Tag: Fables

The Drift

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Long ago, on the shores of a storm-tossed sea, there lived two brothers: Li, the elder, steady as ancient stone, and Wei, the younger, restless as the gulls. Their father, Lao, a weathered fisherman, had taught them to read the tides, but the brothers’ hearts sailed different currents.

Li anchored his small boat each dawn beside a jagged island, where fish swarmed like silver shadows beneath the rocks. “Patience feeds the wise,” he murmured, casting his nets even when the tides dragged slow as dripping honey. Some days, his catch was meager, but over time, his baskets sometimes filled—grain by grain, wave by wave.

Wei scoffed. He built a sleek sailboat with wings of scarlet cloth, chasing rumors of glimmering schools far offshore. “Why nibble crumbs when feasts wait beyond the horizon?” he cried. Yet the open sea deceived him: schools vanished like melted frost, and once, he sailed three days toward a golden spire on the horizon, only to find empty sky. “A trick of the light,” he grumbled, yet still he chased, lured by the wind’s whispers.

One autumn, a tempest raged for weeks. Li’s anchored boat survived, but the island’s fish fled to deeper waters. Wei, battered by waves, returned hollow-eyed, his sails in tatters. Desperate, the brothers sought Lao’s counsel.

The old man led them to the shore, where the sea sighed against the sand. “You see the waves as rivals,” he said, “but the sea is neither friend nor foe. Li trusts the rocks, yet forgets the tide’s rhythm. Wei loves the wind, yet mistrusts the depths. But the sea’s truth is in the drift—the balance between knowing when to hold and when to yield.”

He placed a weathered compass in Li’s palm and a spyglass in Wei’s. “The island’s fish follow the moon’s pull; chase them not with nets, but with the tide’s clock. And you, Wei—the open sea rewards not speed, but sight. Fish that glitter like coins are often scales refracted through fear. Seek the currents beneath the frenzy.”

The brothers joined their ways: Li timed his nets to the tide’s turn, while Wei scanned not the horizon, but the water’s shimmering patterns. Together, they found a hidden shoal where the sea’s two moods met—steady as bedrock, swift as stormwind.

Moral:
The sea’s wisdom lies neither in stubborn anchor nor reckless chase, but in dancing with its unseen rhythms. To drift is not to wander; it is to move with the truth of the depths.

Haiku (as epilogue):
Steady waves roll by, Chasing winds on restless seas, Truth lies in the drift.

Stealing Commons From the Goose

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The Flawed Script: A Goose, a Common, and the Spectral Other

The legal meat-grinder churns, a bio-mechanical Moloch. It devours the petty thief, the one who snatches the feathered signifier, the goose, from the commons – the free-floating, pre-symbolic Real. This desperate act, a twitch in the fabric of the social order, is punished with brutal finality. A public display of cause and effect, a suturing of the rent with the bloody needle of the law.

A goose, you say? A banal signifier, a phallus for the masses, easily grasped, easily digested by the Law’s maw. But the script, this social control program, this matrix we call reality, oh, it runs far deeper. Behind the scrim of ownership, lurks the Big Grab, the Enclosure. The powerful, the Lacanian Other, the Symbolic order itself, fences off the commons, the Real, the source of all meaning. They steal the very ground from which the goose, any goose, can even be conceived. This theft, this act of severing the subject from the jouissance of the Real, is the primal crime.

The petty thief, a pawn, dances to the script’s melody. He hungers for the surface symbol, the meat of the goose. But the true player, the puppeteer behind the Law, craves a different sustenance. They feed on the raw, unsymbolized energy, the repressed libido, the very life force stolen from the commons.

But the greater parasite, the one unseen, escapes the grinder’s maw. This spectral Other, a Lacanian master lurking in the shadows, has orchestrated the theft of the commons itself. They’ve fenced it in, transformed the open field of desire into a codified enclosure. The goose, once a wild element, becomes a commodity, a signifier chained to the symbolic order.

We, the divided subjects, forever yearning for the lost wholeness of the Real, are left with the scraps. We chase phantoms, the reflected image of the goose in the distorting mirror of the market. The law, a malfunctioning script, reinforces this fractured reality. It punishes the desperate symptom, the man or woman driven by lack, while the true crime – the theft of the symbolic commons – continues unaddressed.

This is the obscene theater of our existence, a Burroughs-esque cut-up of reality. We are all junkies, hooked on the signifiers dangled before us. The goose, once a source of sustenance for the collective flock, becomes a mere token in the endless exchange.

Here’s the rub, here’s the Burroughs-esque cut-up: the goose itself is a code. Its honk, a message from the Id, a chaotic squawk the Law struggles to decipher. Stealing the goose is a rebellion, a glitch in the matrix. The act disrupts the script, exposes the power grab behind the charade of ownership.

But the game’s rigged. The commons are shrinking, fenced in by legalese and barbed wire. The goose, once a wild squawker, becomes a processed patty, another empty signifier on a supermarket shelf. The revolution, if there is one, lies in hacking the script, rewriting the code. Perhaps the goose, that symbol of primal desire, can become the key, the virus that infects the system, that honks its way back to the unfettered commons, the Real, the source.

The only escape? Perhaps a radical re-writing of the script. A cut-up revolution, a dismantling of the symbolic order itself. To reclaim the commons, the wild goose of desire, we must confront the spectral Other, expose their machinations. Only then can we break free from the law’s flawed script and enter the uncharted territory of the Real. But be warned, the path is fraught with danger. The journey may lead to madness, to a dissolution of the self.

But what choice do we have? The alternative is an eternity of chasing phantoms in a fenced-in world.