allegrophobia

Medieval squalor must have been made much, much worse if you happened to live in the shadow of a Roman aqueduct. Yes, we have plenty today who live in impoverished misery in view of gentrified downtowns, but I’m talking about something different. Imagine that no one alive can reproduce the taunting magnificence of that aqueduct or that bath. It might as well have been made by an alien race (ROH-mens), and many came to that exact conclusion. Those beautiful masonries must have been enta geweorc, giant’s work — dragon teeth heaved and hauled out of the hungry peatbogs and quarry-maws by a stronger people.

Violence is nothing new to you, but it must have been a slaughter indeed to erase such bright cities from the earth. But now, your world is in contraction. Marble has become dust and steel, iron. Your short and muddy life is much closer to beasts than to whatever wine-flushed gods bathed here. Troves of knowledge burst out of your world like blood out of a tick. You entertain the thought that the human race is nearing its final whimper. All that we’ve grown will be un-grown and all that we tamed will be un-tamed and all that cast a shadow will be shapeless dust.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

History is so disturbing to us because we can’t see it all. We aren’t around long enough. Its monstrosity is its potentiality. It hides from us, and we can only catch a glimpse — perhaps only a bloodied arm from beneath the shroud. Sometimes its machinations are insultingly obvious: the cow-shit hovel and the limestone viaduct, for example. And the Saxons are simply the haggard souls doomed to live in the falling action. But other times, the contraction is subtle, and all we can do is feel its cold breath, shiver, and accept it the same way we do the arrival of winter.

I use that word, contraction, as a dwindling, a diminution, but it reminds me of birth, especially the pain and trauma of it. Worlds, like infants, struggle to be born, especially when they are resisted and unwanted and unaided in such a labor.

Perhaps that’s what’s happening to my world now. Though it’s hard to prove. From where I’m sitting, cranes dot my apartment window view. On my block alone, they are building three new high-rise apartments, the they being ordinary men and women and private equity groups, and certainly not giants or gods. And like those paltry Saxons, I feel like I’m simply late to the party. The peak came and went. There is terror in this belatedness.

We have ways to make it pretty and comfortable, but all we know is that heap of broken images. And pretending that it’s a coherent whole only postpones the inevitable horror of seeing its parts pulled apart. We live in the skeletons of other civilizations that also believed the star-cross’d lovers Fate and Growth weren’t destined for a messy breakup.

Yet the fear of being too late easily twists into a fear of being too early (adagiophobia?). Being late comes with the inevitable realization that another paradigm must begin, and there is paranoia in this uncertainty. A latecomer misses the golden age and must suffer living in its shadow. An earlycomer is singled out and judged for being unwelcome, trapped, exposed. Both are confrontations with in-between-ness. The shadows are long in liminal places.

From far away and in the dark, winds whistle through the Roman fort. Ne’er-do-well kids play with lanterns in its lichened palisades. The village remembers, “ghost haunt these giants’ works: beware!” For years afterward, the village people shun the place so as not to be killed by a danger that doesn’t exist. A human ghost haunts because the soul has retained its human guise when no body remains to shape it. Our history haunts because its body refuses to rot when no soul remains to inhabit it. And so we must see giants and phantoms and ghouls in the old Roman fort. Otherwise, we see our future in its desolation.