Man Machine, drinking gasoline

“I’m a man machine drinking gasoline” – an appealing song for a male citoyen who maybe lives in a European capital and shares his cool contemporary views via twitter and a weĺl-furnitured literary blog with a fairly  non-conformed net community.

While listening to the hammering music for a second time  he imagines grimy, athletic bodies, emaciated by some excruciating industrial work slavery – unseen and unheard of in his own ” corridors of knowledge” as he has recently named  his academic field of work. He’s a professor of law, a schoengeist, too, but right now he rejoices in conjuring up gasoline-fed, smeared bodies – so hard that he can control them by letting them flex their muscles, bend and stretch their torsos, making them spread their legs like an archaic fighting machine. These creatures are manly through and through, he thinks, but in a defiant way, yes, defying their innate machine ma-scu-li-ni-ty, can you hear me, he shouts. That’s what they do, he rages against the vibrating sub-woofers. They are beyond rules, they don’t obey to written words and healthy nourishment and all that painstakingly documented civilization stuff which he himself carefully pays tribute to, day by day, in his urban life as an educated citoyen.

He watches those machine beings who are the vital, patient slaves of an out-faded enlightenment age. They’ll be guzzling gasoline and toiling like gladiators until their time has come. That will be the day when they spit gasoline into the faces of good-looking, slim urbanites like himself. They will soil him and he will submit gladly. They will reach over for all the pretty glasses full of sparkling champagne, everywhere in those pampered European cities. And they’ll empty them, hurl them, break them and it’ll be the start of their reign, the age of a new manhood and the semi-human man machine.

He sighs, and listens to the next song.”Man machine, semi human being, man machine, super human being”, a somewhat weak promise that the profound abyss between body and humanity may be overcome by a six-pack cyborg homunculus. “Man machine, the evil of a dream”, a dream lost a century ago which is now displayed in museums, on fitness courts and in art-house movies.

He turns the volume down, looks out of his living room window, takes a photo of the orange-blue sunset which still lingers above the Western spheres of the capital, and sits down at his laptop. He opens his twitter account and uploads the sunset photo, the third one this month. “Too early to go to bed, but in case I won’t have time later on: Good night, everyone. Sleep well.”