Charlie Godet Thomas

AT THE WINDOW, STARING.
October 8, 2022

FADE IN:
In the first age, we created gods.
In the second age we created money.
In the third age, money became a god.
In the fourth age we created deserts. 1*

CUT TO:
A promised day
on its micro orb crawled across
light-years of quotidian
if ever
a grain of sand
each verbs in breath

Not a promised day
unnervingly (uncountable) quantifiers
fast-arriving from
environment
if never
too late to brake
damage beyond repair

A no promised day
In the
end
there is not

nothing

DISSOLVE TO: A Plastic Theatre

Act I
The phenomenon of capitalistic surplus.
VOICE (O.S)

“No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.” 2*

Act II
The contemporary pestilence.
VOICE (O.S)

“Modern psychology is desert psychology: when we lose the faculty to judge — to suffer and condemn — we begin to think that there is something wrong with us if we cannot live under the conditions of desert life. Insofar as psychology tries to 'help' us, it helps us to 'adjust' to those conditions, taking away our only hope, namely that we, who are not of the desert though which we live in it, are able to transform it into a human world. Psychology turns everything topsy-turvy: precisely because we suffer under desert conditions we are still human and still intact; the danger lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it.” 3*

Act III
The climate apartheid.
VOICE (O.S)

“We cannot live outside our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same time, we are bursting out of this situation. The question which poses itself then is one of the conditions which allow the acceptance of the other, the acceptance of a subjective pluralism. It is a matter not only of tolerating another group, another ethnicity, another sex, but also of a desire for dissensus, otherness, difference. Accepting otherness is a question not so much of right as of desire. This acceptance is possible precisely on the condition of assuming the multiplicity within oneself.” 4*

FADE OUT:
In the untitled age, pray for us, who once, too, thought we
could fly.5

- Jo Ying Peng

1* Margaret Atwood, Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet, written for The Guardian (2009) in support of the 10:10 climate change campaign started ahead of the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

2* Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

3* Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (1993)

4* Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader (1996)

5* Margaret Atwood, Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet (2009)