| For early me and for early druids swamps were a place where the world of flesh and meat touched
the world of the imaginary and of the spirit.
|
Druids pitched human sacrifices into swamps, hoping to shunt them into the afterlife.
|
I attacked swamp grass with sticks, reveling in the stench, and
occasionally sacrificed a sneaker by falling into the fetid water.
|
 |
| Most druids probably didn't realize that swamps aren't some
infinite otherworld portal and that they have a bottom just like every other
volumetric thing on this planet. |
As a kid I presumed the swamp to have a bottom, but made the mistake of
thinking it was temporally infinite. It was a place I thought I could
always retreat to. I didn't like to get in trouble as a kid and I rarely broke
rules but I did violate the no going to the swamp alone rule when
I was very small. |
I had to go to know it would always be there. |
 |
| Rome, plague, christianity, and the false progress of the world killed the druids. |
My family didn't own the swamp or any land outside of our precious acre. I
got to roam the woods purely because they were, for years, worth nothing to their
owner. I still have no idea who actually owned all that land, but growing up
it was mine to be lost in. |
When the land developers came, I didn't know what to do. |
 |
| Druids, weren't super into romans. They rebelled and killed and were
killed. Mostly they were killed. |
I could barely handle bullies
at school let alone the giant construction
equipment that came to tear up the swamp. Anger made me cry. Alone in the
woods I expressed my rage silently by pissing on bulldozers and smudging
them with mud.
|
I stole every land for sale sign and, at night, under the
stars, I pitched each one bented and broken into the swamp. It was a
fitting end: I dreamt of those signs floating into the bog æther to be
ripped apart by bog people waiting just on the other side of reality. |
 |
| I doubt anyone noticed my shitty ruckus. The for sale signs returned
relentlessly. Machines dug pits and the swamp was drained. |
I got older and went to college. I lost track of who I had been in the woods. |
The woods became a place to hide from campus security and drink. |
 |
| They didn't just take the swamp. Most of the woods I walked in were laid
bare to make room for a house or two. Turned out, of course, swampland is
terrible to build on. It took years for a single house to be finished and
even longer for someone to buy it. |
Now when I visit home I always walk by the east end of the swamp where
it touches a road. It's hardly a few puddles, now. Beyond it I can see the
earth exposed and naked: in winter, dead grass is all it has to cover
itself. It is a goulish thing to be able to see the curvature of the ground I
used to wander when it was covered in leaves and brambles and a dense city
of trees. |
To see it like that feels like a forbidden thing. It's like a corpse
embalmed but never dressed, lying unfinished in a coffin. I never wanted
to know the woods' secrets. I never wanted to see them exposed. |
 |
| Imagine if you could convince a druid that every swamp was finite and
terminally mortal and that no matter what riches they bedecked their
throat-slitted sacrifices in, the swamp was just a lazy open faced tomb.
What would it do to their cosmology? |
Internally we feel infinite. Temporally we may be aware of
death, but when we look inside there is no limit to the void. There's no
bottom in sight to the well that emits our melancholy, our joy, our fury. |
Injury and blood are terrifying. They remind us that we are swamps
waiting to be drained. We are volumetric, finite solids. |
 |
infinity |
was taken |
from me |
 |
| as it was taken from the druids |
and the stars |
and all of us. |