FILE "OUBLIETTE" 31OCT1993

 Regarding the oubliette into which all history disappears: of course it is a dungeon, with our prison obsession, our penal-envy, it could be little else. It is not unlike the Great Hole of History in Suzan Lori-Parks the America Play, where fragments are gathered, unburied, and revived. Our history isn’t dead. It lives yet, in the skin of the land, in the soil we turn, abandon, ignore, pollute. All of that lives still.

The dungeon itself is an underground, a subsurface secret, not so much hidden as forgotten, like the Korean war, or any one of hundreds of war dead, disease victims, children, hobos, and so on. It is like book paper, but encoded in stone, in the strata of ten thousand years, etched thinly in the surface of the geological epoch we have invaded.

It is tumorous, a refraction from the originating point — a bunker complex built for a nuclear war which was never fought, created as a campaign promise for a man now dead, copied in shape and symbol by a cutthroat parade of shiftless, noseless mimics. We live in a recursion, on the splintered dermis of a world far deeper than our fragile bodies. From these concrete tubes, crude recreations of caves — those earthy passageways, our supposed ancestral homeland, at least the shelter for the oldest fragments of our buried history — burst a fractal network, spiraling down into the earth, it’s access growing ever smaller. Into it, the pain and joy of the world above trickles down like the economic fable, which is given life there as a dripping giant, three hundred feet long, its limbs too thin and weak to hold its massive head.

The dirt rises, the thin keratin shell of a world unbroken, to swallow what once was. It’s all passed down. It’s all hand-me down. Everything we have now will be handed down likewise. This isn’t tradition, just simple causality. We can’t help it.

If you dig, you’re digging in history, but you’re digging in the present, you dig? The excavation can’t be less than a present process. Memory is the same; an echo not a connection, but impossible to truly entangle from the sense that something happened. Everything leaves tracks. Once those tracks are gone they are gone forever. But everything leaves tracks in the dirt as it rises like the waterline.

In specific, though: like skin it is layered in ages. It contains nothing less than the sum total of the country above, but smashed up, cracked, faded. These are remains only. It is anyone’s guess whether they are the genuine article or cheap imitations. It matters little whether they are original. They are only what they appear to be, and they only appear to be what they are; anyway.

There are many doors, many chambers, valves, pipes, the compartments like a vast digestive organ, processing that which has been, consuming until it bursts. It will not burst for a long time still. There is so much else to say. So much else to eat.

It is not a museum. Its contents are mundane: cooking utensils, pots, pans, dams, cop cars, campaign signs, fishing tackle, flint, teeth, telephone poles, pencils, soup cans, bullets, and so on. Its contents are not collected, but quite the opposite; lost. It is everything that has been forgotten or redacted, curdling under the surface, a pale skim just beneath the topsoil, visible in places with the appearance of buried cottage cheese, or the fruiting body of a tower, a two-legged mushroom with a single observant eye. Sometimes it is two stalks, the legs of Mademoiselle Mayonnaise Legs, whose legs go all the way up. The dungeon gets its energy from the moonlight. This is how it grows. When unobserved, a million lids flip open on the mountain sides, in the litter of pine needles, in unseen alleyways and drainage canals, and it opens it eyes to the sky, white and shiny, absorbing information, distilling starstuff, which will drip through its capillaries and puddle in the tunnels. It will run ankle deep into the valves and vesicles beneath, to be occasionally coughed into life in the shape of a smashed-up milky shadow, the remnant of something that once was.

This is the lifeblood of the fading, the forgotten, the obsolete. Moonshine is timeless illumination. It reveals gently. It is unlike a searchlight. It falls it is not thrown. Ghosts drink deep under the stone, and emerge in their strange and twisting forms, their many limbs, their masks shining with the light that lets them breathe again. The dungeon is a vast kidney, bigger than any anthropogenic apparatus. Even the reach of the IRS cannot compete. The state would love nothing more than to pass a prohibition on moonlight moonshine, but has yet to find a workable solution. Even nukes can’t dent the moon.

Anyway, the depths, in layers, contain: marketplaces for worthless things; great armories and arsenals, buried for the event of the war, their weapons now rendered useless by the constant dripping, barrels rusted beyond recovery, but riot clubs still perfectly viable in their tidy stacks; vast galleries of armored fighting vehicles, of toppled monuments, or movie-theatre marquees, a flood of lighted letters, dribbles of ticket chains; piles of shattered flashbulbs and mountains of rotting newspaper, nearly thin enough to wade in, bug-eaten and ink blurring; acorn husks, the bones of rodents and deer, charnel houses for the dispossessed; summoning circles for possession, formed during the apex of paranoia during the nuclear war that wasn’t; corroded batteries; a near-sea of unused chemlights, leaking into the water supply; an empty aquifer, drained from far away; leaning libraries of censored books, of outdated and politically incompatible textbooks, scattering the floor, littering between the stark metal legs of scaffolding which has grown organically from the remains of a battleship leaning improbably sideways across a solid quarter-mile of the underground; photographs, stapled to the walls by busy ghostly hands, many layers thick, their surfaces untouched by sunlight, warped by the constant moisture; bodies of the lost, crinkled with water-logging and dehydration, twisted like bog bodies beneath the mold of their clothing.

And what mold! The extensive forms of bacterial decay here are magnificent. They are many colored. They are hungry. This is where everything will go. The rotting heart of the country is delicious dinner for the land it rests tenuously on. We are not stronger than the mold, in the long run. In some places, the very air has been discolored by its presence.

This is a temporary escape. It must eventually be surfaced from. It is too easy to get lost, too easy to never return. There is as much truth as mythology in here. It is not a museum because it is not literal history, it is the psychic remains — what drips down from the many meanings above it. In places where there is much dreaming of demons, they are the shapes most favored by its occasional, unsettled occupants.

It is warm in the deepest reaches, as the pressure increases, and the fungus is really allowed to flower. It is full to blinking here. It reaches. It begins to crawl. It collects in narrow, recursive recesses of the lowermost extents, in the scant moisture found within, and unfurls forth, consuming fragmentary nutrients, growing many-colored limbs, fat with un-remembered wisdom, the molecules of time gone by.

This is a place of decay.

In it, cities form, shine briefly, are eaten. Things here are especially temporary, and its more-eternal occupants know this most. They do not linger in once place; it is the nature of the long-lived to be ever-changing, to suit their conditions. In this sense, they are no more eternal then the present. They are constant in the same way that a river is. These cities bloat briefly around some new whale-fall, some new incision, the site of fresh scar-tissue — calamity, atrocity, celebration, feasting on the density of the discards and remnants until they are overstuffed and the economy goes bust. Then it is a return to slow migration, yoked to a slower heterotrophy, a slow atrophy, a slow dying — BENEATH.

Nothing here wakes. It is a place of dreams, dormancy, and sleepless sleeping.