Breaking Bog: Bad Altitude
Pity the typical walker-on-mountains, so crudely enamoured of cramming their silhouette into spreading skies, for they have lost sight of the dank truth: That we are sad-born, bad-live and mad-die in the slow shady mud of the lowest of low places. Abjure the virulent zeal of those cumuli inspirators and serial summit-crunchers. Indulge no pseudo-existential narratives of clunkily Tolkienized atavistic ennui.
It is, baldly stated, not right for folk to clamber aboard the nearly naked cadavers of dead gods. In all the land there is no relic of respect left for the lessons of those dimly stoic creators of ours who, so it is written in The Book Of The Longest Ago, slew themselves in shame most profound rather than endure compassion for the twitching, screaming nightmare they had wrought in fucked-up flesh.
More pressingly disturbing though are recent reports on the construction of a modern trend for “situations” of dolorous “hike-buddies” straddling spiny ridges and exposing the warm fecundity supine all around to the toxic radiance of their beaming proprietorial vapidity.
Who can say what terrible harm might already have been done through local osmosis by the pollutant spew of utmost banality from these cargo cult terrestrial elevation supremacists? Who knows what ancient horror may consequently have been stirred from numberless aeons of torpor and is even now keening and yammering anew as it paints a greasy twisted ribbon of blood and shit through the dreamtime, lunging ravenously towards our world to be reborn?
I counsel you in murderous earnest. Distrust the lackless peak-lark, the scampering summerfriend, the blithely shiny vertex completist. Shame a casual treeline-breacher. Question every action and intention of the resolutely jocular escalatist. What unexamined imperial entitlement compels them time and again to intrude upon the Silent And High Places so sanguine and panting? Do they seek the Grey Room? Are they poly-firmamentalist?
Scowl at their answers-for-everything. Find fault with the purpose and number of their various accoutrements and paraphernalia. Judge the dubiety of their moral character scathingly in relation to their preferred level of personal waterproofing. Scorn a crampon. Sabotage their ulterior compass and subvert the ontological significance of their maps. Be cold and dark and cruel, the Yule tock of a stone clock. Smack them down hard. This is not a game, this is a rescue song.
Using your own liminally tangible sense of quickening dread as a guide, learn to recognize the nausea and shooting misery prompted by the creeping ascendancy of these termagant jack-a-hilltops. Resist the impulse to rationalize away such symptoms. They may be caused by proximity to a source of solar inclination. If you’re sickened to your splintering back teeth by something you can’t see, say something. The decomposition you ephemerally prolong could be your own.
All too freshly common are the accounts of credulaurs and gullibloths tugged unwarily vault-wise by the perfumed hygiene of breezy rhetoric or the numinous veneer of sturdy Phoeban masquerade in ruddy oak and roughly burnished leather. Such stray naifs as often wander above and beyond the old goat roads might never again return to their right minds, their native muck and cunning fast bleached away by a regime of transitory verticality without sense or end.
As the drylands dessicate their microbial cowl, they become precariously susceptible to parasitic reculturing. Remade to perceive themselves free of the burdensome yoke of their broader contextual obligations, it’s only a few loops down the spiral before their usual chirruping mouth-farts devolve into vainglorious claims of immanent cosmic communion through congress with the positive z-axis or some other such bilious affront to everything that has ever splashed or lurked or hunted in the teeming swampy nethers of psyche.
Let your intuitions of suspicion serve you. Listen for the sly whispering kisses of the barbed west wind as it nightly brings agony and doom to the hillsides. Ask a crow, they all know: That gruffly corporeal cherub who bears such enticing witness to the wild joys of auto-vertigo is yet a spectral chimera, a rapidly degenerating pork-dolly momentarily haunted by a furious imbecile ghost.
It is so. Each bronzely chipper visage, bold-blazoned with wholesome grin, sheathes an obscene undead rictus of secret seething terror and hatred of almost everything the world is. Just like anyone else. Let the conscious awareness of this inform, inspire and infect your future social footfall.
By all means walk as high as you wish. Walk until nothing but eternal heavenborn purity-gas sustains the base squelching of your gigantic soggy heart, until your rancid lungmeat is harrowed raw by the noble oxygens of the celestial spheres, until Helios unbound from grubby mortal miasmata spills prelapsarian nectar across your inane lolling tongue. Savour the dizzy supernal gyring of liberty’s phantoms, while their presence seems sensible. It won’t be long.
Ever the familiar tendrils of vaporous taint will rise and follow and find you. Needy and tender and curious. Damply expectant with rot. No place inside of time where fate can lead escapes the flowering lick of lovely chaotic dissembly. The third-dimensionalist propaganda would have you ignore this sweetest and most fetid truth.
Disbelieve the mythic lies of wet and beating mountains. Weave your soul-reeds into russet wards of resistance to all haughty crimes against perspective. Mulch the black morass between your toes and surrender to the suck of your own home-mire. Lie deep in thorns and rushes in the soft loam in the gloaming.
Wisp-lit filth-kin, foul ethereals. Break down with me.
(Bog ups to 3liza and orb-steeb, whose jam I’m shamelessly riffing on.)
