BAD STONE
Julian Cope, in his dense volume THE MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, attempts to identify
the point at which the world went bad.
It's his contention that the Neolithic temple builders of the Britain of
five thousand years ago set off the modern age. Five thousand years ago,
the establishment of agriculture transformed us from a species of individuals
and nomads into settlers and communities. We went from worshipping the Earth
we wandered to learning some control over it and developing independence
from it. Cope suggests that our first great response to this new freedom
and power was the creation of the great stone monuments still visible all
over the country today. In his words, the "joyous and unconscious act
of erecting a standing stone in response to the jubilation of learning to
farm" was the moment at which we irrevocably peeled ourselves free
of the Earth and felt true separation from it. An enormous psychological
act, and a firewall between the points where our life with Earth always
made some kind of sense – and the point where, for many of us, life
on earth stopped making sense. Perhaps this, too, was the intent of the
megaliths – marking the milestone beyond which we no longer understood
things clearly. Where we could no longer see the machinery of the world.
Five thousand years later, we erect our own monuments to the world that
runs us. Great stacked cairns and dolmens of theory and notion and fear
and maybe even a few facts. Conspiracy theory, parapolitical thinking, cult
delusion and UFOlogical mad science are the ways in which the people caught
on the underside of the culture try to make sense of the bad world. That's
all. Our secret histories and forbidden archaeologies, our beamships and
hidden chiefs – these are our bad stones, erected under a dark and
oblivious sky, the signs of the people who find Earth too strange and oppressive.
Trying to understand how the world really works. So that they no longer
have to be afraid of its terrible complexity.
So that, perhaps, they can say sorry for ever abandoning it, and express
regret for what the Earth became while our backs were turned.
Warren Ellis
Southend, England
May 21, 2000