whose harm is it, anyway

What is harm anyway? There's the obvious nightmare catalog of war, insurrection, repression, torture, and unimaginable, and all-too-observable, endless permutations of physical, mental, social, etc violence, passive or active. And everything in between along a continuum of horror. There's that. There are also ever more subtle acts or omissions of harm, a seemingly infinite inventory of our inhumanity.

But what about the debates that people wage, even on Planet Harm?

Debates about blame, responsibility, history, cause and effect, will, evil, social structures, philosophies, religions, anarchies?

What about cloudy or murky (in the eyes of some) instances of alleged harm? (Mere mention of the word "alleged" sparks debate in some circles.)

The gesture of holding the door open for someone: is it gallant, condescending, ahistorical, sexist, ageist, arrogant, presumptuous, kind, or neutral?

And the rebuff of such a gesture: is that a shade of harm in the form of hues yet named?

The list goes on. The lists go on. (Whose lists?)

The look from one to another, anonymous or intimate: affection, objectification, lust, compassion, anguish, remorse, regret, rage, curiosity, sadness, charity, solidarity, sincerity, lovingkindness . . . ad infinitum.

The same with the written word, the spoken word. The same (multiplied exponentially) with words or parts of words or emojis transmitted by short message service, or SMS, which we all call "text."

The same with the word or words not said.

And then there's the harm of history, the stain and weight of ancient or recent sins, horrors we inherit, a heritage that can't be disappeared, that we cannot escape, even if by association and lineage. 

So, we on Planet Harm live and breathe all this; it's our atmosphere. Some of us plead acceptance; others pray for amnesia; yet others cry for conversion, a magical metanoia; many crave escape (and they find it but only in passing, momentarily).

We Harmlings are standing on a plank over a crevice. We dream of wings. 

We Harmlings push a rope that is slack from use.

The elders sang sagas of a deus ex machina, a dea ex machina, come to the rescue.

We lost the words but remember the melody.

What now?

Planet Harm

You walk in the sands, the landscape you know by heart, the windswept dunes granular as sugar and almost as white. The screeching seagulls declare, "Water is somewhere, but where?" People say, "The sky's the limit." What kind of limit is that? The sands, the horizon, they're the limit. One echoes the other. You have no GPS, no bearings. One direction is the same as any other.

Legend has it we are on the planet Harm, meaning that is what we are taught from the earliest age. We are told that our world is round, not flat. We are taught that Harm is spherical but not circular. We are taught that Harm is the name of our planet.

Who came up with that, and when?

Who can say?

As a citizen, a resident, of planet Harm, your pain is nothing special, nor is your grief. All of us are in harm's way. It's our birthright. If everyone is in harm's way, who has a right to complain? Sure, differences of degree and scale exist. But they don't stand out. Harm is in the air, in our history, in our vocabulary, our line of sight. 

When someone (Anonymous, for our purposes and safety) entertained the idea of escaping the circle of pain, it made no sense. What circle? We see no markings, no signposts. How could there be a circle of harm when harm is all we know? How can we imagine an atmosphere other than our own?

No passports, no tickets, no travel vouchers.  

But no one has ever expressed a desire to leave. Nobody has ever voiced a need to flee. And to where would we go? What would we find there?

We perform our daily chores: melting the sand into glass, sculpting the glass into art, selling the art to the Harmageddonite who bids the highest.

The sharp bristly-minty tang of a dark pine forest. The shock of the chlorine choir of the salty sea, its ripples blinding you. The roar of a river halting you. A blanket of emerald meadow lulling you to sleep.

We hear rumors, murmurs. We dream, or fantasize. Our poets sang sagas.

Talk of escape, revolution, refuge. The elders memorized the chants and passed them on to our children's children.

We hear the secret and dangerous whispers about "charms." The unwritten subversive scriptures etched into our blood.

Charms: the coded hints of talismans, trinkets, fetishes, amulets, totems, periapts, tokens, incantations, chants, litanies, phylacteries, scapulas, beads.

The inscription on the desert rock quotes Empedocles: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. ”

The priestesses debate whether this promises hope or despair.

what is my saga?

Never mind asking, "What is my sign?" (It is Sagittarius, but that explains or predicts very little, in my worldview.) It is more apt to ask, "What is your saga?" Now we're talking. Epic tales of conquest or defeat; heroic journeys; enlightening discoveries; noble orations.

My saga is in progress.

It is often ordinary but sometimes surprising in its twists, its shocks, its steps, its songs.

Isn't that what I've been reciting or humming here, my saga?

Characters come and go.

The tune morphs.

The plot thickens.

Or thins.