After the Revolution

AFTER THE REVOLUTION time was free. Time had been emancipated. Nobody would ever need more time again. Those people who had invested their time carefully before the revolution now felt bewildered and betrayed. Those of us who had wasted our time felt nothing. Now we could no longer buy or spend time and would have to find other things to do with it. Time was the only thing we would never run out of. Long after all the food and medicine had been stripped from the shelves we would still have enough time. This was the time we had always hungered for. Time was now perfectly elastic. Either we would stretch it around gigantic projects or it would snap back and be forgotten in less than a second. This was time during which novels could be written or symphonies composed for a world with no publishers or orchestras but possibly readers and audiences. For a few weeks someone continued to ring the hours on a distant belltower and dutifully clocked every hour. Eventually whoever it was overslept or gave up or left town like all the other people. It was impossible. Time meant little more than distance and the certainty of sunrise and sunset and the possibility that autumn would grow colder. Time had been freed from its rules and measurements and we discovered we needed other rules and measurements. The order of the day became the order of the day. We invented new rules for everything each time. We tried new ways of walking talking cooking eating and sleeping. We found dozens of old board games and tried to figure out different ways to play them. We never consulted the old rules. Now that we were able to live without decisions we began to make and follow them. Those of us who were anarchists before now obeyed our own rules more zealously than anyone. Often the rules didn’t work like eat without using your hands or don’t touch the ground. We finished every game anyway. We had finally found that the only way to have fun or accomplish anything was through rules. The only way to give free play to our creativity was through a labyrinth of restrictions. We wondered if inventing rules should have rules. Even casual conversation had become impossible without rules. Without limiting ourselves to four letter words or a particular verb tense there was too little to say and too many ways to say it and we would end up talking about ourselves and each other and who hadn’t done the dishes and what rules might get him to. We used strange rules to become friends. Now the handful of us were alone together in a world without automobiles or muzak whose electricity had died and whose billboards were peeling and we had to work through the jostling shifting of our various enmities and alliances until we each shared a language with every other person and had learned to enjoy and depend upon each of our idiosyncrasies. We managed to do this surprisingly quickly. We began to wonder what we could do as a group on the day we agreed on the rule to speak without using singular pronouns.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION I always told you to meet me at the university library—although it was quite a long bike ride away—I always said you’d find me—even though it was now deserted and the few people you did see were reading and you respectfully subdued the urge to greet them—I had hoped we would never meet—and inevitably discuss what was going on with our friends at home—and how we weren’t sure why—even now after the revolution—we couldn’t talk about them in front of them—and whether Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle made more sense with interpersonal interaction than subatomic particles—or at least—interpersonal relationships being more urgent—especially now when there was no electricity to power particle accelerators—whether the principle was a more useful model when applied to them—etc.—instead I had hoped we would each wander a maze of carrels—wandering opposite directions down parallel aisles—researching old ideas of the new society—reading waiting reading sitting waiting etc.—finding messages we scrawled to one another in the margins of pre-Revolutionary revolutionary literature—call numbers of books where we had scrawled other messages—wild reference chases in which we would search through pages for evidence that the other had been there—finding only answers to more urgent questions—slowly filling the margins of every book with commentary—I left false clues and genuine red herrings—books I wanted you to read so I wouldn’t have to—maybe when we found each other at some call number we would embrace and with wide eyes speak to each other in the startling new languages of other texts—we would have met interesting people and spent time in their carrels learning about what they had read—we would have used different reference systems—wandered apart on lattices of footnotes only to meet up again—when we last met at 154.63 Sa22:r:E we charted our separate courses through and about time and space and found each other in the poetry of Erasmus Darwin—gaping at the same stanza—different expressions on our faces—we would both walk around the stanza a few times and come face to face between two lines each of us with different understandings and different books and we would stay right there for days—building forts towers playpens out of books by daylight—the libraries never closed—cuddling in the dark cold nights on the floor—and—who knows—maybe occasional moans gasps sighs would echo down through ten empty floors and the small new moons would wane—embarrassed—then wax—curious—and—who knows—someday—when our minds seemed to map perfectly—we might disagree on the meaning of a word—and set off in separate directions to find definitions and—who knows—not meet again for days—or weeks—or back at home in half an hour.

