The Past Is A Zombie: Rambling about THE OLDEST VIEW by Kane Pixels
*ahem*
Liminality
“Oooh, is this that new-fangled word that the kids are using on the TikToks and MySpaces? Is it the big thing that drives the clicks for all the meme stealers? Is it hip to be liminal? Does the youth even know what it means? Did they just make it up one day? All of them collectively and unanimously on some invisible hive mind wavelength that only zoomers and gen alphas can see?”
Okay, let’s actually introduce this properly now.
Liminality is basically defined as an area or period of transition. The time that passes when you’re waiting on a chair to be called into the dentist’s office. A long stretch of road that you need to drive along to get from your house to that of say, your friend’s or distant relative’s. It can even refer to the passage of time as felt in retrospect. A pop song that once topped the music charts in Eastern Europe during the year 2008 but is now recalled in the the furthest reaches of the internet. The entrance to an indoor soft play area that no longer exists but was saved to someone else’s photo album that you happened to stumble across. Spying an obtuse looking plastic media contraption emblazoned with the promotional artwork of a film referenced by a bunch of TV shows and suddenly feeling nostalgia for a time that you were never actually alive to witness.
The past drives so much of our casual conversations, fantasies, entertainment, technology and our politics that it seems as though the past hasn’t really gotten any further away from us, even after all these years. Point A still hasn’t receded from view and the distance to Point B feels longer by the day. Some would view it as an escape from reality. To never grow up. To never change. For everything to stay as it is right now. But for plenty of others, it’s already reality.
And that reality is a little bit more complicated.
With all this stagnation hanging thick in the air, it would only be a matter of time before somebody came along with the intent of exploring the feeling more cerebrally, asking what it would be like if this liminal feeling truly did last forever. There have been shows and films about characters stuck in time loops, living out events over and over again until they are freed from their nebulous cycle. Maybe they’re being held inside of some kind of impossible space that either constantly loops in on itself recursively, or confounds ones senses to the point of insanity. The first one I remember experiencing was in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus oddly enough, wherein small gags and vignettes would suddenly repeat themselves beat for beat, all of which went right over the heads of the characters experiencing them. That is, until one unwitting TV host in the show suddenly looks directly into the camera and into the eyes of the audience watching, slowly seeing the cyclical pattern that nobody else does. He soon finds himself trapped in a frustrating cycle of cuts and edits. Just when he seems to be making an effort to get somewhere new, an errant jump-cut will place him just a little bit further back from where he last got to. He perseveres all the way through the end credits of the episode, but never finds out how to escape from this vicious wheel of meta-humour before the show fades unceremoniously to black.
Monty Python is a comedy series so it was obviously supposed to be funny, but sometimes my mind drifts and I start to wonder if to this day, the man is still running into that doctors office over and over again, or if his own body finally failed him at some point, eventually reduced to a skeleton being watched over by a studio camera for all eternity.
I think about which possibility would have been better or worse for him on balance and eventually conclude that fundamentally, there is no difference. Even the most charitable theories of death whether in scientific or theological contexts still describe the same thing: eternal damnation, endless rest in gods kingdom, all sensory experiences ceasing to register completely, nothing forever, everything forever, it’s all one state of being. Forever. Sure, there’s always talk about an ultimate end and a momentous beginning, but there surely have to be things occurring before “the beginning” and after “the end”, because “forever” is simply too impossible for even the largest group of human minds to fathom.
That’s what explorations of liminality in art are trying to break down and express. The feeling of being stuck on that long stretch of road and never seeing it end, no matter how far you drive towards the horizon. Of being trapped in that dentist’s office and going so numb to the concept of time that it’s no longer possible to tell the days from the years that have passed. Of seeing so many relics from ages gone by placed side by side informing so much of our modern selves that the first Ghostbusters movie might as well have been released yesterday for all it matters.
And now, with all that musing and rambling out of the way, I can (finally) talk about why I love THE OLDEST VIEW by Kane “Pixels” Parsons.
