a story by Anthro Naughty
The truth is, we weren’t ready for how relentlessly tedious the zombie apocalypse would be.
Years of 3rd rate Hollywood action films have given us space to mentally prepare for the more cinematic aspects of it all– the violence, the destruction, the carnage. But now that rubber has met road, I find it’s the little day-to-day practical things that really eat at you. Every day you're stuck scavenging for more supplies, rationing food and water, awkwardly avoiding your nextdoor neighbor Jeff (in part because he’s now one of the undead but mostly because you still need to return his leaf blower), and generally not enjoying your life so much as just surviving it. Living through a zombie invasion takes constant vigilance and stamina, because while the zombie hoard may be slow-moving they are also relentlessly persistent. (And you know the old adage about hares and turtles. To us creatures on the run, there are few things more pernicious than slow and steady.)
But does it need to be this way? Are we handling this new invasion with the right kind of thinking? Are we even thinking at all? In every piece of literature, we’re presented with only two possible responses to being confronted by a zombie: fight or flight. But I’ve never been one to settle for a binary. And after years of us losing fight after fight, and losing the stamina to run away, I think it’s time for a third option. Another choice. An actual solution to our zombie problem which I’ve discovered by analyzing the zombies themselves.
We know precious little about zombies other than what we can directly observe. Do they cause wide-spread destruction? Yes. Have they killed (well, I prefer the word turned) thousands of people? Of course. But all the data in the world does us little to no good so long as their intentions remain a mystery to us. If we don’t know their motivations, we’ll never figure out how to stop them. We’ll never figure out whether or not we should stop them. What if the fight/flight dialectic is actually predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding? What if zombies aren’t the problem, or even a deadly symptom of the problem?
What if they’re the solution?
Years of 3rd rate Hollywood action films have given us space to mentally prepare for the more cinematic aspects of it all– the violence, the destruction, the carnage. But now that rubber has met road, I find it’s the little day-to-day practical things that really eat at you. Every day you're stuck scavenging for more supplies, rationing food and water, awkwardly avoiding your nextdoor neighbor Jeff (in part because he’s now one of the undead but mostly because you still need to return his leaf blower), and generally not enjoying your life so much as just surviving it. Living through a zombie invasion takes constant vigilance and stamina, because while the zombie hoard may be slow-moving they are also relentlessly persistent. (And you know the old adage about hares and turtles. To us creatures on the run, there are few things more pernicious than slow and steady.)
But does it need to be this way? Are we handling this new invasion with the right kind of thinking? Are we even thinking at all? In every piece of literature, we’re presented with only two possible responses to being confronted by a zombie: fight or flight. But I’ve never been one to settle for a binary. And after years of us losing fight after fight, and losing the stamina to run away, I think it’s time for a third option. Another choice. An actual solution to our zombie problem which I’ve discovered by analyzing the zombies themselves.
We know precious little about zombies other than what we can directly observe. Do they cause wide-spread destruction? Yes. Have they killed (well, I prefer the word turned) thousands of people? Of course. But all the data in the world does us little to no good so long as their intentions remain a mystery to us. If we don’t know their motivations, we’ll never figure out how to stop them. We’ll never figure out whether or not we should stop them. What if the fight/flight dialectic is actually predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding? What if zombies aren’t the problem, or even a deadly symptom of the problem?
What if they’re the solution?
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Vampires, I’m sure you’ve noticed, don’t come in hordes. They’re less an invasive species and more a statistical anomaly, individualistic in their very nature. Individualism has had a good run in the west – after centuries of enlightenment thinking being underwritten by erroneous matrices (like the false doctrine of the American Dream) and impotent religious practices (like expensive skin-care regimens and single-occupancy bouncy castles) all our individualist tendencies have coalesced into our current me/my/mine mind.
This is why it’s safe to say that vampires, being the most distilled example of the me/my/mine mind, will never be a catalyst for their own apocalypse. Can you even imagine what that would look like? All these individualist psycho-divas, bickering, backbiting (literally), and jockeying for power positions. And for what? To get distracted by hunger and general boredom of it all, then head out for a round of golf in Bedminster and top it all off with a quiet night of binge-watching Van Helsing while sipping fresh baby blood? Apocalyptic revolutions must be made from thicker stuff than that.
And even if these princes of immortality managed to pull their shit together for one big corporate move, what would the organizing principle be? What would motivate these self-interested solipsists toward collective action? One can only drink so much blood, and nevertheless one must constantly be in pursuit of that blood. In the past, they’ve tried to solve this problem by preserving little reserves of A/B/O (by canning, bottling, freezing, etc.) with the hopes of being able to monetize the hunger and hoard their earnings. This was a major failure. In all cases their preserved blood lost its taste.
