When we think we are alone that is when the ancestors are hungry
There is a grief that lives under the grass. This grass that is alien. That lives above the surface of an alienation that is foreign, as well. This grass does not grow well here and it is because of this grief, the persistent melancholy that lives with the dirt.
There are two ways here of being dead. There is the way of death the foreigners brought; the way of death that lives under stone, that abides in iron and steel. These dead lives that are separate, sequestered; they ask for nothing but the fees to care for the lawn. This is the way of death of the invaders, who made murder a hobby, and the ancestors an excursion. The invaders keep their dead under lock, because they cannot abide their presence in their lives.
And there is the way of death that was here before. And theirs is the grief that lives under the grass. This is the way of the dead who did not live alone; the dead who did not die but returned to life. These dead are not ethereal, but mineral. We, the invaders, make our lives by taking theirs. We hold them hostage. They are not ghosts, but we are haunted by them. They live with us still. They live in us, and through us; their substance is our flesh, and our folly.
This world we have made, the world of the great extinction, has been made possible through them, and because of the spite we bear toward them.
After we took the land–or claimed the land as our own because who could ever have the power to take something that no one, no person or people, could rightfully give–we locked ourselves inside our houses. We knew we were being watched. We snuffed the candles and put out the fires. Our lamps were dimmed and everything went dark. We live in the dark, to this day. But we will never be alone. We will live with the grief that can never be mourned..
When we invaders first arrived we did not know what we were doing. The land was not ours and so we could make nothing of it. We took what was here and we made what we could. Because of the people who were here, the generosity of the people who remain here still, we survived, and we thrived. Because of the people who were here, we could eat, and we could sleep; but the more we ate, the more we wanted to eat, the more things we found to consume, and the less inclined we were to the day. We ate up the old world and shat out the new. We live on the remains of the dead of those who were here before. We hope ever for the dimming of the sun.
This is about the things we grow, and what we have grown. What we owe to those who were here before, and how we have wronged them. The enormous scope of how they have been wronged, but all that we have done.
Many days–or, more often, many nights–I feel as if I have wandered onto a Hollywood backlot. The houses are rectangular and small, charming and twee, while just worn enough to suggest a slight period of extended habitation. The streets, in general, are unnecessarily wide; far too wide for flanerie, and just wide enough for a camera, on a track, to pass unnoticed. That I am in Iowa and not LA does nothing, really, to dispel the illusion. Much of the vernacular architecture of the American West–the parts of the United States west of the Mississippi–took place under principles of prefabrication and modular design. The vernacular architecture of the American West was conceived and executed as a series of components of geometric severity, squares and rectangles fitted together, buildings crowned with triangles. The occasional flourish of neoclassical statuary cannot hide the underlying fact that this is an architecture adapted to the rectilinearity of property. The West was built less as a machine for living than as a mechanism of occupation: the grid is everywhere, irrefutable, inevitable, inhumane, indomitable. It has been here waiting, waiting. It has always been waiting for the boxcar and the container.