There Be Monsters

What lies within the city walls

This is a poetic and desperate rant about the past, the present, and the future, and the egocentric values that our city dwelling lives have spread through our world.

I’ve added an audio of the post, for those who prefer to listen. I’m still not sure. But hey, let’s give it try and see.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

The weather began to close in as the purplest grey horizon, like some celestial anxiety, loomed in our direction and the tendrils of winter began looping across the land. The dog and I traversed down a ravine toward the lake where a stand of towering birch trees had gathered. As the wind picked up a lofty birch began swaying and I noticed the slender wrist where the girth of its trunk had once been, and I marvelled at the power of the ghost-like beavers that I’d never actually seen. Not for want of waiting and watching and trying, but because they were more expert in this wilderness than the dog or I, and they chose to be unseen.

As the dog began drinking from the lake, I climbed away from the waterline where the beavers had intended the tree to fall. I whistled and the dog left the shore and came to my side, and we dropped to the ground and quietly scanned the lake for any sign of these vandal architects, only the descending pitch of an osprey, like a cooling kettle, to keep us company.

Beyond the lake, a three hour walk perhaps, I could see the distant city sprawling across the land. The same city that captured me and has held me hostage for these last twenty years. I venture into the forest with the dog, but only for short periods of time. I must return. There is no alternative.

I saw the day slowly fading into evening, the shoulder of the planet blocking the sun as we skulked away from the great source of life. A brownish yellow light emanating from the city kindled the belly of the oncoming bruised storm clouds, in steadfast refusal to comply with the rhythms of the planet.

They say that European seafarers heading toward those early colonial towns could smell the settlements long before they could see them. The sewage and rotting waste mixed with drying fish and animal flesh reeked across the sea from these choked hubs of humanity.

Early towns and cities staked out their territories, building boundaries between themselves and the immense, unruly wilderness. Map makers of the day warned of barbarous dangers beyond the city borders and beyond the boundaries of their understanding. Here be monsters they proclaimed, fencing off the surrounding world and enclosing themselves in a physical and mental membrane, coronating themselves as the pinnacle of possibility, the shining triumph over so-called savagery, each city a kingdom unto itself. They applauded themselves as they succumbed to the idea of linear progress, of hierarchies and of segregation with, their bankers and slaves, their soldiers and priests, their falconers and scribes, as if these new forms of power were the ultimate expression of all of humanity.

I’ve lived in cities for most of my life. I’ve lived in older cites, beside the ancient architecture where bygone peoples set about ordering their way of life, their sense of self, their dreams and their beliefs and their values, all manifested in their architecture, in pyramid and castle and wall and narrow lane and grand boulevard, with wood and wattle and daub and stone and brick and mud. And of course in blood.

I’ve seen these ancient peoples straining to conceive of the world from their city fortresses, beyond which there be monsters, inside of which there be the righteous. I’ve seen their obsessions mapping outwards from their cities and across all of history. Their passions and phobias and compulsions and megalomaniac delusions. Entire societies dedicated to sending their most civilised to some afterlife in opulent, extravagant comfort. Entire societies dedicated to squabbling and fighting for power to control the destinies of all the other squabblers and belligerent power maniacs within the confines of their city walls, in an ever increasing (and then decreasing) race to topple themselves forever.

And I’ve lived in modern cities with their glass and steel cathedrals towering toward the heavens, arrogantly pointing to another heavenly realm where today’s most civilised now want to send themselves, away from here, away from this earth, away from where monsters be, into the heavens, to become the gods. Glass and steel sculptures that decree the final separation of we city-builders from the land, from nature, from each other, and from ourselves. Modern enclosed cities fashioned from mirrored skyscrapers, each reflecting the other, in a never ending fractal of obsessive self-reference. These great modern cities that are no longer staking out territories upon the landscape, but now imagine themselves to be the landscape, the totality of everything, oh how the ancients would have looked on enviously at this paradise of hubris. These great cities that have become ravenous carnivores clamping themselves to the land and sucking in everything in a howling wind of desire and destitution.