The dominion class of humans, the ruthless 1%, have increasingly concentrated their power by employing suppression tactics in order to accumulate massive stacks of gold (gold still dripping with the sweat of their exploited labor force). These humans do not literally drink their victims’ blood like vampires do, and so the wealth they extract is slower to rot, but vampires know that hoarded wealth of any kind always eventually becomes tasteless. Accumulated wealth always submits to the demands of negative inflation. Nothing gold can stay.
The ruthless 1% may still be desperately striving to achieve their dream of eternal riches, but vampires have resigned themselves to the hand they have been dealt. They work alone, they drink alone. They prowl the earth alone, each night gorging on fresh blood but always and for eternity starting each new day with an empty belly, staring famished and alone into the void. Vampires are confined to solitude for eternity. Their me/my/mine mind is forever pushing away those whose friendship and brotherly solidarity would otherwise give meaning to their life. There is no space for the blood of a covenant amongst brothers. Solitude is demanded by their nature.
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Zombies, on the other hand, seem to really know the value of togetherness. They sit together. They eat together. They go on long walks on the beach together.
Many of earth’s predators deploy pack-based hunting strategies, be it timberwolves routing their prey away from their herd into a trap through fanning out and cutting off escape routes, or the Trump children doing the same with exotic game animals in the Serengeti (or in Florida beach-side, singles’ bars).
However, when we carefully observe a horde of zombies in the wild, we surprisingly do not see classic, pack-based strategies of surrounding and conquering. Rather, we see them moving out in a rhizomatic manner, as if they are participating in a search party that is looking for something or someone who is lost. They fan out, not to circle around a center point for attack, but rather in a continual movement outward toward a horizon of endless regress. Molecules, diffusing to fully saturate a space.
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Now, imagine. Your standing in the darkness. You can sense them breathing. To your left, a zombie. To your right, a vampire.
The zombie makes the first move. Not because it was fast off the line—zombies, of course, are never fast—but because the vampire got distracted by a squirrel. Instead of engaging your fight or flight impulse, let’s say you choose the third option. Let’s say you decide to acquiesce to this zombie’s advances.
His first bite is deliberate and without malice. The zombie does not start with a major artery as a vampire would (predictably always going straight for the jugular), but rather he begins by using his teeth to peel the flesh off your chest and head, exposing your rib cage and your skull. Next, he grabs a small, sharp rock from the ground. With one hand he holds the sharp rock against your now exposed skull and with the other grasping a second heavier rock, he begins tapping the sharp rock until your skull cracks open exposing your brain.
He then begins to feed. His feeding however is not desperate and sloppy. Rather, it is measured and with purpose. As he slowly eats your brain, his eyes are trained on the newly exposed beating heart seen through your rib cage.
For a moment, his gaze moves from your heart to your eyes which are only inches from his. You realize you are not looking into the eyes of a craven monster, neither a predator absentmindedly feeding on its prey nor a psychopath cruelly perpetrating meaningless violence. As you look into its eyes, you see something else. You see something that could only be called kindness.
His gaze drops from your eyes back down to your still beating heart as he continues eating your brain, the sound of his quiet and deliberate chewing, effortless as his black teeth easily pass through your grey matter. Occasionally the crunch of an errant bone fragment that has found its way into his bloody mouthfuls can be heard. Despite your desire to be cognitively present for this holy operation, your attention is increasingly hard to muster. You start to drift through a cosmos that no longer seems remote, an outer space that has suddenly become unmistakably inner.
This zombie is eating your brain and in so doing is eating your me/my/mine mind. He continues to eat until the precise moment when your brain sends its last electrical pulse to your heart. The zombie stops and sits back to observe the fruit of his labor.
In the waning twilight of your consciousness, just before you take the last permanent plunge into your inner cosmos, you feel a gentle, cool wind pass over your body. As this wind blows through your now open and empty skull, it makes a whistling sound—a silly, pitchy whir amongst this gruesome scene. This wind is what the zombies call a we-wind. We-wind connects us all as it moves through our many empty skulls, whistling as it goes.
This we-wind fills the empty cavity where our me/my/mine mind used to be, activating us and our skulls into apocalyptic collective jubilation, a chorus of whistling zombies. This we-wind is the only and true wind of change for as we are transformed from our false selves—individuated me/my/mine minds—into a dividuated community collective, we then effect change in the world through continuing the holy work of consuming me/my/mine minds wherever we come across them. You have just become part of a pack that exerts its influence not by making its world smaller through dividing and conquering, but a pack that makes its world bigger by ushering everyone in.
This we-wind of change is changing all of us into a communion of activated and organized action workers, neither living nor dead but constantly laboring in love, ridding the world of the scourge of the me/my/mine mind, adding to our numbers daily, and whistling while we work.