Kane Parsons got his start making animated music videos with characters from Attack on Titan before injecting new life into liminal spaces in media with his interpretation of The Backrooms. What started as a picture of an empty partially built interior decorated with yellow-tinted wallpaper then given haunting context by a paragraph of existential horror from an anonymous comment, became a found footage style exploration of mankind’s hubris as it tried to bring the impossible to life. Parsons created and uploaded part one in 2022 at the tail end of the COVID pandemic (arguably and appropriately, the height of liminal-mania) when he was just 16 years old. Parsons later got a movie deal inked with A24 to mark it and the subsequent follow-up instalments reaching 57+ million views on YouTube and spawning countless imitators, homages and other tangential interpretations. All of this and an entirely separate YouTube channel loaded with original music.
The man clearly knows how to grab people’s attention and keep them invested with a solid yarn, but I believe it’s THE OLDEST VIEW that represents a true creative quantum leap for his artistic sensibilities. It goes beyond exploring liminality as an aesthetic component for what is in essence, a (still really well told) government conspiracy thriller as The Backrooms did. THE OLDEST VIEW is far stranger, way more off-kilter and incredibly ambitious. Not necessarily for the scope of its set-pieces or visual effects (he basically pulled a painstakingly recreated digital building from the internet and had an art student bumble around it for upwards of a half-hour), but rather for the gonzo implications that it all exists in service of. This (so far?) five-part 75-minute-long series not only so neatly encapsulates the concept of liminality beyond the feeling it invokes, but also explores how humanity as a species affects and influences it.
Ohhhh yeah, it’s gonna be one of THOSE articles.
Part One: Renewal
We start in the woods with a thunderous storm brewing overhead. A man in a fancy suit bends down to collect some flowers before sitting on a log suspended over a shallow stream and reaming through a notebook procured from his pocket.
Everything except for the green of the grass and leaves on the surrounding trees is presented in stark black and white for reasons that clearly have a purpose if Kane went through all the trouble of keying out the other colours in his editing software for this one scene.
The very next scene involves lots of dreamy fades with an unseen figure cutting through cardboard, gluing materials together and assembling a mask as part of an overall art centrepiece that also, curiously enough, incorporates bouquets of flowers into its design. All of this, while a warped cover of an old folk song about parting, grief and pain (When The Swallows Homeward Fly) plays in the background.
Aaand that’s part one.
There was no obvious indication that this was part of a new series, so at the time of its upload in March of 2023, I simply assumed this to be a creative break from the grind of Backrooms uploads or a way for Parsons to expand his filmmaking skills by roping in some friends he made during the making of that series to help him conjure some seemingly disconnected visual ideas into being for his upcoming A24 portfolio. It was slow, ponderous, melancholy and completely unexpected for him.
Two months later though, to our further surprise, we got a direct follow-up.
Part Two: Beneath the Earth
If it weren’t for the 15 second opening shot of greenery with ominous encroaching sounds of what could almost be rolling wheels, you’d be forgiven for assuming this video is entirely unrelated to the first beyond name and creator.
After a fake loading ident and some peppy electronic music, we are introduced to “Wyatt”, a young teenaged student with a camera and an online following (write what you know, eh). This writers stand-in seems to have an affinity for exploring out of the way locations or seemingly abandoned property in the middle of nowhere, a well-established cottage industry among video creators that the opportunistic Wyatt himself is clearly fully entrenched in. This time however, he gets more than he bargained for when, beneath the base of a tree in an otherwise empty field miles away from any roads, Wyatt stumbles upon a heavily worn stone stairway lined by electric lamps and leading down deep underground. Naturally his curiosity gets the better of him, but not before he decides to pack a camera with him so he can record his findings and presumably show it all off to people watching online.
