The
earth demands blood.
It's
a well-worn trope of horror fiction, playing on the city dweller's unconscious
fear of the rural; knife-wielding druids, pagan ceremonies, fertility through
sacrifice. Well-known too, as the dark heart of the 20th century; Blut und
Boden, boots and runes, the bleak magic of destruction and hysteria. Yet for
all the horror, it is perfectly natural. 'Adam' is known to be the masculine
form of the word Adamah, earth, and related to the word meaning blood; so the
earth only wants what is hers by right, and violence is the song of the earth
singing her children home. Dust, to dust.
But
what, then, of all things which are not Matter?
Memory
and place are made of the same stuff; earth and blood; sinew and mud. Dust and
dust.
Yet
within this tiny knot of streets, there are also other residents; a twist to
the left, a sharp turn right within memory and place reveals glimpses.
Intimations of the dunes hidden beneath the pavement; the way the large old
house sits atop that slight incline, concealed by pine trees; the way the
farthest wall of the Sephardic cemetery at the end of the lane catches the last
of the noonday sun in winter; the spires of the palatial neo-Gothic edifice
shrouded in mist, their scale unmoored, become Faery towers.
The
carved leaf-and-bough faces of the Green Man leering down from the pillars at the park entrance. Lights
behind the roset windows of the boarded-up church at night. The house you're
sure was here, set back deep among
the other buildings, but that you can't now find.
What
are these?
Real,
they are not; not in the way of bombs in Syria, and hunger in the homeless
shelter around the corner. But things
that are not Matter are not necessarily things that do not matter. That they
exist at a remove from the world, does not mean they have no function in it.
Such imaginings and visions, although they are non-facts and non-places, in their
phantasmagorical extrapolation are extensions of the world. A Non-world, if you
will, as outpost of existence, an archipelago of meaning in the Void. For every
corporate-owned stretch of concrete, someone's fond remembrance of it as a
field; for every charmless thoroughfare, a lover's memory of it as the place
where a ring or kiss was first offered and accepted; we make our home in two worlds at once; make our way through
both.
The
earth demands sacrifice, but so do these places and moments that extend from it
into our imaginations; the half-remembered vistas and dissolving corridors of
the last dream traces in the pre-dawn light that stay with you throughout the
day (ghostly complement to the mundane) ; the brief jolt of a stranger's face
mistaken for that of a long-lost friend; the impractical notion toyed with for
its own sake; the envisioning of the route of a train not taken; glimpses, flashes,
imaginings; the Non-world is vast.
And
the nature of the sacrifice owed to it?
It demands to be seen.
Drawing
attention to it, drawing it, writing it into existence, is service and
ceremony, ritual and practice. Work that i predict will be as difficult in 2017
as in any other year, and more difficult still, and even more important.
For us, there is only the trying.
For us, there is only the trying.
" Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings"
-Wm Blake
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