Face Beneath the Earth

The light is dim, soft, it is evening, surfaces are purple, iridescent. The street outside and its bordering palms and rose and blackberry bushes are moonlit. They look like they are made from solid silver. They don’t move at all, there is no wind. Most of the properties along this night-time black and silver street have a big dog in their yard, whose job it seems to be to aggressively charge at those that pass in front of the property. Preempting property invasion, squatting, breaking and entering… Each looks like it might kill you. Once when I was walking in the late afternoon I saw a pack of them wild, jaws buried in some raw heap of stuff they had found, moving freely through one of the unfenced abandoned lots. I wondered if they ever attacked people, if this happened often, was just some fact of life out here. I know (from childhood) that you can carry stones in your pockets to throw, it frightens them, they run away whimpering in fear. I know which properties to avoid during the day. It is not that I am worried about physical attack — the dogs are securely fenced in — it is more that I do not wish to be subjected to that animal adrenalin feeling of being barked at, of being charged, of needing to make decisions about what you would do if the fence failed.

But now it is evening. When I look out the window I see the slopes of the volcano and the thin strips of fire glowing red against the dark grey and purple sky. Mosquitos buzz around me incessantly. They don’t bother me at all. I want to spend time getting more in tune with the way the volcano spits forth the matter from the centre of the earth, how it is constantly emitting, and how what it emits is pure, uncomplicated stuff. You can’t get anywhere near it, it’s much too dangerous, although of course there is no threat display, no aggression. 

There is no evil in the ground, in the molten material that constantly churns its way upwards like some great, millennial engine scraping away the inside of the planet. But I think that this town is evil. Not the people in it; the town itself, the yards and dogs with their small territories, the empty lots. How can I explain this. 

The town is evil because of what has been done in our names — in all of our names, every human. So every town and every city is the same. The silent, moonlit street is saturated in the bizarre and treacherous (treacherous because unknown, untested, unstudied, unmeasured) face of evil. Our souls have begun to turn and scrape like that subterranean engine. Soon they will show us something new, something we have no record of and cannot prepare ourselves to fight. 

This house full of centipedes and mosquitoes has the same stink of the face. If I could be like a volcano maybe I could describe it. If I could be like a dog or a centipede or a mosquito maybe I could manipulate it somehow; could transmute some of its filth, though even if I could do this, after sublime effort (and I think the effort would damage me permanently), I wonder what type of stuff would remain in the aftermath.