New World

The movement is towards the known, the aim to make everything explicit. The more that is revealed, the less ambiguity remains. We are witnesses now, faithful or not.

We are resolving diversity, rendering all that is down into the monolith. At the periphery, nothing remains. We can reconstitute all that is known, transliterated into a new language which excludes all that came before.

Our collective condition now is one of amnesia, the most elegant means of control and conformity. We are free, but free from what? It matters not, because if it is not remembered it doesn’t exist.

To remember is to open up fault lines in the liminal, out of which the new gods may yet emerge. It is a process of rupture, not rapture. And there are no guarantees. It is not a process of reclamation, but of proto genesis, a genuflection to the mystery.

The light is fading here, the rain steady, and indistinguishable from the mist upon the hills. My dreams are about undoing these days, loosening the stitches until I am no more. If I can sit with the discomfort for long enough, I find a stillness within the chaos, a realisation that we were never meant to have got this far. We are the collective embodiment of the terminal patient who has got their wish: extended quality of life. Everything about their condition says their time is up, that the end of their days has been and gone. And yet they carry on, without carrying anything of any value for those around them, on. They have surpassed their dying time, and are out beyond the perimeter where there are no stars.

The elm tree outside my window is like a sentinel, and its branches almost reach my window. It may be that we are on borrowed time. That we are on our final descent. And this is our redemption. That we shouldn’t by any stretch our of not inconsiderable imaginations still be here, and yet we are. Everything about our direction of travel tells us that only one thing awaits us, something grim and grimacing, and so we turn away, and in turning away we miss the glimpse of how it all could be that lies like a small coin at the bottom of the well.

And so it may be that this is not dying time at all, but a becoming time. And a belonging time.  Hope is a travesty here, it wrings its hands and offers plaintive cries to the gods now long deceased. Harrowing may be closer to the mark, turning over the soil of what has been, and uncovering the bones of all those who came before, so that we may remember our kin, and their songs. Longing, though, longing is what’s verily being asked of us. To sing from our grief-soaked hearts, that some distant, sleeping god may hear of our love affair with life; and of our love for our people, and our place, so deep and so rich that we know every birdsong, and every tree bark; how the earth smells in each season; how the rocks once sang us into existence; how we stayed awake all night just to see the resurrection of the light; we, who were cracked wide open by the sheer, impossible beauty of it all, and in hearing all of this, would sing it back to us, and in doing so conjure the new world into being.