(AFTER THE REVOLUTION I found I was as lonely and confused as before (I couldn’t explain it because there was too much important work to be done (and I often skipped dinner
(rather than reorganize my food on the plate while the others ate (laughed (made up new rules for how to behave at dinner (threw handfuls of cauliflower) ) ) ) ) but I wondered whether I belonged here (where I wanted to be) or whether there was more important work for me elsewhere in the world
(and once during lunch the bell tower which had been silent for days rang a great many times and we counted the hours up through thirteen (at which point my friends all screamed (delighted) and chased each other around the farm while I watched (vaguely sick (that clock used to...(never mind) ) ) ) and I excused myself to do the dishes in the middle of the meal and go for a walk) and I wondered about the other people and what they were doing (and I considered leaving my friends to go investigate the rumors of disasters (earthquakes in Missouri floods in Oregon) and communities rising up everywhere (looting and revelry in New York and Detroit (they shared the moons with me) ) and I walked until night down dark cobblestones through empty residential neighborhoods and I stopped in a park and watched a moon pass through a gap in the clouds and wondered what it saw (What did the new moons see? (Could they tell me anything about the world they were the eccentric calendars of?) ) and I waited for the moon to tell me but it disappeared again and left me in perfect darkness too treacherous to negotiate home) and I wondered whether the rest of the people were forming groups like ours or whether we were deluding ourselves to believe that our only problems were internal and that everything elsewhere was so good so safe so warm and I asked the darkness whether the other people had survived a pleasant revolution to enjoy this peaceful world
(or were there other consensuses (another moon passed through the gap in the clouds going the opposite direction (I wondered briefly how) ) ) )
and then (in the light the moon cast) I ran home) .

AFTER THE REVOLUTION

Blake and I got to spend time alone together

in the park playing with a giant green ball on the hill

writing poetry whose logic we then spoke

then thought

then ended up in weird situations

like Blake at the top of a tree shouting

“I PRIVATIZE YOU! I HIJACK A BLUE YOYO!

FOG! WOOD YOU AXE IN MY SEQUOIA?!”

and I paused in astonished recognition of

the deliberate play of vowels

but before I could compose a reply

which showed a keener sense of the distinction

between the use of Y as vowel or consonant

he produced a blue yoyo I had never seen before

and dangled it with exaggerated elegance

from his slender branch

I fell in the grass laughing

he threw the green ball down from a blue sky

through red leaves

At night we went off in different directions

I needed secrecy

to prepare a special salad of handpicked plants

chosen for their obscurity

subtle distinctions of flavor

for Blake who claimed to be able to recite the Latin

name of any plant he tasted

There were no reference texts out here

so we would have to rely on poetry to teach us botany

Latin

Poetry was capable of this

It spoke us to each other

We gave it back to the whispering trees in

the cool autumn night air of smoke

manure

We tasted each word as we spoke it

to the congenial

lights on the horizon

lights?

