This story has been calling me for a few days; each time I envision the collective body I'm brought directly here. So let's watch and listen:
I'm pressed up to a viewing device, like the old viewmaster stereoscopes, and the collective body is in front of me some distance away.
Click. The scene evolves.
Now I see only the bones of the collective body, but they're laying in a pile like in the desert, picked clean and drying under the baking hot sun. There's nothing holding them together except for gravity and the ground beneath them.
Click.
I see the organs laying on a mossy bed in a humid environment. I can see the lungs rising and falling, the digestive system moving something forward through peristalsis, the connective tissue holding it in place relative to each other.
Click.
The body dissolves into dots, and suddenly its more space than matter. I hear a laugh cackling in the distance like reality is all a trick of the mind and an illusion that we so desperately want to buy into. There's a confusing disoreintation that overtakes my body as I become plunged into an existence that doesn't feel real.
Click.
I see the brain and nervous system, and feel the overstimulation of the nerves sticking together, touching one another and looping the feedback instead of relaying input from other parts of the body.
Click.
I see the muscles suspended in a saline solution, like they're being preserved in time.
Click.
A river of fluid rushing with nowhere to go.
Click. Click. Click.
Different combinations of these images come together as the viewmaster keeps advancing, like a macabre Frankenstein's monster.
It advances faster and faster until it switches from a viewmaster to a filmstrip, and then a filmstrip into reality - the lenses through which I was seeing the collective body are stripped away.
But the collective body feels antsy, itchy, and dissatisfied. It's like it's wearing a sweater with a tag that's bothering it, or wool fibers irritating its skin. It doesn't feel congruent. It feels...uncomfortable.
And in that discomfort I feel an ear ache, lungs tickle, a breath that can't be breathed deeply enough, eyes that are searching until they're strained, burned tastebuds, a ruptured knee, fallen arches, nausea, disgust.
Break down.
Falling apart.
The illusion of coherence is falling apart before our eyes. The discord is showing up in our bodies. The illness of the Earth is the illness of the collective is the illness of the individual. But we can't see.
We can't see.
We can't see.
Panic rises until nobody can see.
And then a viewfinder is pushed against your face.
Click.
You see the bones.
Click.
Organs.
Click.
DNA.
Click.
Nervous System.
Click.
Muscle.
Click.
Fluid.
Click.
You can see it all.
Yours,
Ash
P.S. I've received some questions on how I write these. They're written in the moment with no planning or end goal. I close my eyes and type, seeing, listening, feeling, and transmitting what I'm shown into words that get delivered straight to you.
If you catch any typos (I try to re-read for those!) it's because I'm not watching the words as they're written.
I'm watching the body.