The entire process of awkwardly climbing into the hole, slowly descending the stairwell and finally reaching the bottom takes up more than half the length of the whole video. Plenty of time for spooky ambience to start building, for Wyatt to really reckon with the weight of his discovery and to prime the audience for the overall mood of this series going forward as the inexplicable sense of dread slowly sinks in. Even with the glacial length, there are multiple jump-cuts that serve to make the passage of time and the true depth of the hole less clear. Once Wyatt does get to the end of the stairs though, it’s nothing like what he may have expected. Whatever it was, it certainly didn’t involve a rotting wooden door immersed in the smell of cut grass leading to a shower room behind a disused office space with a much larger hall on the other side. Not only that, but everything beyond the shower room looks pristine. Untouched, even. There’s even the distinct sound of generic waiting room music playing from speakers that wouldn’t sound out of place in a large scale shopping centre.
In fact, that’s exactly what it turns out to be. A giant clean shopping centre buried beneath the earth.
Even without any explicit signs of danger, the overwhelming sense of “wrongness” about the whole situation makes Wyatt feel more and more like a forbidden stranger in this place. Soon after he starts laughing to himself in disbelief, the video ends. Just as abruptly as the one that came before it.
It would be another five months before the next part would be uploaded, but this time there was very clearly room being made to follow up on what had just been shown off. But still, what wasn’t yet clear was how “Beneath the Earth” related to the seemingly disconnected imagery and sounds that were shown off in “Renewal”. Who was the man in the suit? Why was everything green showing up in colour and not him? What was that cardboard face being shown off? Why did the bottom of the stairs smell of cut grass? There was no doubt that answers would come though. If these things felt disconnected now, they were clearly being set up with a big pay off waiting in the wings to explain how they fit together. But this series didn’t tease out the answers in quite the same way that the Backrooms series did with its numerous character connections, events played out of order and general “red string connecting scraps of evidence pinned onto a corkboard” storytelling. The next video in THE OLDEST VIEW would instead elucidate matters in a much more esoteric fashion. It would weild its previously established ideas as means to communicate thematically linked concepts drenched in abstract metaphor, instead of more solidly defined in-universe “lore”. The kinds of things that would never make the slightest amount of sense in real life, but become analogous to headier concepts when taken as a fictitious world with its own meta-rules laid out by the creator.
In other words, the kind of stuff that’s like catnip for people like me who think too hard about things.
Part Three: The Rolling Giant
This video begins as the last one did: unassuming shots of greenery, strange ambient sounds and a video update from Wyatt. After apparently failing to get much info from potential landowners, borrowing some wildlife cameras from his botany professor at his university and seeing absolutely no other people approach the stairwell that he dove into, he decides to return and find some answers with slightly renewed confidence. But not so much that he’s still paranoid of any possible human contact, however improbable it may seem at this stage.
Wyatt’s exploration is much more thorough this time; no other signs of human activity above ground and a giant abandoned shopping centre under a tree, still with that cut grass smell at the entrance. The further in he goes and the more details go completely over his head though, the more clear it becomes to certain residents and frequenters of Dallas Midtown in Texas USA watching the video:
This building existed in real life.
The place that Wyatt is exploring was formerly known as the Valley View Centre which was closed down in 2017 due to financial troubles, before it was (appropriately enough) toured by abandoned building explorers online to dredge up memories and engagement. In fact, by the time “Beneath the Earth” was uploaded, efforts to demolish the Valley View Centre were about ten days away from finishing. Strewn about this ghost of a shopping centre are stores, posters and directional signage displaying real adverts and promotional materials, many of which are linked to a so-called “parade of giants”. This refers to the practice of creating large effigies of historical figures that are often socio-culturally relevant to the town or country that’s hosting it. Lots of places around the world host these kinds of parades from Cornwall to Barcelona to Belgium and Dallas, Texas. The giant being shown off front and centre in most of the posters has a face which bears a very intentional resemblance to the large cardboard mask that was being constructed in the very first part of the series. One of the stores that Wyatt briefly fixates on in the shopping centre has a portrait dedicated to one of Dallas’ most renowned figures: Julien Reverchon. It’s his likeness that is replicated for the giant on the poster and who the black and white man exploring the forest of green in “Renewal” is clearly intended to resemble. Key dates in history regarding Julien, the building and the plans for redevelopment on the now demolished grounds are referenced in other pictures and documents elsewhere in the staff areas later on, but that’s skipping ahead a tad.