Blake threw the ball

we saw its silhouette eclipse a moon

And stop

The sky remained black and we never heard the ball

fall

The new moon waxed gradually over weeks.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION Jane and I undertook the project of redecorating an empty mansion / got enthusiastic / found food and art supplies to fill it with / discussed how the mansion/theatre/3 piano rehearsal area could be used / walked through deserted grocery store aisles with flashlights / choked on the sweet stench of rotting produce / accumulated cans of artichoke hearts and bundles of pasta / remembered which dark aisle everything was in from before / accumulated necessities with the detached guiltless logic of shoppers / became distracted by the fact that other people might rely on this supply of leftover commodities as well / wanted to leave them more in the way of greeting than plundered shelves in the supermarket/fetid cave/consumer cathedral lit by a sunroof whose glow cascaded down in the center / arranged canned food into rainbow patterns / built houses of cereal boxes / attacked the magazines dated in the month of the last date with scissors and left images everywhere / pushed an overflowing shopping cart across a parking lot falling up across the setting sun / took the food/toilet paper/batteries to the house / worked through decisions of how to arrange it/what rules to use/where the stage should be / wandered through the house all day together/alone/silent in marble hallways/singing to each other down spiral staircases / met on a balcony to share some cigarettes we had found in one of the rooms / decided that the first floor should stay as it was/comforting to the visitors we hoped to receive when the other people came back/frozen in lavish pretensions towards an elegance history had overcome/as close to the former conventions as we could mimic / decided that the second floor would have the stage and classrooms for us and visitors / decided that the third floor should get weird as we imposed different rules on it / talked about a black room/a reflective room/a plaid room/an upside down room/a soft room/a maze/an underwater room/a library filled with our writing/songs/ideas for new societies / worked out absurd and useful ideas / drew up plans / put the groceries away.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION, after we had accumulated food, moved in together, had arguments about whether and how new rules should be applied to an activity as essential and unfamiliar as gardening, we asked ourselves the question, “What do We want?” Was there some way we could simplify the question? How about: “What do I want?” There ensued a merry chaos during which everybody shouted answers, except Mike, and eventually the rest of us gathered around him, wondering, “What does Mike want?” He didn’t answer so we argued with each other on Mike’s behalf, because he had always brought red to our cheeks and tingling to our fingertips, and Mike finally cut us off by asking, “Dinner?” It was morning, was this sarcasm? Mike clarified, “Mushrooms, and can you make them blue?” So Hunter and I fixed dinner, discussing what else Mike might want, how to make the mushrooms blue, what to prepare for the others, news we had seen on the horizon, heard on a radio, or found blowing down the street, about where the other people went, what they were doing, until Jane burst into the kitchen to give us each a piece of paper, pencil, and the instruction to answer the question “What do I want?” When we brought the food out we found Mike and Blake rehearsing a puppet show they had written in a very short time, and learned that, during that same time, Jane had read the Wants and composed a consensus that we should invent social organization games, or rules, which could be tried on small or large scales, try them out, and compile books for the benefit of the other people (would they ever come back?). During dinner, Mike, too excited to eat, now confessed he had written a piece for us to perform in one week, and he gave us each handwritten copies of a score and instruments to which I asked, “Wha—?” Dinner forgotten, I opened the clarinet case and brought out the black cylinder with the maze of keys and rules, and left for the valley with the instrument, a notebook, his score, and a vague promise to do my dishes later, found a sunny spot to sit, unfolded the music, studied it, and felt a terrified flattery pump through me as I wondered, “How to count that measure?” I made six different drawings of the first measure, attempting to play each sketch, until the sun left, and I invented curses, remembered the drawing of the measure where the notes were vegetables in a garden, and looped it to the cackling shriek of locusts and the tittering murmur of breeze, until the cackling and tittering joined in, the gusts regular, the locusts harmonizing ordered bursts in a stack of, no, minor seconds? My notes fell across a tangible grid and time emerged, divided by rules, and my fingers wrested away my control and marched across the metal rings and wooden holes as I turned around playing and saw a melody of rising moons arranged above the horizon like notes on a staff.