I’ve flown from one city to another, no longer islands of so-called civilisation bobbing beside the seas of wild wilderness, but instead they seem to be the entirety of the world. They’ve dragged us, these cities, from the world, and they clawed the world from us, dumping us in an ever-growing pile of just ourselves. And now they dominate our lives and our futures more furiously than ever, as we are mangled through this digital revolution, toward we know not what, but, for sure there be monsters in that place, way off any map, that place beyond the boundaries of our meagre understanding.

2.

We’ve been back, on occasions, the dog and I, to the remaining stand of birches not yet sacrificed to these elusive beaver builders. We’ve seen the gnawing and the labour, but we’ve not seen these arboreal architects themselves. On one occasion, resting on a mossy glacial erratic stone, I looked across the water and contemplated the power of all these things we do not see. These things that are always forming and forging and shaping the world seemingly in absence. And I pondered the vital magic that happens off-stage, in the wings, behind the curtain, that which we do not know and cannot control. And I thought of how we can only understand these things on our own terms. An how we dismiss and denigrate and fear these things that demand we see the world through their eyes.

The tilting earth has shrugged away from the sun and winter has now arrived in full glorious splendour. The ospreys have long since migrated to warmer climes. Their descending calls now but echos, until the planet finally heaves itself sun-ward again. In their place, crows and ravens fill the silence with their scratchy, gurgling intelligence, going about their complex lives with such assurance that I feel like a pretender in this world. I ache for that belonging, for that assured certainty I’ve had wrenched from me after generations of city life. They look at the dog and I, these crows and ravens, I’m sure, with disdain, their wildness intuitively recognising two domesticates blundering about beyond their confines, out of their depth in the real world, beyond their mental membrane.

Winter means that all those creatures that do not hibernate or migrate, instead must adjust and balance themselves to the perpetual ancient rhythms of an entire planet breathing in and out, and in and out, wobbling and spinning forever on its gravitational groove through time and through space. I’ve grown to love this quiet and desolate season where the hullabaloo of fruiting and copulating and gorging and fragrance and colour and ambition are all put to one side. I’ve come to love this time of sleep and darkness. This time of contemplation and reserve. This time of strenuously holding on in noble belief that the future will arrive and with it, change, belief that we are not forever lost, belief that there is but a ray of hope on the horizon.

Winter is a beautiful and serene season, swaying between death and hope, nestling in the planet’s rhythms like a perfect thing. But in the city, winter is a menace in that frenzied, ever churning, season-less city where rhythms and cycles have been abandoned to clawing at endless growth and endless gorging and the never ending sating of endless desire. Winter is an interloper in the city, not a beautiful and serene season but something to be dealt with, to be handled, to be smothered, to be conquered. The winter is gawked at through windows, shunned, barely tolerated, endured, the winter has doors slammed in its face.

Here in the forest, as the snow falls in tumbling waves, I feel the threshold of myself pulling inward, contracting toward the inner world, shying away from the cold and the certain death that awaits we that venture too far or too long. But back in the city I am overwhelmed in a tide of ceaseless micro-cycles where even a circadian rhythm seems a lifetime. 24 hours! 24 whole hours!

And now we have staked out yet another territory, not outside our cities but inside them. Inside us. A new looming anxious territory, where there are no cycles at all, no seasons, no planet turning its shoulder from no sun, a territory with no rhythm, no life, just the hyperventilating digital pattern of on and off, and on and off, and on and off. We now populate a strange and new digital world that lays itself like a sheath around us, between us, through us, until eventually we see the world only through a window, a screen. A digital world that inserts itself into every relationship, demands entry to every ritual and every thought and every moment. A digital world that flows like blood through our modern cities, pulsating on and off and on and off and then just on and on and on. Our new digital cities just like our ancient archaic cities, are dedicated to treating our so-called most civilised, our shopkeeper kings, to a life of opulent, extravagant comfort. Our modern cities go further still, sacrificing everything to the need of those civilised few. Those insane few who see not the world but only the reflection of themselves in their skyscraper cathedrals.

Call back the map makers for we have found where there be monsters, and they linger not in uncharted waters, they lurk not in the dark mountains or the dripping forests, or the great unknown. The monsters that be, they thrive within the city walls. There be monsters for they are us.