The Coin, The Fountain, and the Dream

The shaft of the hammer in my hand was soaked in sweat. How many were there? Hundreds? Thousands.

He was like a shaman, like a great religious leader. Passionate. Dangerous. Wild. True.

He was in a feverous reverie. His words caught us by the back of the neck. They grabbed our souls and shook them to life. We wanted it. We needed it. We would have followed this truth anywhere.

“Do you know what ritual is?” He cried out over the rain-soaked crowd.

“Ritual is the physical expression of a psychological process. We act out in the world of the senses what we want to manipulate in the world of the spirit. Tossing coins into a fountain: this is ritual at its most simple. We exchange coins for dreams. And we sacrifice the coins to the water, the source of life itself.”

Not one person made one sound. The rain came a little harder onto the parking lot.

“Ritual deals with symbols: the coin, the water, the sacrifice. Ritual deals with symbols because the language of the spirit, the language before language, is the language of symbols. We don’t dream in numbers. We don’t dream in words. We dream in symbols!

“The great religions of the world deal in ritual and symbolism. The great mythologies of the world deal in ritual and symbolism. The human animal, in its mind, wherein it is distinguished from the other animals, is a creature of symbolism!

“But this sacred element is being attacked, brothers and sisters! We are eating ourselves like snakes eating their own tails. And we can’t see it. They can’t see it! But we see it! We see it!”

We all erupted in a fury of agreement. I held my hammer high above my head, the rain washing down now in a torrent over the slippery wood, the power seeping inside me.

“We have rid ourselves of religion and mythology!

“We are lost! We are lost and confused!

“But it is worse than this, brothers and sisters! Worse!

“We have done something worse than this!

"We have taken the most sacred and mystical of our nature and plastered it all over the physical world in the most crass, heinous act of bastardization the natural world has ever seen. We forget that symbols are the deep expressions of the soul, and that ritual is the medium for their expression in the conscious realm! We have actualized symbols in the great, horrifying ritual and mythology of ADVERTISING!”

Again the crowd bellowed in rage.

“The symbols continue to work their magic. But the magic has been trivialized, mutilated. We have surrounded ourselves with deep, meaningful manifestations of our psyches, and used these manifestations to manipulate ourselves.

“Why?

“For the COIN! For the coin, brothers and sisters! The coin has been fished out of the fountain. We have waded in and discovered an underwater mountain of money. And we have pulled it all out.

“But we have reversed the ritual. The coin is removed from the water and the dream disappears in the air! 

“The coin is removed from the water and the dream disappears in the air, brothers and sisters!”

We all repeated:

The coin is removed from the water and the dream disappears in the air! 

“The symbol of the family is used to sell to the family. The family struggles under the pressure of the need to satisfy the draw of the symbol, the manipulation of the depths of their own minds, and is destroyed, crumbles in misery because it cannot escape the distorted message: if you don’t buy this then you won’t be happy.

“And they cannot buy it all. And they are not happy. And even those who can buy whatever they want are not happy because there are too many symbols. There are symbols everywhere, all the time. The ubiquity of the message you are not enough if you don’t have this, is astounding, overwhelming. Buy what you want, you will never have everything and you will never escape the power of your own mind being used against you.

“The young hero is not the wise man and the queen is not the maid, but we have to be all these people, at every stage of our lives, if we are to satisfy the call of advertising. It is impossible! It creates only misery!

“We must reclaim the symbol!

“We must raid the houses of the rich and steal back our coins!

“We must go back again to the fountain and heave the coins back in! We must fight to get our dreams back! We must rip the cables from behind the neon lights! We must paint over the billboards! We must round up the black magicians of advertising and lock them up! Let them sell things to each other from the dungeon! Let them brutalize music where we can’t hear it!”

The shaft of the hammer in my hand was soaked in sweat. The crowd again roared: Give us back our dreams!

We poured onto the streets of the city: fanatic savages raging against decades of manipulation.

Baseball bats smashed in the windows of boutiques. Iron bars destroyed the digital billboards. Golf clubs whistled through bus stops. Neon lights shattered in the wake of our passage.

Every insane second of it I loved. These are our minds, I screamed to myself, these are our thoughts! As I hurled a metal bin in through the window of a fast food restaurant, I was thinking, stay out of my mind, stay away from my soul!

Then the bank.

We found ourselves in front of a bank. Everyone started throwing whatever they had at the walls, at the doors. But the bank was solid. We were like ants attacking the Great Pyramid.

Then someone stole a car.

They drove it right up as close as they could go. We lit it up. The car exploded in the doorway of the bank. We had pierced the armor of the Black Knight. Frenzied, we scrambled in through the flames like human flares. 

I was there at the front when they emptied the safe. We grabbed what we could. Someone was directing us. Someone was organizing us. But nobody really needed telling. We knew what we were doing. We were reclaiming the coin.

The police had cleared the city centre and had encircled us. Riot gear. Guns. The Army of Greed. The Soldiers of Money. Burn our forests. Kill our animals. Blacken our skies. Do what you want, but whatever you do, do not touch our money! This is the message of the Protectorate of Advertisement.

But we were going to do it. Nothing was going to stop us. Someone had another car. Someone drove it over a water hydrant.

Water everywhere, gushing upwards into the rain like the phoenix of a fountain that it was.

As the guardians of capitalism closed in on us, we took our bags of money and emptied them, in glorious unison, over the newly born fountain. And we cried out:

We sacrifice the coins to the water, the source of life itself!

I dropped my hammer as I was handcuffed and pushed to the ground.

Millions of dollars of damage done.

Most of us went to prison.

But that night, locked up in a physical prison of metal and stone, our minds were freed, and we began to dream again.