Along empty highways, now covered in dirt, a sieve lets rust colored water move underground. The heat makes us dig for cool water and tuck in rubble, which now resemble nothing more than boulders, for shade.
The rubble was laid here years ago, where song birds once sang, there is the sound of wind weaving through the cracks in buildings that once stood as monuments to gods of commerce.
Wandering these melted streets, you feel the mind disconnect from the body, and the dreams of who you are splinter from your grips. They take on forms of their own, the self now is found in plastic parts that deteriorate and find their way back inside you. We’ve spent years going down the wrong road. Can we turn back?
The rubble reveals the possibilities of a world which existed before, the loose ends that hadn’t yet closed.
“It’s not about turning back,” you say, “it’s about where to go from here with the knowledge of where we came from.”
I think of where we came from, and see the way that the concrete buildings return to limestone dust and the glass shards sparkle as they disintegrate into sand.
The human brain has all sorts of contingencies to keep the self satisfied and make decisions without interventions or hesitations. Our language and society was then build like a cocoon around these psychological compulsions, that keeps us tied to highways and obeying road signs.
The mountain speaks…in whispers and if you listen you can hear it tell you how to break free from these stiff confines and the double yellow line. The poison you know is deep in your bones, waiting like lead to leak into your blood. You must begin the climb to seek truth. Truth that is written in systems of life and love that make up the hustle and bussle of the once magical hubs of human connection. The cities of old, the skyscrapers now covered in rust and dusted with snow.
On the precipice…you must be careful, there are strong winds that can take you away from this earth, and crumbling masses of iron that are only in place because they’ve gone many years without human interference.
The days after the collapse are quiet and the hums that persist, come from twisted flutes of dismantling architecture and colonies of insects that feed voraciously off the minerals that once made up luxury apartments.
When I reach the plateau or what was once a city square, I think I can make out the remains of statues that have been toppled, reinstated and defaced as conflicts play out over history, only for the statue to once again fall to the weight of time.
It is getting dark, and I need a place to rest; however, the barely intact benches still have metal rods that protrude strategically placed many years before, when people sleeping was seen as a problem to be solved by keeping them out of your jurisdiction.
As night falls and the telephone poles turn into tree stalks down the highway, you’ll think you see something walking in the distance.
Life without muscle and a heart and a brain, the scaffolding of your own body seems alien to you. The parts of you that are invisible coonfront you in the night and the years we’ve spent running from our archaic forms and covering them in cloth and jewels seem to disappear.
What you see in the writing on the walls of caves. When the fire is dancing and you are tired from a day spent out in the elements. When your dreams are built into your DNA and the systems that keep them locked behind closed eyes and under sedated limbs, begin to malfunction. The boundary is leaking like rust creating rosharch tests that elude reason.
You must stand in awe.
Down deeper as you force your eyes closed, the flicker of the flame becomes subtle variation in shade that rush in fluid shifting patterns over the backs of your eyelids, and the thin blood vessels make up strings of dark viral clouds that soon leave the physics of combustion to become assemblies of thought, perception, belief and sensation.
You enter the realm of the mind…
The forms come to life and begin to speak to you as the boundary between you and your surroundings begins to melt.
The mind is deceptive…are they speaking or are you?
You are brought deep into catacombs, covered in ornate carvings that are mostly illegible, languages from a different time that once occupied the same space. How do you pay your dues to the place that made you? How do you begin to understand the world you’ve come from? These old writings, like abandoned classroom chalkboards, speak to the forces that shape who we are and the stories we tell.
What seperates a story and a myth from what is declared objective fact?
In these halls, you handle artifacts, pieces of empires, and keepsakes that are no longer held by the hands of those who imbued them with power and felt that power return to themselves.
There is a little golem that served to protect a family’s home from robbers pillaged by institutions claiming to preserve history and practice a more refined and astute culture. One that is closer to reality, and as such does not have the time to concern itself with human constructs such as attachment. Though where these premier institutes to turn their cold calculus on themselves, they would see their own attachments to notions of superiority and their almost supernaturally conceived hierarchy. This little golum looks at you and asks the question…
“What do we decide is our history?”
The golem tells us that at all times we share the same space, sometimes so overwhelmed with the fullness of our own awareness that we forget that we are here. Breathing, living, and arguing with ourselves about the worlds we have constructed in our minds. The history, whether or not we decide it exists, shapes the terrain and spaces that envelope us.
But alas, past is past, and no more, the swirling conflicts that shaped us now live catalyzed in our blood and then printed in coins, that we claim contain value and yet, as if it were a clerical error, cannot ascribe value to an ecosystem. The system was blind to the interconnectivity between biological, behavioral, and social phenomena. The past cannot be revived or transformed but it is undeniably present.
Being in lines and through time and space, that persist like the lights of stars long after they are gone. The many paths we came from, are sometimes years of travel away, they may cross, never meet, and weave into the now or be lost in large catalogs of infinite chances reduced by imperial forces to strict paths and limited acceptable practices.
You can find these catalogs in the Tower of Babel, where we tried to reach towards this endlessness. The concerted goal of the human race exists within many labels but in our narrow window, we can see common expressions and feelings that remain glowing at the center of our experience. The constructed past, the illustrated future, the year we spend rearranging scrambled knowledge within ourselves. The many miles of life we alone have lived are testaments to the cultures and connections that supply our little steps down grassy paths.
The path leads you to the place you came from, the little corner of the world where your heart was sculpted. It seems isolated in time, here tightly tucked in the rocks, there are lands that nurture you. You find this safe space tied to your true being, which seems so obscured by the machines that march outside your doors at night. It sits many miles away from you now under threat from deep splits in the earth’s surface.
Life lived here alongside you. As you grew up, sitting in tall grass that you watched with telescopic eyes, that bright yellow you breathed in in bundles and flashes with the wind. You are a part of this earth, and it is a part of you. This is revealed by the way soil and grass are peeled back into rocky cliff faces cut by high rushing water, revealing abandoned dens of small mammals that moved on as the stream itself settled into its new home.
As morning light shines through your eyelids, you are forced to come to terms with the fact that all you have just witnessed and described is only a creation of your own. The golum returns this time in the form of a large beast, with impressions of your dreams in its sides and swirling eyes.
You look in its eyes and you are granted words to cling to if you have the strength.
“Love is home, history is here, and feelings are real.”
The coming days will decide if these words ring true or they melt into the past without the steel stamp that is now needed to make it through the crumbling cliffs of century-old projects of heads of state.
You wake up and all you can remember is a person setting their child down at the base of a tree.
Your head is foggy, and your back is sore. You feel like there is a vast infinity between you and where you want to be, and you feel lost in space and isolated in time. There are no tall waving grasses, no warm glows, no dark clouds, no strange creatures. The skeleton you met sits firmly inside you, the golum is nowhere to be seen, and you are back on the mountain, as the winds travel like shrapnel through the quiet morning, where your environment no longer speaks, and all you have in front of you is the dull curated history meant for the halls of guards of a gold-plated tyrant. How can you move when every move you make feels like the wrong one? When time has run out, and the hounds are baying outside your door, but all you can hear is that muffled sound of the wind. There are no answers in sacred texts, and no answers you will find in the endless paths of your mind; you must begin the steps towards the next city and find your way out of these industrial ruins. But don’t forget where you came from, as there, deep below the rubble in the dark on its isolated island lit by solar lights, holds your past, which has demands of your future.
