I Hear The Ruin Of All Space

Ontological Eye: pure white light, hovering: Creation: formless diaphanic white cloud nebulae veiling vast primordial impenetrable expanses of black and olive-green boreal spruces and pines, canopy after canopy, unplumbed profundity, the teeming earth-nourishing impenetrable wilderness filling the face of the antediluvian deep. The Divine Eye hung there in arrested immobility, surprised to see above the earth again. I hear the exhultatory breath of all space, cosmogony choreographed into existence, unshatterable and untoppable and indestructible, time untapped, nature's possibilities as numerous as the stars in the heavens and as the sands on the shore of the sea. A sea of tree tops stretching and spiring skyward into the heavens, untouched forestry multiplied most mightily. A vault of indicolite blue firmament shot through with blinding whiteyellow sunburst of great canvassing the dominion of day, rays stretching into eternity, below, frothy milky clouds, darkly shadowed land, and divided from the land, a piercing diamond eye slit in the horizon: water. Watery delta wetlands, a shimmering river watercourse (the Athabasca), the waters under the heavens gathered in one place, swiftly thrushing alongside Alberta's rich Boreal Forest, a forest yielding seeds of each kind contained within it upon the earth, replenishing itself and its domain for eternity, the heavens and the earth completed, and all their array.

The river branches, curves, and carves out teardrop-shaped mounds of land. Cutting a powerful strong course through boundless burgeoning wilderness, pearled sky above and river below hugged by limitless vegetation, the Ontological Eye dips down to take a closer look at water that should be swarming with swarms of living creatures, water that should be shimmering with the divine spark of the sun as it should. The river, lutulent luteofulvousness, unnatural, pultaceous sullage, aureous poison, the Eye refusing to believe the refuse, this is not the candycoloured gold-brown marbled river of childhood memory, this is not the boisterously beautiful river dancing and dandling in froth and waterblowballs, this is a mephitic, foul exhalation from earth, corrupted currents, the Eye pulling up and way in disbelief, past white sky into clouds of clouds and the Eye slowly pans over a metropolis (Fort McMurray), unholy trinity of water and air and city, an unholy cosmogram, then gliding into pacifying powder blue and white ocean haze filling the screen, zooming back and it's pollution from smokestacks, massive quantities of carbon dioxide released into the air, livid flames licking the goodness of out the sky and spewing back foulness, the Divine Eye, having had enough, pulls back and zooms out, and there it is, the hidden ugliness that the powers that be do not want you to see, a slagland vandiemanland wasteland out of a fantasy novel, the Dead Marshes of the L-rd of the Rings, the Aiel Waste in the Wheel of Time series, the landscape slagheaped and slapgpooled, sunbleared and scalloped and scorched, spavined and vitiated, legions of beige mud streaked with black bitumen, the disunity of scenery causing the Eye to once again become immobilized and arrested above the earth again, outraged to see the earth itself was filled with outrage. The flaming heat of smokestacks destroying the Creation of the flaming heat of whatever prevailing cosmological theory the viewer cleaves to. (Me: Big Bang with G-d in the design).

Deep tracks in the landscape look like bare uprooted trees unnaturally stretched out on a torture wrack mazarine lithochromotics of uprooted roots, polluted lagoons the shape of tear-drops (officially called 'tailing ponds', perhaps named after the tail of a teardrop....), the water opening its eyes and crying, tortured eyes, tortured ghosts, golden-coloured lava lunar landscape, clouds smoke as the Tower of a bitumen upgrader plant (Syncrude) emerges from view, flanked by a square-shaped football-field size courtyard comprised of polluted water, as the angle shifts and smoke cascades left, I see a face: the building is the nose, the square water is an eye, the horizontal machinery is the mouth. From this moment forward, I've lost my mind, because not only do I externally and internally see and feel the disunity of the microcosm and macrocosm, but my mind gets completely tangled up in the union of things that should not be a union, I see things that I should not be seeing, as if I've suffered through a temporary degenerative metamorphosis of sanity.

The Camera Eye has now become the consciousness of the machinery looking at itself and looking with....awe? insouciance? celebration? at the destruction it has wrought. It's consciousness amplifies the deeper it glides into the world of open pit mining. The Camera Eye's robotics are felt as the camera is adjusted to see more clearly. The technical readjustment of the camera, its mechanization, the feeling of helicopter movement, echo the ontological readjustment viewers should be undergoing as their eyes and hearts and minds and souls try to make sense of the destruction they're beholding. The Camera Eye's perspective pondering the choreography of destruction wrought by humankind's industrialized machinations, the Divine Eye arrested at the thought that humankind has created a world where petroleum's power is supreme, the Ontological Eye staggered by what it is seeing: humans filling the earth and conquering it, eliminating the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth.