“AFTER THE REVOLUTION writing has become important to me, Tom, can you—” “Hi Hunter. I thought you’d be in the treehouse. I can see you’re typing but can I talk to you for a second? This afternoon my phone was working for about an hour.” “Really?” “Yeah. For the first time in weeks. I was talking to my Mom and apparently some pretty crazy things are happening out there outside the Farm.” “Like what?” “Well...on the RNN Evening News Mom saw a story I can’t believe they’d report even if it was true about organized movements of people refusing to use money all over the United States and Canada. Instead of buying things from each other they trade, negotiate, work, organize, and are finding out that there’s enough to go around. In fact it seems like there’s more than ever before because people are taking less. My Mom saw footage of people singing and playing guitar sitting around a campfire of burning dollar bills!” “Yeah?” “Apparently during the riots last week the hospital where she works was flooded with patients with no money and the management ordered that the doors be locked but the staff refused the order and they were all working around the clock treating and feeding people and then when those people started getting better they started helping treat the newly arriving patients...or maybe they starting getting better after they started taking care of the other patients I don’t remember anyway now the hospital has become the community center: kind of a combination town hall, soup kitchen, coffeehouse, library and...hospital! It’s fantastic news!” “Sure, sure.” “And you know what else?” “Hmmm..?” “Tag! You’re It!” So that’s what that liar was up to. So I am It again. Sigh. It means I have to stop what I am doing and go find someone to tag. Just as well. What was that Tom had been saying about money? It’d been so long, I’d forgotten about money: how you had to carry it everywhere, how you could lose your wallet on accident...and actually regret it. Ho-hum. I decided to go tag Blake. I knew he’d be in the woodshop working on his essay and I was right. “Hey Blake, apparently Tom got through on the phone to his Mom today and—” “—Hunter can it wait I’m right in the middle of a run-on sentence and—” “—and people all over America have stopped using money and—” “—and I’d like to hone it, whittle it, melt it, boil it, burn it down to a clear and sober thesis so—” “—so the revolution has begun, Blake.” “I don’t believe it. Some Mom said this? Tom’s? Give me a break.” “I didn’t come here to tell you that anyway. I have something much more urgent to get off my chest.” “Make it concise?” “Tag! You’re It.” I don’t really believe that I am ‘It’ but after a while I’ll extricate from this tangle of prepositions and grumble down an entire flight of steps and out to the loading dock to find Ella, welding brilliant blue refractions in a trickle of sweat and copper, the quiet exhalation of acetylene which will cessate when I shout, “Hey, Ella!” “Yeah?” “Hey Ella Tom’s Mom said that people out in America have stopped using money.” “Really? That’s great. If it’s true that is.” “I’m sure it isn’t. I also got some other unlikely information I wanted to pass on.” “What?” “Tag. You’re It.” I’m It, am I? That’s alright because I can hear Mike on the third floor hammering out on piano the same measure that tripped him up an hour ago. I’m getting sick of it. I’ll just run up the stairs and lean over his shoulder, scrutinizing his sheetmusic until he gets flustered. “Ella, what’s up?” “Have you heard the great news?” “What?” “Tom’s Mom and some of her friends have stopped using money.” “Tom’s Mom’s alive? See? Great things are happening all the time. All you have to do is notice them. Revolution is on the way!” “Also, I wanted to burden you with something else.” “Oh?” “Tag. You’re It.” I need an excuse to talk to Derek anyway. It’s nearing dinnertime and it’s his turn to cook tonight so I’ll just slide this music into my briefcase and start up the gravel road, gulping deep breaths of clear air, grinning, whistling that measure across the valley.... “Derek that smells incredible! What’s in it?” “Cilantro I picked just moments ago. Try some.” “Mmm. I heard that Tom’s Mom has stopped using money.“ “Wow. That clinches it: this is the best day of my life.” “Don’t be so pessimistic Derek, wonderful things will continue to happen. For example, I have a present for you.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Tag. You’re It. Isn’t that great?” “That is good news.” I will find Jane beside the unlit firepit singing and playing guitar to an exceptionally fortunate sunset who will not go unsung to. I will watch her sing and smile and rock back and forth and wonder how I could be so lucky as to have a friend like Jane. When she finishes singing her new song to the sun I will tell her the good news. “Hi Jane! You sing good.” “Thanks!” “Um, I came to tell you that Mike told me a story about somebody who once stopped using money and you know what else he told me?” “No.” “Tag. You’re It.” You will never be the same again, Jane, after having heard this anecdote about the money here at the Farm, the free hospital in the mountains of Snohomish County. You will gaze amazed at the sun eaten by mountain and strike a chord you haven’t heard yet. You will know that this change of state will happen to other elements, that from one person going for a few days without money a new society will be designed. Deliberately. Revolution will come. Already you will imagine the bills in the firepit curling and setting like a sun in the mountain, the President smiling and mutating into something unrecognizably human.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION the absence of electricity was the most devastating to Hunter: he used to work in security and data cryptography encoding digital payments sent across the World Wide Web: something which we had never understood and which no longer made any sense and his status as fallen mystic caused him to become terribly despondent: he never took off his guitar: with the lightning eloquence of a typist he would run such astoundingly sad programs that at least once the entire room was swept into silence and under tears until Jane saved us: she joined in on accordion and Hunter’s eyes flickered as his mood reset and he and Jane interfaced rhythmically and shut it down: applause laughter tears: Hunter’s as his face displayed a sad smile and he retuned his guitar and manicured the ends of the strings and polished the wood until we were all reflected in it and he never looked at us but didn’t need to: the inscrutable logic of his haunting harmonic subroutines and algorithms and recursions caused unexpected functions in our movements and conversations even through the weeks he couldn’t practice because I did something terrible: I played the blues and broke our last E-string and Hunter could no longer produce output and crashed: he got lost in strange loops and had the same nightmare every night: he would wake up in the blackness convinced the others were coming back: riding with guns: he told us everything: we made him then we consoled him and joked with him and argued with him and eventually he agreed that these were leftover fears but still he couldn’t sleep and we worried until we agreed on a rule: we took turns sleeping in his room with him and he said the virus would delete itself and we didn’t need to worry but I wasn’t so sure: when it was my turn I woke up in the middle of the night to find him staring out the window scanning the darkness: he was scared: he was convinced he had seen a shadow cross a moon and I knew I had to free up some of his memory: I asked him to go for a walk with me: he was scared to so I told him: we’ll bring the harmonica and the melodica and be prepared to sing a song to anyone we find on the street: we went walking and he spoke to me then seriously about the risk and the plans: plans he had made to lock the doors and hide the food and arm ourselves and practice running and emergency routes and hiding places: none of this I had considered before and all of it I found quite troubling: I proposed a rule: I told him to write every fear down as an eventuality: if we needed them we could use them but in the meantime we ran a greater risk by being frightened when we finally might be able to move without fear and he finally nodded: he agreed to begin typing the next day after breakfast and we returned to bed but I wasn’t certain I had erased the fears: half an hour later I found myself staring out the window beside his snoring mattress trying to convince myself that a twinking light on the horizon was a star.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION I watched as everybody made friends with you for the first time again or for the first time, one by one, getting fed with your attention, quenched by your voice, inflated by your excited ideas, and wandering a lattice of mutual rules. I think I got jealous. I did. I couldn’t tell anybody about it (except the cats). It didn’t fit. I didn’t want you to see it in my eyes and I avoided you in the kitchen in a self-fulfilling delirium. Everyday I would have breakfast at the table laughing with you and our friends and then I would go to the library to talk to a creased, thumbed photo of you, telling it how much I wanted to be with you, asking it if people should have rules in addition to feelings for one another. I kept it in my other embarrassing secret: my wallet. The others had lost or abandoned theirs. Mike, laughing, realizing he still carried his wallet, tossed it onto the floor. Later, alone, I retrieved it, transferred its money to my own, then—afraid he would discover it had been emptied—went to some trouble to hide it elsewhere in town. I was convinced, and didn’t want to be talked out of it, that this would prove to be in everybody’s best interest eventually. Sooner or later we would have to pay for something we needed and the others would regret their easy willingness to slip out of time. It was a weird habit, weirder still because I tried to hide it. Once I went into a bank and found so much money that I almost regretted the Revolution. Now I had all the money I could ever want and was unable to spend it on flights to Australia to jet ski, or a car, or a house, or food to cook for everybody on the weekend. Every old “want,” every consumer capitalist wetdream, worked out in breakrooms with coworkers and bosses in excited tones and expansive gestures over ashtrays and lottery tickets, resurfaced in tears and I wandered home in a daze through deserted shopping districts. When I got home it seemed like everybody had left. I stood in the middle of the house in the slanting afternoon light, clutching a neat block of hundreds, my eyes streaked with revelation, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach bumping into my ankles, meowing miscellaneous accusations, queries, confessions. I wondered where you were and I heard something, a sigh? A sound, a moan? A creak, a gasp? I didn’t know which one you were with this time. Forget it. I shoved the money in my pocket, put Bach on my shoulder, picked up Mozart in one hand, my clarinet in the other, and started walking southeast. I was leaving. I was a freak. I didn’t belong with these people. I needed rules, more, different. And I was taking the cats. But Bach and Mozart didn’t agree and after two miles, the sun setting behind us and an angular orange moon full on the pale blue horizon in front of us, they meowed clamorously and clawed to be let down, but I clung to them and lectured them sternly.

