The poet on trial

by Jon Rappoport

March 27, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (George Orwell, 1984)

The judges in the room, behind their table, were gray, but the poet in the dock appeared to be refreshed.

The charge against him was, as usual, incitement. This time the statement read, “…he has used words outside their legal meanings, and in so doing has risked the security of the State. His poems suggest another language, another form of expression, which would introduce disorder, since they are never defined. The State trains the citizenry to make it unified and literal, because without precise shared ideas expressed simply and beyond the possibility of misinterpretation, the Common Cause is undermined.”

The poet spoke in his defense:

“You can put a hat on a word, and a coat, and shoes, too. You can make it walk in the rain, you can force it to fight and die and come back to life again. You can strip it naked and reduce it down to the size of an atom, and you can pump it full of ashes and circle it around the sun, a dead planet.

“You can turn it inside out, cut it. You can surround it with fog and have people walk past it without ever knowing it exists.

“What you can’t do is define it narrowly forever. Sooner or later, it will take on new meanings, rough approximations of itself, it will become relative and comparative, it will grow lopsided. It will refer to other words, go silent for a thousands years and then incarnate.

“Like a human being.

“Fascisms rise and fall. Their unit of measure is the human being, who remains, despite all appearances, incalculable.

“The State tries everything in its power to defeat the individual, and can’t achieve it. Force, seduction, bribe, they all eventually fail.

“Every effort at unification is a glue that hardens and then disintegrates.

“Try to capture a word in a net, and it burns through the cords, though it seems no one lit the flame.

“You sit in judgment, hoping to snuff out a spontaneous creation of a spontaneous poet. Your verdict is refrigerated, mine is coming out of a hot undersea vent. I walk down the street and see a thousand things that have no numerical significance whatsoever. I see an angel who invented herself out of nothing. You see a dank cathedral whose petty bureaucrats impose order.

“You worship ideals that, in their implementation, turned your hearts into dead machines. You, sitting there in a row, are a little grove of petrified components.

“You’re at the end of the line. I’m just getting started.”

The sun shone through the windows of the room. Its rays fell on the judges, who were silent. The poet stepped out of the dock, walked over to them, and pinched their faces. There was no reaction.

They had sat in judgment of thousands of accused criminals. Now there was nothing left. They crumbled in their chairs and the dust fell to the floor.

The poet nodded and walked out of the room.

On the crowded street, he looked at a giant calendar on the side of a building. The year and the day were gone. He sensed it had taken several thousand years to arrive at this moment, but it didn’t matter. The State was in the process of disappearing.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com