At first there was a simple ditch,
a ditch dug to demarcate a sacred space
where priests could intercede with the divine,
or perhaps it defined the boundary of a market,
a place where goods could be traded, tolls levied,
and an earthly lord could take his cut,
but what ushered in this liminality
that serves as prototype for every other distinction,
between sin and salvation, trash and treasure,
holy and profane, rich and poor, weak and powerful?
It was the edge of the first grave,
a ditch we dug, where we stood dumbstruck,
paralysed by the discovery of grief,
the vertigo and precipice of it,
and built paradise in our imagination,
conjuring an afterlife in response,
rather than accepting our loss,
inventing time whose passing is marked by decay
so we could dream of some parallel eternity
free from death and disintegration
now that our love had conferred on a life
the quality of ending,
now that love had turned that absence
into a void that persisted.
We limit our experience of time and space
to whatever permits that lie to endure,
then dream of gods coming to our rescue
because we are lost in a purgatory of our own making.
We reduce the world to the status of property
so we have something to leave on the altar,
some keepsake to toss into the grave,
diminishing the world to fit the prayers
of this animal that has amputated its past,
that has invented time to enable that amputation,
until eventually we need science to describe the world,
and pride and cruelty and cupidity and theft
render its title deeds to the rich
as a coin was once rendered unto Caesar,
and the rich grow wealthier,
and the ditch grows deeper and wider.
A palisade is built on the embankment
where dirt dug from the ditch is tossed.
Eventually a stone wall replaces it,
and the ditch becomes a moat,
stocked with exotic fish, haunted by swans.
An island in a river is used by a king,
and cathedral and conciergerie
are erected within its precincts,
and chivalry and romance guide us,
shepherding morality and ambition,
and what it means to be human,
which reinforces this odd category
that we now use as an excuse,
that exempts us from nature, from death,
the pretence that we are exiles: human.
Think of that cat you put in a box,
a curious experimental quantum grave.
You think it's simultaneously dead and alive.
All that means is you are the person
who opens the box both on time and too late,
from its point of view, the observer observed.
You exist exactly as the cat does,
except in one respect: the cat has no choice.
It doesn't choose when the box is opened.
It finds out if it lives or dies when it lives or dies.
Only then it discovers what kind of god you are.
This world is a box, a coffin, and you are the cat,
waiting on god to make up his mind
about what kind of god he is.
The edge of the grave
seemed like the centre of the universe
but god cares about you as much
as you care about that cat,
so you may as well dig that ditch,
build that wall, sign that cheque,
do that deal, do whatever you have to do,
to pretend the box was your idea,
that you are in control
and chose all this.
Now the ditch is filled, not with water,
but vacuum. The rich joyride in orbit,
and the moat that protects them is space itself,
at last. Space, that we imagined into being
when we invented time as counterpoint to eternity,
when we first needed somewhere to set aside
as a graveyard. Finally we have dug that ditch
in a way that combines abstract and literal.
The rich have left Earth.
They are colonising other worlds
using some innovative propulsion,
or maybe they exist digitally in a computer
in some disembodied way relative to which
we are mere unterflesh, mere eugenic dregs,
all paid for with something that is not money,
but supersedes it, some new crypto scam
that we don't understand:
the details do not concern us.
It is still a ditch, though.
It is still just a ditch.
It is still somewhere in between them and us
where we can drown them before we disappear,
watching the bubbles until they stop,
proving to them they're not immortal,
then escaping all the consequences
they have carefully woven into our minds,
into our very ability to conceive,
to imagine consequences,
beguiling us with paradox and axiom.
I will return to the forest
before the first grave was dug.
I will kill them the way death always came
before we thought it was something terrible
and then I will leave the ruin of their history floating
and mundane, the history that charts our progress,
the history that provides the excuse
for their every appetite and excess,
reduced to a broken toy, made unremarkable,
with all the dull audacity of a false apocalypse,
a laggard Armageddon, lazy,
timid as a broken bully, an end of time that exists
only because the only time they can imagine
is one that ends, and I will return
to the eternal indifference of the forest,
to be with all the people dumped in the ditch,
the forgotten people who never existed,
or who may as well have never existed,
and the endless interplay of mud and blood,
surrendering our arteries to tree roots, watched
by a thousand slow glistening arthropod eyes
as slugs blindly follow their unsung Odysseys
and detrivores claim our slumbering substance
and we decay and sink forever
into the eternal present.