That moon is not closer, it just looks closer because it’s closer to the horizon and we’re seeing it not in reference to an infinite sky but rather to objects whose size we are familiar with like houses and billboards and skyscrapers...

Okay okay so there’s no houses and billboards and skyscrapers out here fine. You cats think you’re so fucking smart but you need to wake up.

That’s not true. They don’t care anyway. I just need to change my old consistencies. And so do you. Y’know you two really piss me off. You could be tigers now, or flying elephants, but instead you just lie in the sun and fucking stare at squirrels like before. Forget it. We can’t change until we find a different community. Or live alone. I don’t even care. Wherever the other people are they’re looking at the same sky. So that’s where we’re walking.

You think you know everything but you were neutered before the Revolution.

It doesn’t even matter what you say. Everything is prelinguistic now.

Okay okay postlinguistic. Linguistic. It’s different. We need to make up a new language to say what we want anyway.

Fucking cat. The moon will get smaller as it rises. You’ll see.

But it didn’t seem to be. It seemed to be getting larger faster. It covered nearly half the sky and was unbelievably detailed. It couldn’t have been farther than a half block away. Its seas, craters, promontories, filled the sky. It was close enough to touch. I was about to walk into it. I stumbled, stopped, afraid of its weight, afraid to walk into one of its mountains. I put the cats down and stretched an arm out, slowly. Sebastian rolled onto his back and stared up with intense eyes. Wolfy wandered up to the moon and bumped his head on it, purring, and a cloud of orange dust rose slowly. I closed my eyes and took one step forward, arms outstretched, groping.

Nothing. I stopped. My feet, heavy, planted, refused to take another step.

Wolfy and Sebastian waddled and loped down the road before me. But it was dark and I didn’t know which way to go.