One thing is clear from all of this very slow and meticulous plodding around a large virtual set: THE OLDEST VIEW is directly tapping into a set of universal experiences as shared and witnessed by a highly specific group of people in a select part of the world while they were still happening. Reverence is paid to places and things that were themselves products of other places and things which influenced them. By placing them all in a form of stasis deep underground beneath an idyllic field on the other side of the country with only a single tree to mark its position, it is heavily suggested that their fading from the world is tantamount to death. The very song that played over the creation of Julien’s cardboard mask in “Renewal” is literally about the pain felt after the passing of a loved one, the wistfulness felt when looking back and the easing felt by knowing that they too will join them in death one day. Like cut grass that never grows back. Leaving only the lingering smell of its pain. (I’m not even trying to sound poetic either, that’s literally what the smell is. Look it up.)
Is it any wonder why Wyatt expresses to himself the fact that he knows he shouldn’t be here? It’s the same feeling that excavators of ancient Egyptian tombs must have felt when they first raided the resting places of great Pharaohs whose preserved bodies, organs and treasures were buried with them in preparation for their assumed journeys into the afterlife.
Now, in horror fiction, this is the point at which a curse would be introduced to punish those who would dare disturb the peace of the ancients. In Wyatt’s case, it involves the music and lights around the shopping centre occasionally springing to life and dying down with the sound of rolling thunder, spooking him into trying to leave before discovering that the stairs he came in from have silently caved in. To make matters worse, he then finds that he is being stalked and toyed with by the giant effigy of Julien Reverchon moving around on wheels all by itself.
Spooooky…
Much has been made by fans about how this giant moving cardboard effigy of an old American botanist (this is why I love art) doesn’t intend to kill Wyatt outright, but rather make escaping the ghost mall more difficult for him by cutting him off at certain junctions, crashing into walls or panes of glass and chasing him away from where he’s trying to go using its sheer size and heft to intimidate him. It’s why the giant is seemingly impeded by an escalator early on, only to be able to ascend it perfectly without issue at the exact point where Wyatt is getting closer and closer to finding a way out. Wyatt has trodden on the graves of the past and is desecrating its grounds. By capturing evidence of the place on camera, he is preventing the spirits of history passing on from the constantly moving present: from allowing the old oaks to remain in the past in order to spread the seeds for the future (and yes, this WAS me trying to sound poetic that time).
It becomes pretty evident towards the end of the video that even the building itself doesn’t want Wyatt to leave either, as evidenced by the aforementioned cave-in, flickering lights, the walls of stone that block off all open entrances and exits, the sudden manifestation of trees, dense foliage and more parade effigies from out of view and the dead bodies of horses and men from another time rapidly blinking in and out of reality at the climax of Wyatt’s escape attempt. The whole place is cracking and decaying right before his eyes, its transition to death halted by Wyatt’s unwitting interruption. The thunder keeps rolling too, as though some great unseen omniscient presence is causing all of this to happen. Eventually though, by reaming through building schematics in the staff offices, he finds an “emergency” escape in the form of another convenient set of concrete stairs leading upwards, just like the ones that led him down in the first place. Unfortunately, it happens to be positioned at the end of a precarious sequence of metal beams suspended high up over the large central hall of the building. High up enough that were anyone to fall from such a height, they would surely die.
You can probably imagine what happens next.
The last we see of poor Wyatt is his motionless body laying next to his cracked phone, surrounded by the same ethereal field of greenery that also surrounded Julien Reverchon in the very first instalment. The final shot is of the forest with the giant partially concealed in the dense foliage staring out into space. The imagery even comes full circle; just as the camera pulls away from a shot of the giant’s eyes in “Renewal”, it also fixates on Wyatt’s expressionless eyes as the colour is literally drained from his body in this unnaturally natural monument to faded memories.
