Lost
Advance Drafts #8
Often, as my editing whittles away at large texts, they will shed substantial chunks of material that I might preserve to incorporate into some future article or book project. Given its size and scope, Hellworld obviously produced a number of these fragments, several of which have since gone on to play some role in the forthcoming book on the AI supply chain (see early drafts of sections 1, 2, 3 here). Sometimes, however, I am unable to figure out what, exactly, to do with these orphaned stories. In these cases, I will often either archive them or try to spin them off into their own pieces with a singular focus or theme. The effort is hit and miss, producing pieces that don’t quite fit in either political or literary outlets. That is the case with the piece below, a brief, creative non-fiction sketch of the Humbold County area in California, where I lived for several years, which doubles as a skeletal critique of secessionist and broadly “vitalist” politics, as contextualized in the long history of the California Genocide. The piece began as an aborted introduction to Hellworld and, for this reason, these larger themes are better fleshed out in the book as it came to be. In fact, looking back at it now, I realize that this introduction occupies the gradient space between Hinterland and Hellworld, connecting the largely regional, dark pastoral landscape of the former to the more explicitly global, cosmic horror approach of the latter. Perhaps the piece will find more formal publication someday in some other form. For now, it can live here as an archive of an unfinished draft.
There is a certain glowing darkness that swells behind the redwood curtain when the moon lies unrisen beneath the black mountains or sinks drowned in the molten silver of the sea. Fog rises like a ghost tide, drowning the stars. Mist wets bark and flesh and flushes bone-colored with light cast errant from muted hamlets. From above, the place must look like a lamp dropped in the fern-choked undergrowth, its damp flame slowly dying. The gloam is claustrophobic, streetlamps and sunken stars just diffuse enough that you can see the darkling fog with its phantom strata of cement and slate. The traces of the city beneath your feet always slump toward the sea and you lean with them, almost drawn by the horrific, humanless pull of deep time, that ur-fossil glimpsed behind the veil of the ghost. There is never enough of a glow to illuminate the shape of the surrounding world, which is thereby reduced by the circling mist to defiled remnants of motion and form. Stay long enough and the fog draws your memories from you like poison from a wound.
Walk outside and chill dew will pool in the sunken skin of your eye sockets. It will gather slowly like all ghosts gather, the weight as tender as it is malignant. And when enough of the moisture pools it will plummet, tracing the tear-trails cut by past tragedies in a phantasmic pantomime of grief. Stand still in the fog and you might feel the current of a greater, glacial flow, feeling out the meander of inhuman sorrow. The fog tugs gently at your skin. You feel it shudder in the sharp stone otolith buried in the depths of your inner ear, the same way that bones can hear great rivers grinding forward. Shivering in resonance with the deep pull of time, on the precipice of extinction, you might realize that your small grief is nothing but a channel cut for that single great ritual of weeping. The fog is a ghost that passes through us. It cut these towns from a grander tragedy, named this place lost, cursed it in that great crushing-forward of history. And perhaps humanity is the thalweg of the flowing specter, the deepest part of a river, where the water flows cold and fast and where all violence cast into it falls, in the end.
