A blue train
Chalk blue as light in a tube as water blown through glass into day heat off pavement, invasive as grass and concrete.
The origins of plague have been the same for thousands of years. Not the gods or God but capital, or its aspiration. Aspiration, aspirate, particular stench: disease always arrives with the big ships. Not in production, but circulation.
In the weeks after the port explosion in Beirut, people insisted that there was some conspiracy behind it because no one wanted to believe that horrible things can happen absent persona or malice. That systems that are predicated upon the perpetuation of crisis often beget crises they cannot foresee or control and the mechanisms often break down and errant sparks are then sometimes enough to light the fuse no one knew had been laid.
The most common delusion among psychotics: I am being watched. They have planted listening devices in my house, in my flesh.
As delusions go, this one is totally reasonable, because it is entirely correct. Someone is watching you, right now. Someone is listening. What makes this a delusion is not that it is a lie. What makes it a delusion is that the psychotic believes that just because someone is listening it means that they care.
Siri, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Epidemiology is not etiology, because cause is chimerical; nevertheless, it lives on as fantasy, which may be the point.
Meanwhile, we know Roundup causes cancer but you can’t sue the manufacturer; not because the evidence is inconclusive but because they operate from a position of neither malice or intent.
“In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong bold miners….[I]n the matter of the health of these workers, the same Children’s Employment Commission’s Report judges differently. It shows…how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust among the smoke of blasting powder, seriously affects the lungs and disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs….[M]any due young of galloping consumption…[having become] unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth year….”
That was Engels, writing in 1845.
Capital is particulate, viral. It pulses through rock and into your lungs; it seeps through the soil and lives on in your skin, through cuts and abrasions.
What is needed is a digest.
Forty-eight, twenty-nine