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| Segobriga, today |
The town’s
residents were like me. I can imagine us
being traded, swapped-at-birth across an eon . . . They pause during their day, struck by a
strange realization, an odd, final thought – that everything that surrounds
them must end. They’ve heard the tales
of incredibly old ruins found by soldiers in Persia. Untellably old ruins. Vast structures of a people long gone.
But it is just a thought.
They, he or she, has family, has duties, tasks, jobs, has structure in
their life that they must bow and pay homage to. The machine needs willing participants. The machine gives us the idea
of specialness that crushes the thought of finality. No,
this more powerful thought says, this can
go on forever. This time it is special –
you’re special. Now back to work.
At different times and different places in what we call
towns and cities, people have had this questioning thought – why this? Oh yeah: It’s
the way things are, comes the reply.
Back to work.
In this Spanish Roman town – now ruins, of course – I send
my thoughts, psychic time travel, to be with a person, a man or a woman of that
town. Beneath our seemingly eternal sun,
how long before the surrounding soils pull themselves over the toppled walls
and toppled buildings?
I’ll say to this person: How odd a thought that one day a
person called an archaeologist will pick away at the bricks and artifacts of
your town – sewn into the earth as though thoughts could be turned into
physical seeds. These bricks and things
served as the backdrop to your life, real stage settings and props. Your words and breaths are recorded on that
fired clay as sure as writing. These are
the same thoughts I might have today, here in the 21st Century. I tell you, my past relatives, to think about
these difficult thoughts – about your city’s ruin – and then find it too hard
to think of myself in the same way. All
cities everywhere covered over and forgotten.
Our modern society, our cities and towns, the dust and loess piled for
centuries until we are nice and covered and preserved for future hands to pick
at.
Will there even be future hands? If we go extinct then it will be non-human
appendages that pick and wonder. That
there is no one to find buried bones must be as viable a story as the idea that
humans will interminably exist. And in
the case of man’s eternal existence, will future man even have the tools and
understanding to unearth and comprehend us
as their past? Perhaps a rule: the society that develops the
scientific tools to adequately unveil the past has necessarily reached an apex
from which they will irrevocably start falling from.
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