Nation States 1 of 4 - The Wasted Lands
Because Astanael was so very kind enough to produce four pieces of promotional art, as well as "filter coloring" for them, to provide the intended mood for the works, I think it would be highly remiss of me not to explain them. Especially since I tend to think in a highly viceral manner, visualization and kinaesthetics and the sense of touch being vitally important to my understanding of the world. Places have a texture to them, and when they're presented correctly in fiction, they become characters in their own right.
That bit about touch being important ties directly into my kinesthetic sense, my proprioception, my sense of dasein within the spacetime of our manifest physical universe, is very literal for me. As I've been putting in the time at the gym, at the martial arts, at gardening, at tending to animals, I've learned to pay attention to the "feel" of things. I am very much an anti-gnostic, absolutely opposed to the idea that the physical universe is somehow fundamentally sinful in nature, however flawed it might be from our perspective here, down in the dirt. Our bodies are a fundamental part of us, our scars are the bookmarks in the pages of our lives, and our assorted traumas, guilts, and sorrows are the watchfires on the path that can lead us home, if only we will pay attention.
As an example, recently a friend of my mother very much wanted to move a sturdy "tree house," that is to say, a children's playhouse built alongside a tree. She wanted it to house her chickens. The owner of the property on which the tree house sat was going to tear it out and was willing to sell it. It was actually a very elaborate little structure (which I don't share both because I forgot to save the pictures on my device, and also because it's on private property and I'm never sure about the legalities of such things), made of solid hardwood and good, strong bolts that integrated part of the house into the tree itself. Additionally, the house itself was sunk down on solid wooden pylons that had been deliberately buried into the ground under the house, kept from sinking further by connecting cross-slats of equally sturdy hardwood.
How did I know all this? Before I really looked at the tree house, I slipped underneath it and pressed upward, spreading my hands open as I pushed against the underside of that sturdy little construction, then shifted my weight from side to side, testing for flaws, weaknesses, for that little bit of "give" that would indicate if our little band, consisting of my, my mother, and my mother's friend, could actually accomplish the job before us. In the process of pressing my weight against that of the tree house, I became a part of it, felt myself join with its there-ness, and could compare my weight and mass and capacity to overcome inertia against its raw immovable desire to remain right where it was, as it had stood for years and years.
My contact with the tree house also told me that it was made to be a single, unified piece, not something ever intended to be broken up. Those bolts were sturdy, the wood had no flaws, the whole construction was of astonishingly expert craftwork considering the neighborhood, which I could judge by listening to the casual way in which the neighbor boys discussed how the house had been ruined by methamphetamine addicts, even the copper wiring torn out of the walls, besides looking around at the not dissimilar state of the rest of the neighborhood, "condemned" signs in many windows, rotted porches and junked cars on the front yards of others, the occasional sound of chickens in the yards of some (my mother's friend's house wasn't that far off, so it could have been hers for all I know), bored and dejected dogs in the yards of others, the occasional stray cat ambling about unnoticed by the uncaring inhabitants. From my touch-sense, not only could the three of us not move it, not even if we'd attached a tow rope to the tree house to tear it out of its moorings (well, maybe that, but I doubt it, considering my mother's car is a gas-efficient little hybrid), but even if we could do so, we would destroy it, since the force necessary to budge that hunk of wood and steel in the first place would surely also be enough to tear it in pieces. After some effort, I was eventually able to convince my mother's friend to leave the tree house where it was and look elsewhere for her chicken-related housing.
If you read the above paragraph thoroughly, you would also notice that I was doing the same to the neighborhood in which the tree house was located, and also to its people and animals, as I did to the tree house itself. Listening, watching, feeling, I was creating a world-sense of the place, a localized zeitgeist. I was also growing steadily more annoyed, because I genuinely loathe relying on stereotypes to make sense of the world, and yet here I was being presented with an overwhelming amount of evidence that what I was seeing - in polite language, a semi-rural, economically depressed region whose majority population were of lower than average education and higher than average majority American Christian church identification (actual attendance rate uncertain); in less polite terms, a white trash neighborhood - was exactly what this place was, no more and no less. While the people to whom I listened and talked had depths to them that extended beyond their backgrounds, they were where they were, and it was the way it was, because it suited them. They liked it that way. Or, in the case of the children, they'd been raised there and didn't know anything else.
