Wonderoom

This is site number 12 at Mesa Verde. One of my favorites, along with Double House. It’s a small site, but when you’re there you feel like you are walking along a minature avenue. A sort of Tinytown. Like every ruin at Mesa Verde, it has been emptied of virtually every artifact aside from small potsherds and the ubiquitous mini-corncobs. It’s like walking around a three dimensional mystery novel. One you are never going to be able to finish. Pages are gone, somebody spilled coffee on the rest.

You’ve got this time period when a whole extended culture decided to build villages on the sides of cliffs, and then later just abandon the entire region.

It’s fascinating, and people have some amusing theories. I had someone tell me with perfect conviction that the Anasazi were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Walking on water all the way across the Atlantic. Or maybe Moses did some extra credit water parting. Others are sold on the “aliens sucked the Anasazi up in a spaceship” idea. When in doubt, send in the aliens, your all purpose mystery deus ex machina. Alien ex machina. Or…God=aliens. Something like that.

One night while laying down on a rock next to another ruin, I had a revelation. This revelation might have been fueled by what I had been smoking earlier, but it seems obvious to me even now…Mesa Verde was indeed invaded by aliens.

We are the aliens. We stare at screens and boxes, carry little boxes around that we attach to our heads. Most of us tend to lose track of day and night, the change of seasons. We are scarcely residents in our own world.

Maybe the Anasazi will walk out of a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle holding hands with Sasquatch and a big bag of Elvis, but we’re still the aliens.

It seems almost inevitable that a day will come when books will go the way of vinyl or the horse drawn carriage-existing only as nostalgia items, collector’s keepsakes.  Instead, we will have the Internet, sound recordings-whatever the latest fad of discreet units of data.  No books. No libraries as such. No book stores.  I think this bookless reality on the horizon,  more than anything else, makes me feel the passing of time.  A world where books are quaint, charming, passe.

I love the smell of old books, old libraries.  Oddly enough, they make me feel alive, like something exciting but hidden is somewhere near my grasp.  I used to spend hours at libraries, walking the stacks, not bothering with card catalogs (remember those?) or computers…just looking book by book for something new.  In ancient times books were revered by some as magical, sacred, almost absolute.  Now we have the Internet, among other electronic wonders, which is practically Borges’ library of Babel leaking into reality complete with Google searches which can run to seemingly endless lists of disconnected words.  So many of us spend countless hours searching it’s vast corridors.  Tlon isn’t just Wikipedia, or other clever mock-ups, it’s the Internet itself which can become our world, if we let it.

What if the Earth were a cube? When I first ran across this question, it was in the context of a science fair “experiment.” I must admit a certain initial failure of the imagination. I was looking for variables and controls. This was more like a Platonic thought experiment. A completely different animal than the effects of salt on the boiling point of water. I originally pictured the question being posed after multiple bong hits. “What if the Earth were a cube?” “Or a cone?” “Dude! Or like a tree!” Read more »