Hourglass POV
a modest homage to Calvino and his amazing, invisible cities. From watching my son play with sand.
GOD PEERS DOWN THROUGH A HOLE IN THE WORLD. I watch him from a chair a few feet away. His simple voice tells me what is happening.
"I am pouring sand through a hole to make a pile underneath."
From my vantage point, however, I see he is speaking in metaphor again. A small mountain is growing beneath the desolate strata of a city all but forgotten. Its citizens left long ago in concentric droves beginning with the outermost ring. The jobs vanished first, shipped off via bug and barrow to neighboring hot spots. The workers felt they were no longer en vogue and set out in search of them and fresher air. The hull left behind became the model of the ghost town, used in all Old West movies, themselves relegated to nostalgia.
FROM ABOVE HE CRUSHES THE EMPTY STREETS, houses, useless banks and deposits them down the hole to the new society burgeoning below.
Down here we do have inhabitants, a population toiling beneath the radar (in latitude and scale). This race is different from their predecessors, I see, for they do not reconstitute the raining raw material into its previous forms, but into a single, rising knoll. All stuff and energy, like ants, is for a unified purpose. Uninterested in intricate road systems, parliaments, whored alleyways of a genuine city, this new tribe has one charge, to forge an edifice from the stuff of their origins, for the sole purpose of returning to same.
Getting up I myself walk over to look down the hole that God made.
LOOKING DOWN I AM INVESTED, a citizen of the beginning, looking on as the future works backward in a nearing point of contact.
I ask God, "Do all ancestors wonder why we make such strides in retrograde?"
The Shaper of Worlds knows better than to answer.
So I return to my chair and look again from an hourglass point of view. It becomes clear. There were never two cities, one above and one below; one beginning to find the one ending. There is only a God addicted to action, yet unwillilng to commit to a future, be content with the past.
GOD PEERS DOWN THROUGH A HOLE IN THE WORLD. I watch him from a chair a few feet away. His simple voice tells me what is happening.
"I am pouring sand through a hole to make a pile underneath."
From my vantage point, however, I see he is speaking in metaphor again. A small mountain is growing beneath the desolate strata of a city all but forgotten. Its citizens left long ago in concentric droves beginning with the outermost ring. The jobs vanished first, shipped off via bug and barrow to neighboring hot spots. The workers felt they were no longer en vogue and set out in search of them and fresher air. The hull left behind became the model of the ghost town, used in all Old West movies, themselves relegated to nostalgia.
FROM ABOVE HE CRUSHES THE EMPTY STREETS, houses, useless banks and deposits them down the hole to the new society burgeoning below.
Down here we do have inhabitants, a population toiling beneath the radar (in latitude and scale). This race is different from their predecessors, I see, for they do not reconstitute the raining raw material into its previous forms, but into a single, rising knoll. All stuff and energy, like ants, is for a unified purpose. Uninterested in intricate road systems, parliaments, whored alleyways of a genuine city, this new tribe has one charge, to forge an edifice from the stuff of their origins, for the sole purpose of returning to same.
Getting up I myself walk over to look down the hole that God made.
LOOKING DOWN I AM INVESTED, a citizen of the beginning, looking on as the future works backward in a nearing point of contact.
I ask God, "Do all ancestors wonder why we make such strides in retrograde?"
The Shaper of Worlds knows better than to answer.
So I return to my chair and look again from an hourglass point of view. It becomes clear. There were never two cities, one above and one below; one beginning to find the one ending. There is only a God addicted to action, yet unwillilng to commit to a future, be content with the past.