All of which leads into the power of places, which is what the Nation States series of pictures is all about. The story The Man from Rock Bottom revolves around its locations, of which there are - in a very general sense - four. The first of these, of the Wasted Lands, has the Man staring out over a monster-infested region of twisted landscape. Here is the descriptive text I gave to Astanael for his use while he was drawing it:
"This is a scene of the Wasted Lands of Earth. The prevailing emotions should be sorrow and loss, with a trace of the traumas from old, bad memories. The Man will be looking down on the scene from a barren hill. The scene itself looks like an extreme version of the trench warfare and no-man’s lands of World War I, but taken to a horrific future date. There will be hideous monsters, ruined war equipment, and dead bodies (some in uniforms, some not) scattered around the scene. A horrible battle took place here not long ago, but now it’s done and all that are left alive and moving are the monsters."
In the story, the Wasted Lands represent a tragic past (the link is to a comic that I thought was appropriate). They *are* a tragic past, given material form. But don't we all have our own sad stories to tell? Don't we all endure tragedy? Normally we just don't see the sort of trauma that everyone has endured, nor do we really realize our deep connections to the past. We may see Richard Cory walking down the street, glittering as he walks (and do please check out that link - the poem isn't very long, I promise, and I think it's very good), and compare our situation to his, but he was the one who shot himself, not us: there is more going on under the surface than any of us realizes, and we too-often don't realize it right up until something goes "ping" in a very expensive-sounding manner. Just like in the Grove of the Suicides in Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell, where the souls turned into trees could only speak through the bleeding wounds left when a branch or a leaf was torn, all too often we fail to communicate until all that can come out is raw agony.
That is the backstory of the Wasted Lands: it came about at last when humanity finally fell from glory. We had a star-spanning empire; we had conquered alien civilizations; we had tamed the wildernesses of strange and fertile worlds; we were able to gather the stars and their infinite worlds like pebbles on a beach. Then our great civilization ran smack into the Pan-Galactic Republic, who did not approve of what we had been doing. No, not one bit. For years, centuries actually, this strange alien society tried to reason with us, to talk us out of our outward progress, to convince us to give up our manifest cosmic destiny.
We refused. More than that, we struck back.
After an attempted assassination on the primary representative of these alien interlopers made our displeasure clear, the Pan-Galactic Republic declared war. Finally, we had an enemy we could meet on equal terms in a battle beyond the stars!
Problem is...um...well...they were better than us.
In a demonstration of extreme restraint, the space navy of the Republic accepted the surrender of any vessel, but any vessel in our own fleet that resisted was utterly annihilated. Our ability to continue our outward expansion and conquest of the stars was utterly ruined in a single cataclysmic battle. Some of us decided to join the Republic, especially those who'd been slaves and indentured workers in the outer colonies (how Earth's own society was rendered so perfect: everyone who didn't fit in was sent somewhere else). The rest - the overwhelming majority in its trillions - returned to Earth.
(The image above, incidentally, is "The Last Judgement," by John Scott)
And there, lacking any other targets for our discontent, our disappointment, our tragic loss, we turned on each other.
Using the technology given to us by the Republic back when they were trying to convince us to stop killing other people and taking their stuff, twisting it, and also twisting our own technological gains in horrific ways, the would-be rulers of this new compressed population, the same conglomeration of Church, State, Business, and Criminal enterprise that had gotten us to this point in the first place, tried to restore order by making the populace afraid and reliant on them for protection. They did so by taking the route explored in Alan Moore's Watchmen comics, namely, by creating monsters. Lots of them. *Hordes* of them.
Problem is, by that point in time, the people of Earth weren't willing to listen to the very people who'd gotten them into the present mess. They also weren't willing to talk to each other. And so the killing continued, our empire breaking into nations, then into states, then into mere tribes, or even just little pocket communities. Then, in our weakened state, when we weren't killing each other, or oppressing each other in the form of a series of petty warlords and would-be dictators, the monsters were killing us instead.
Here is how the Man describes the situation, from chapter 3 of The Man from Rock Bottom:
The carnage of the End left our poor little planet covered in vast swaths of wasteland, or wasted land, places where nothing natural could live, not even microscopic organisms. There were bio-engineered plagues and irradiated landscapes and storms that ranged from flaying sand or ice, to smothering dust or acid snow, to literal fire and brimstone. And if the environment out there isn’t enough, there are always the monsters, the only macroscopic life that seems to thrive in the wasted lands. They’re not natural, though, and none of them are friendly by any definition of the word.
Well, maybe by one definition. They’re not the kind of friends you’d invite on vacation, or to your birthday party, or to come home and meet your folks. Instead, when you’ve hit that point where your lips are chapped, and your face is blistered, and all you can do is lie down and stare up at the pitiless skies, they’re the last friends you’ll ever need, the ones who’ll make it all just go away.
After this great trauma, the whole rest of the book is all about humanity getting over itself. This is a story of redemption, both of the individual and of our collective species. But before there can be healing, there must be pain. This is the post-apocalypse that frames the tale, the ash in which the seeds of the future have been sown.
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