Hack the Booker

My cousin wakes in the early morning, and in that sudden rush of memories refreshing the mind from days previously, she regrets some things and smiles at others. Autumn hits hard here and the windows are blurred in the cool of the night but over the mountains there is blue sky and promise of a warm day to burn away the mist. Life in this valley is indeed sweet.

Here, I dream of rigging votes. I will write the worst ever book and make it win. Now the sun is laid to sleep and I can work at my plan. This book is started and tells of empty passion, the lusts of the disenchanted elite and the acts of those who cannot live proper lives. They are the arbiters of our morals, They decide on what we see and what we read and they alone can choose who lives and dies. In my simplistic dream of the way the world was when I was born, I filter out the wars and famine and see a land of fields and eternal summer. Our programmers see the same thing but they steal these visions from us and turn them in to plastic nostalgia, a past time where the values of today are plastered over the images of then. Real history is one of illness and danger and not the calm, well-ordered world they make it out to be. We are fed and kept like a farmer keeps animals, always with the unseen and unfelt threat of death and sale. We kill our gods and monsters and believe in only nothing. Our art is reduced to its simplest terms - they sell us crumpled bits of paper and lights that simply turn on and off as the pinnacle of artistry and we buy it on every level. These cultural thugs say that they do it because they want to overturn the old ideas and that they do. They want to take away the love we have amongst us and replace it with the love of things and non-things, the electronic, microscopic things that make up this world you read on this screen. How big is this paragraph in the computer it lives on? It takes up a tiny area of disk and yet you see it large upon your screen like all the other people who may read it. The whole of experience becomes nothing, in blank white boxes in unknown, unlit rooms across the continents.

They have medieval tastes, an austerity that comes only because they cannot have any thing other than that which makes life better - just a little. The ornaments are plates that must be used. The walls have colour made from earth and plants. In the fire they make an illusion of penury, a cramping lack of anything which we might consider a comfort in our life. The water is carried in from streams many feet away and boiled to make it drinkable. The food contains the grit from the quern stones and the husks of the rough unengineered wheat used to make the bread. It tastes good but gives no nourishment. In the winter, the cold is kept from the house by more illusion. The gold of the walls drinks in the sun and buries it in hiding places round the rooms, to be let out at evening to heat the freezing air.

The music here is simpler still. There is no polyphony or complex instrumentation. A scraped string and a rhythm beaten on the table are all that is required to make all guests dance like madmen. The executrix leads us all around the house to bless the windows and to point out witch bottles. In the future we will find these idols and save them up for museums like we saved the Trilobites we find in the fields. The world turns at the same speed for all of us and this history is ended because we are at the end of history. We love the world and it loves us back and gives us shelter and the minds to make the technology we use to help us live in comfort and safety and free from hunger and illness. And poetry will save us all.