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There
is no spoon.
Neo's vocation is one of mind over that which foists itself upon the mind
as matter. And as we're graphically reminded throughout the film, this
matter is lethally powerful in spite of its illusory nature. He has to
assert the true and the real against the false and the fake in a realm
where fake, for the moment, reigns supreme, where the fake, moving in
for the kill, crowns itself with such descriptions as "the sound
of inevitability." The counter-performance of Zion dreams large but
also celebrates, in the face of the computer-generated construct, such
small, local, but earth-shatteringly effective affirmations as "There
is no spoon." This is dictionary-definition apocalyptic. Our world
is not unfamiliar with the processes which would reduce all human life
to the status of the coppertop battery, fueling the machinery of stone-cold
profit by utilizing humanity's preference for the Disneyified over the
incarnationally redeemed. To the man with a hammer, as the saying goes,
everything's a nail. To Christof, an unborn child is a ratings phenomenon.
And to a corporation, a human is a target market. Apocalyptic unveils
another way of doing things. Apocalyptic awakens.
 As
The Matrix ends, Neo directly addresses the Matrix and explains
that he's about to do some awakening. In contrast to to the limits the
Matrix has imposed, arrogantly asserting the meaning of "realistic"
and "the inevitable," Neo will unveil "a world where anything
is possible." He will make a spectacle of the principalities and
powers, parading the commodifying folly of the Matrix before the watching
world. He is in this world but not of it. And he's about to start us imagining
what it might mean to rage against the dying of the light and the pretentious
busyness of the machine, which we now know, of force, to be death-dealing.
He's announcing Zion's new day which is and was and is to come.
Taped on the wall above the doorway exiting my classroom, I have two drawings,
each of a pill, one red and one blue. Much of what I profess to students
at fifty-minute intervals is dismissed as complete lunacy, much is forcibly
ignored, and plenty fails to overcome the myriad images and sounds that
occupy their minds even when I'm the only one talking. They've been bombarded
by a multifaceted media presentation before they entered my room, and
the bombardment will continue once they're out. The Matrix has them.
But from Beowulf to Philip Larkin, we talk about choices, the grids that
define them for us, and what it might mean to represent new life in the
mass hypnosis of the present. We start small with such seeming trivialities
as not breaking in front of other students in the lunchline just because
you can and somehow expanding your sphere of respect by kindly regarding
the people you're not inclined to notice. These are red-pill decisions,
representing a lifestyle the darkness does not know or comprehend. The
blue-pill option, on the other hand, will involve submission to hostile
forces which constantly generate more illusions in such a way that we're
eventually doing it to ourselves.
The two drawings are but one more invitation for my students to a more
determined clarity of thought and action. They know that it's a funny
idea, but many also acknowledge that it can be a help. We've talked, read,
and written, and now they're made to re-enter (though hopefully they've
never left it) the real world. There they can either willfully misconstrue
what transpires around them to fit their mindset or receive the faces
and situations that confront them in all their uncommercial beauty. The
broad path of the former has many takers, and they've long known that
the wide-awake latter is narrow and fraught with danger. They'll note,
too, that red-pill living is best undertaken in groups and that, on his
best days, their teacher is attempting to join them.
6
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Copyright
©2003 by David Dark.
Adapted from Everyday Apocalypse, published by Brazos
Press; used with permission.
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