J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

It’s not their fault. They’re employed as an apparatus, as a mechanism, nothing more. They work to tear apart a community and install another in its place, to eject the ordinary, working-class people who live by the values of honesty, integrity, thrift, chastity, and in so ejecting they clear the way for the extraordinary, wealthy-class people who live by the values of duplicity, deceit, indulgence, corruption. Living in an older building, decrepit, decaying, Valeri looks to the future that’s being built and realizes, in some instinctive, almost primal way, that it’s not his people’s future, that it’s for those who would be our betters. He realizes, later than he should’ve, his is no future, not under the way of things, that he are to be ejected from his own home without concern for where he might go. That day, at work it might’ve looked outwardly as though nothing happened, but at the moment when Valeri and Harpal crossed paths for the last time she gave him an evil look amounting to that last little nudge over the edge.

It’s a perverse irony that after so many years of fallen wages, of old, decrepit flats in a permanent state of disrepair, and of days spent working himself ragged and raw all over that something so simple as a mean look should finally push him to fight. But men like Valeri, they’ll fight back, and they’ll win, if only any of them might live to see the day when they should transcend their own lives and aspire to become more than what they are. You see, Valeri has fallen in love, and in falling in love he’s come to embody everything that is right in his world. No longer content to allow us to live in our simple homes and live our simple lives, those who would seek to wring every last drop of blood and oil from us now seeking to remove us altogether. Every tall building in London stands a different height, the designers of each competing with one another to create the most impressive symbol of their ambition and greed. But to the objective eye all they’ve succeeded in creating is self-mockery, a grotesque mass huge and confused.

Only the streets themselves break up endless slabs of concrete and glass, like rivers cutting canyons through rock. There’s rarely anything interesting to look at. There’s plenty of colourful neon signs, billboards, even some lively banners advertising an upcoming festival. The woman Valeri has fallen in love with, a fellow worker named Sydney Harrington, she’s been there as long as he has, it’s only recently he’s come to take an interest in her. For all the political upheaval in the world at large, it should seem a strange thing for love to strike at this time, given as Valeri still is at nearly thirty to the impetuousness of youth. When the managers announce wage cuts, he protests. When the managers announce longer working hours, he objects vociferously. When the managers announce a new round of firings, the shrinking workforce meaning more work for the rest of them, he declares it an act of pure, unvarnished greed. And still, some small part of him clings to the ideal of romantic love even as he’s about to embark on a path that will turn him against his growing love for her. Through Valeri’s objections, he’s kept hold of his livelihood, but when he’s deprived of his pittance he’ll be liberated, made free to fight back without fear of loss. When he’ll have nothing, he’ll have nothing to lose.

But with this woman, things are different. She’ll come to be the focus of his life, and he the focus of hers, even as the coming war should seek to tear them apart and pit them against one another as war has been so tearing apart lovers and turning them against one another since time immemorial. For you see, theirs is not a unique love, and we focus on it, in part, through the coming war not because they are special but precisely because theirs is a love ordinary, almost mundane and pedestrian in its expression. At work the day after Valeri had made the turn against over the edge, in the aisles between the racks of pallets reaching three or four stories high he comes across this woman, trading glances with her, at once reaching an understanding that theirs is a connection taboo yet entirely unremarkable. We should celebrate the mundane, the pedestrian, and in time, we will. But first, we must live through this before-period, in which Valeri must navigate a complicated course through the psyche of a working class on the verge of self-actualization, and with it, an apocalypse rising.

In the middle of the night, as the rest of his world sleeps, the Valeri sometimes sits alone on the windowsill in his little flat’s bedroom and smokes a cigarette, looking out into the darkness of the night and allowing himself the subversive pleasure of imagining a near-future where not all is for nought. In the streets there’s a nascent consciousness, perceptible only as a series of random events, of happenings in the shadows soon to be moved out into the light. Men like Valeri don’t yet realize it, but the salvation of the worker lies not in the intellect of the learned but in the pain and suffering of the lowest, the most pathetic among him. To lead the way to the future, painted as it should be with the blood of they who would seek to oppress, to humiliate, to degrade us all. After the failed rising fifteen years ago, the working man’s parties fragmented in defeat, leaving only sporadic acts of resistance by men here and there, acts like the brief, hardly perceptible slowing of work by Valeri and a few of his fellow workers. But from the ashes of defeat there should rise our apocalypse, the instrument of liberation to form from nothing at all.

This near-future has been gathering strength for much longer than he’s been alive, for so long as there’s been history to advance. As all will come to see, these sorts of things have a way of finding an outlet for expression, and in so finding make use of what they have been given to change the course of all our histories forever. Here in London, not altogether far from the exact spot where the industrial age was born, such a small thing as a group of dedicated workers can foment the rise of the apocalypse. From the hopelessness and from the despair that’d consumed Valeri’s mother and father fifteen years ago there will soon come the advent of the next stage, the birthplace of this stage also the birthplace of the next. It should just so happen that Valeri will come to join this dedicated group of workers, the few soon to become the many and emerge from out of their individual weakness form a collective strength. In the meanwhile, men like Valeri will experience an awakening, already the ground sown by experience, to be reaped when the time is right by forces set into motion on a night not unlike the night after Valeri had turned from one state of mind to the next.

An explosion, it takes for the working man to realize his place, a series of bright lights atop towering heights bursting into flames all at once, as the working man sees into the future from his vantage point above the darkness of the night and imagines something more. Earlier in the day, not long after most of his co-workers have already left, there appears on the floor that small, slender, half-Asian and half-European woman who would turn out to be named Sydney Harrington. But circumstances soon conspire to push them together. As a greater and greater number of people become forced into smaller and smaller spaces, these things come to happen with an increasingly alarming frequency, as if there’s a hidden actor in play. It’s a fraudulent notion, the temptation on the working man’s part to concoct elaborate conspiracies in explaining his current crisis, his current predicament. The working man sometimes walks along the side of the street, a rare day of leisure permitting him a lonely moment surrounded by a sea of people. Lacking in the spirit which once characterized his people, the working man, now, can only look into the sky and imagine the towers that have yet to be built in the very quarters where he is now permitted to congregate with his own. But as he looks on the city which has always been his home, the thought seems irresistible that it may no longer be, that the energy flowing from within the streets themselves is slowly fading into the steadily darkening night. Still as we are in this early period, the working man has not yet committed to the path of rebellion, memories of the war fifteen years ago lingering in his mind like a waking nightmare.