The Twilight of a Psychopathic Civilization

“We also, when building a relationship with people, believe that they are real. What a psychopath does is they weave a picture of a person that’s really a dream. It’s a spirit. It’s not real...When the psychopath is done with you, they leave. They’ve never had a bond with you. It’s all been a game…feeling no empathy…” Paul Babiak, psychologist, author of Snakes in Suits in I Am Fishead

I've showed this film to a friend of mine who has worked in mega corporations, and been subsequently laid off for his personable style of mitigating interrelationships between different interest groups. Simply  put, he was not a megalomaniac nor a psychopath, increasingly necessary prerequisites for keeping one's job in the field of human indecency, the corporate world.

I live in a city where oil corporations run amuck, seen as the life of the party, and there are Fisheads among us here, this is a city ruled by psychopaths, and the status quo lauds them. My friend, mentioned above, who worked for an oil company described their worldview well, "they are a storage and pipeline facility, and their worldview is as narrow as one looking down a pipeline."

________

Arctic light fills the top of the room with a brittle delicacy, like the tooth of a gentle jaw in the unknown hours of a white night. I sit across from a well-known theatre music composer. In his characteristic black jacket, he eyes me with the filling presence of boreal light, as a friend in the mysterious haunts of a northern dream. I’m at work on an essay. The title marks a conscious turnabout towards the psychic rush of art in the unconscious; a memory become prophecy as the light dims and the man disappears with my thought.

Arctic fox in winter mountain by Magne Håland

Leaving my room for the main complex of the northern university, I feel on edge as concave walls cut with sharp angles into grass-laden gardens, while up above the window glass refracts the incessant sun with chilling delight. As I move through a room, I am accosted for passing over an international boundary.

Mikak and Tukauk by John Russell

An Inuit woman breathes with intensive definition as she explains the national boundary, seemingly on the grounds of the school. With a bright empathy, I willingly and pleasantly follow the guidelines and roam across the border daily, with attention and respect for the defense of physical difference. 

________

        Throughout the sanctified fields of one human home
                  Lived to the final digression into creative madness 

The right to be
        As connected as all beings
                  With electric happiness
                          Outside

- excerpt "Lugubrious Background Nearing an Electromagnetic Haze"