From notes. Would like to go back one day and mark the minute/second that I saw these things. Roads, ash landscape. Right of screen - out of the landscape, a zoophorus sculptured bas-relief frieze of a female body, rocks as dress, lying lengthwise against block rise, one leg arched, black rise looks like horse's head. Pounding people right into the earth and they rise back up, out of ruination. Where are the the autochthonous natives and animals, the aboriginals, the indigenous, O Where? I see, fossilized fish. Truck turns in circle, confused, quite symbolic. Triangular face fossilized. Tear-drop tailing pond shaped like whale, trapped, is this a bird a swan a sea creature, the elusive Moby-Dick, in the patterns and colours I see flames of an Olymic Torch, the Burning Bush, Roman torches, in another pattern, a computer motherboard and electric grid, there, neolithic cave etchings of trees ripped out of the ground, mazarine roots tangled and tortured out of shape, fossilized frescoes are outlined in reds, brown-blues, violets, ochres, siennas, a prehistorical archaeological dig, screaming protolithic petroglyphs, human torsos growing out of tree trunks, a human upside down wrestling like Jacob with another human, both in a bowed down fetal position, one dark petroglyph looks like a baby's head, another, part of the same this same bewildering primitive mnemosyne atlas, is a man with his hand loving attached to a woman's waist as she holds a baby, and look, a pompeiin face frozen in terror, head and face covered in burning tar, demons hissing and contortuplicating amid serpentining snakes and horses veins and upheaved cellular systems and blasted tangled roots all the colour of mazarine and I think I've mentally cracked, a staggering Rorschach test of cosmological proportion, O Egypt, O Chronos, I see primitive outlines of ancient Egyptian splendour, Ramesses II sitting inside inside Luxor Temple, hieroglyphics, the Ontological Eye slowly navigates back breaking the spell slowly hovers above a meteor-sized pit, gashes and trucks the size of mythological giants, electric shovels the size of mythological giants, a Mexican pyramid petrified in blasted outline, another Egyptian Temple complete with palace and garden from classical antiquity merging upward from the gutted remains of the earth, tears ponds and outlines of mythological and biblical sea creatures in a state of petrified torture, biblical cataclysms and flood surge are outlined in the land's scorched surface, paleolithic equines and stags and bison and birds wolves leap out from thermally cracked fissures, hydrocracking pipes with water ejaculating out in an inverted-triangular vaginal shape of semeny frothing smoking sulphourous excrement-coloured water, an Aztec pyramid sacrifice outlined there, mud tracks from trucks look like gigantic-size machine gun bullets, stretches of sand contain, the Ontological Eye gliding at a disjointed tilted angle over coffee-coloured yogurty gloopy goopy slurry waste land, primitive outlines of sea creatures, Eye pulling up and away, the destruction transitions into preadamite flourishing boreal forestry, but the toxic river cutting its in half, the retromorphosized river spreading its fatal poison into the forest, the light fading into the blackness of night. And G-d saw all that We had done, and, look, it wasn't very good.

Humankind, breathtaking in its artistry and destruction

Hydraulic utopianism instituted by federal feudalism to pursue industrial manifest destiny to feed humankind what it's been brainwashed to believe it needs.

Humankind, breathtaking in its artistry and destruction

Who can take the sunland, thermally crackle and sprinkle it with naphtha chemicals, cover it in black crud...Who can take the earth, dip it in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, separate the sand, and collect up all the bitumen....

The tar sands, a manifestation of our current oil-based lives, a manifestation that reflects humankind's current lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, a lack of consciousness, a lack of values, a lack of enlightenment, a lack of spirituality, a lack of faith, a lack of thirst for divine enrichment, every illness and every plague in existence humankind bringing down upon itself and this land, the vines are dried up, the fig trees cut off, the pomegranates, the date palms, the apples, all the trees of the field, dried up, for humankind's heart has hardened and its rivers have stopped flowing, the desire for material wealth supplanting the drippings of the honeycombs of nature and G-d, humankind's fires consuming earth in every capacity, leaving behind a wasteland.

Humankind breaching natural limits, moving out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene, a new of era of devolution defined by humankind's biological, chemical, geological transformation of earth's global ecological and environmental systems, key planetary systems. Humankind manufacturing new landscapes [Manufactured Landscapes (2006)] and ecologies and environments and atmospheric conditions and other geophysical systems. Humankind wasting trillions of trillions of trillions of natural, monetary, and human capital to satiate material demands.

Time and nature are a witness that Man is lost.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then? [James Joyce, Ulysses]

10/10 = Peter Mettler - Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives On The Alberta Tar Sands (2009)