Conduit
ongoing
There are literal thresholds that link the aboveground and subterranean worlds like there is danger in abstraction. At those sites lies conduit which trespasses between the two realms.
There’s a horse living aboveground not far from where the mining pit sloughs into the center of the earth. We make neon blue lakes that burn alkaline into our skin and we make snaking pathways underground full of idols and blackdamp. There are single celled organisms deep in the earth’s crust which survive on the chemical energy from rocks and there are fungi in Chernobyl that eat radiation. I swallow six bottlecaps a year. I swallow six bottlecaps a year so I can witness how we make piles of planet innards, gizzards, + necks and leave them out as anonymous reminders of the inside.
When I’m underground, sometimes I stumble across things that are complete mysteries to me, like a giant gate built into the rock. These artifacts are emblematic of human colonization into the subterranean realm + they feel like the contemporary equivalents of ancient cave paintings. These objects are representative of the capitalocene, of the alienation we experience aboveground, and of the transmutation of materials that were once sourced from the earth itself.
We don’t think about the underground often, but we should. We take all kinds of things from it and use them to construct our material world up here. And - I’m starting to think that pretty much everything we do has something to do with the void.
