Within the small ravine, there was a preponderance of stories to be told. There was rock flowing like water down the middle of the ravine. On the ravine floor, there was a bleached bone which appeared to be a section of a vertebrae.
It was beautiful, so I picked it up. Upon inspection I found that a spider had made its home within the hollow center. I put the bone back. At this time it was meant to stay.
All is passing away and emerging somewhere else. Something died here in the canyon. A deer? An elk? But one of its bones became a home. Where does one begin? Where does one draw lines to signify what is? The ontological reality becomes an endlessly shifting process of expression, in which things, limited expressions, are transformed within their relations between each other.
There was the existence of something else that was beckoning consideration. I found myself sticking to the very bottom of the ravine, so as to remain hidden. The paranoia was growing.
There was a palpable fear out in the Montana hills. Nearby was a man living in a large house on the hill, who routinely scanned the landscape with his binoculars, looking for something that was out of place.
A couple of years ago he had moved out to the country to get away from the city. He was going to become more self-sufficient. He built himself a windmill to get off of the grid, and then was promptly hassled by the local power company - which had ingratiated itself to the local government, winning local zoning ordinances - to deactivate it. Now the windmill stands high above his house, sitting idle, a reminder of what could have been.
Meanwhile, the man has become increasingly embittered, suspicious, and self-isolating, according to neighbors. A botched job on his house attributable to unscrupulous contractors, and a steady stream of invasive hunters crossing his easements has steadily worn away his composure.
Now he prowls the hills with an enormous grimace on his face, looking for the slightest sign of an invader, scaring off a van full of lost teenagers in one case.
There are all sorts of individuals such as these littering the countryside. Frowning at their windows with telescopes and binoculars, placing ever more threatening signs on the boundaries of their private property.
Here the earth is constantly scanned and mapped. The landowner is poring over the countryside, looking for anything out of place. To the landowner, even someone politically, socially, and temperamentally the same as them could be suspect if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. God forbid you are coded as out of place prior to being out of place in the countryside in the first place.
The hillside is a collection of increasingly atomizing patriarchies, the patriarchs presiding over their lone hills, suspicious even of each other.
A set of unknown headlights coming up the driveway is more often met with a cocked shotgun than a smile or even looks of curiosity or charity.
And to exist in such a climate of fear is to participate in it. One becomes fearful in turn, becoming suspicious of those finding oneself suspicious, strengthening the logic of fear.
A plane buzzes overhead. Afghanistan comes to mind, where to the paranoid US military, the locals are always out of place, and a buzzing plane could very well be readying its rockets. There we have created a fearscape on another order of magnitude altogether. Better to call it a hellscape.
One hears stories of the locals looking up and praising stormy skies and dreading blue skies, which give the drones better visibility.
The project then is to compress everything into its place. The other becomes an object to be situated in a hierarchy which intrinsically makes the position of the powerful more stable. This project happens both within and without.
Simultaneously engaged in crimes against the global South, the imperialists retreat to their fiefdoms, alienating their societies and even the relations between themselves in turn.
This is certainly a shame in Montana, where the beauty of the landscape is breathtaking, and the breadth and scale of the surroundings contributes to an air of expansiveness, which is quickly dashed away by the descending ceiling of paranoia.
One can take a deep breath, in appreciation for living, and the ceiling is raised temporarily. Yet...
