Vanishing Point

Under constraint of pandemic, I've not left the prairie. The accustomed supply of fresh visual content found evergreen along Superior's basin is, after a good run, unavailable to me.

Supply chain's broken. Repair status pending. No fault of mine, at least.

Things are what they are, right? Damned 2020.

Previously, I'd figured to at least complete my long term work at Whitecap Mountain Manor. I'm reasonably sure that by now this crop circle stain on resurgent life is vanished beneath nameless meadow…

Looks small, right? An insignificant disturbance of unknown origin.

Except Whitecap Mountain Manor once burst from that space. Take my word for it that when the thing was prouder, it stood much bigger than this and far grander on any scale:

My favorite old, abandoned cars are finally gone.

Hard to believe they lasted long as they did, considering the theoretical dollar value put on such things in some circles. The secret treasure hidden just beyond the wooden curtain behind that rusting rocket ship was this:

Cultural artifacts come, they go. Still, it's harder to imagine the mighty ore dock at Ashland as forever vanished from the earth.

That's like someone up and stole a pyramid.

Ancient Egyptians built memorials of stone to cast themselves as eternal gods. Western Civilization's lasting mark on the real world is considerably more god-like than theirs, if far darker.

Short-sighted, we've said Well nothing lasts forever and pushed past. Thus it'll be the Anthropocene Epoch marks our species (ancient Egyptians included) down for all time and that's that.

Some self-evident truths are said to be eternal but in practice prove both remarkably flexible and fragile at the same time, so who can tell? If indeed those truths are everlasting, that'd be way better than any great edifice to the living or the dead, and it might even get us deeper into our namesake epoch than we will under our own failing steam.

This notion of collective individuality gifted us by a bunch of Madeira swilling big thinkers came with a serious caveat. Converting the raw resource of manifest truth into sustainable fact requires better dexterity than humans have demonstrated to date.

When exposed to structural sociopolitical failure and multigenerational despair refashioned as art for their edification and amusement, viewers often search out narrative content that may or may not be there, but at any rate is unknowable to them.

Look at all that stuff. It's like they up and left...

How do people disappear?

Why didn't somebody save it?

The time to save history is before the vanishing point is on it. The boom & bust experiment is done to death. Privilege in any sense of the word won't preserve anyone.

We are, now and again, as one with the Earth. It's not just more art.