
I am not quick to strike. My idiom works slowâstory, empathy, the careful challenge toward better things. This is fine. But it is slow. Change comes by persistence, not pyrotechnics.
Still, I wonderâwhat does today require, when the pace of modernity, of suffering, is anything but glacial?
School Two â The Rebel
There are times when the slow drip will not do. Times when justice must be forged in hot hands, not bound between quiet pages.
The Rebel arrives with a crowbar made of pure chaos and a pocket full of matchheads. They pry open the locked door of consensus and wedge it with a shoe you canât buy anymore. Their dent is a meteor strikeâsudden, loud, incandescent. Shards in the sidewalk, smoke in your lungs, a crater that refuses landscaping. The timeline still smolders while the neighbors argue about zoning.
Both schools birth collateral beauty and horror. Gardens grow in cracked concrete; ghosts whisper through widened corridors. The universe remains magnificently indifferent, but the witnessesâusâbecome altered, a little feral around the eyes.
So why vandalize reality at all?
Because the untouched wall is sterile. Because the gods, if they exist, are not curating this gallery for our small, carbon opinions. Because defacement is authorshipâyou sign your name by bending the frame.
Close your eyes and hear themâthe Cosmic Cleanup Crewâpush brooms made of cold dawn, muttering in pre-atomic dialects as they scrub at our bright heresies. They buff and buff and fail and buff again. That is their liturgy.
Ours is the hiss of fresh paint, the tearing of cosmic canvas, the mark that says I was here.
And while fast times demand fast strikes, pick your weapon: the slow ink that rephrases the stars, or the hot blow that shakes the streetlights. Either way, the wall is waiting, and the landlord is already awake.