The last thing you see before you die.
The “oldest view”.
Phew! So, end of article, plug social media, link other pieces of writing, brag about projects I’ve worked on, move forward, have some food and go to bed.
Nu-uh.
We’re not done yet.
Not if humanity itself has anything to say about it.
Part Four: Life Of A Giant
It would be a pretty safe assumption otherwise to think that the series ends here, but there was nonetheless anticipation and queries from fans about a possible fourth instalment. But how could one possibly follow on from an ending as definitive as “hapless author insert falls from a high place and dies, the end”? When queried about a fourth instalment, Kane Parsons himself (allegedly) said in a Discord server (and I’m paraphrasing here), “we are all living in part four right now”. Much of his subsequent media posts and video uploads related to THE OLDEST VIEW from then on involved music, assets and reference materials used in the creation of the series itself.
The one that I’ll be piling attention onto here is an equal parts mournful and nostalgic montage set to “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Dream Academy. We see images of the actual Julien Reverchon effigy being built before being paraded and put on public display along with footage of the Valley View Centre in the days when it was still active. An emotional high point followed by the building’s subsequent condemnation and destruction with the rolling giant cast in a deep dark shadow. The final two images shown are a portrait of Julien Reverchon himself and an obscure looking (and supposedly completely fictional) ancient stone monument that bears an uncanny resemblance to the stairways in the shopping centre itself.
The whole video seems to reinforce the exploration of liminality in THE OLDEST VIEW and clearly reflects and summarises the outpouring of personal accounts and waves of nostalgia hits from other people posting their own theories and tributes in the aftermath of “The Rolling Giant” upload. This video backed by a song about the desperate longing for happiness in times of despair plays into frustrations felt by people in a modern age where forward progress is leading to the papering over and increasingly, the erasure of our depressingly fickle past.
Large video game companies are punishing people for trying to enjoy their old relics, even going so far as to revoke licenses for online games that were already rendered inoperable after servers were shut down, slapping cease and desist notices onto fan made projects for infringing on long-neglected intellectual property. The lifespan of physical media from several decades ago has long been made apparent as to its short length, as polaroid photos deteriorate, strips of magnetic media decay, irreplaceable batteries leak until they’re empty and old pieces of hardware are left behind, rendered forever incompatible and inaccessible. Governments and armed forces have invaded countries, ransacked its people, torn down their research, made a mockery of their beliefs and stolen their cultural heritage, discarding and cherry picking bits and pieces of their history as they please, leaving lone survivors to pick up the pieces before they’re made into an award-winning animated movie. Drawings and evidence thereof are scrubbed out or deleted, websites and links become broken and even entire pieces of large scale popular media are removed by their own distributors in some cases, before they’ve even been seen by the public in any capacity.
That’s the emotion which all media exploring liminality starts with to some degree, because that’s the reality in which we live. So the question of a part four seemed pretty open and shut to me: we are all living in part four. THE OLDEST VIEW as a series ended here because the past will recede from view eventually and even our best efforts can only do so much when confronted with inevitability. Every toy and piece of art, priceless or not, is destined for the trash, the internet will die forever one day, the Earth will burn to a crisp, all light in the universe will go out thousands of billions of years from now, all matter will spread and settle like dust in the attic and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop it.
But that’s only the beginning.
As I said at the start of this very article, there is nothing to suggest to our limited understanding of reality that anything ever technically ends or begins to or from anything else. It makes for a narrative or hypothesis that’s easy to communicate and digest, but true liminal media questions the very idea of beginnings and endings in both space and time. What does “nothing” look like? Is there even such a thing? Where is that “nothing” being stored? How long as it been there? What exists outside of the “nothing”? “Everything”? How far does “everything” go? How much of “everything” is there really? Is “nothing” excluded from “everything”? Does it even make sense? Am I making any sense?
The universe has never given the answers because nobody else ever asked the questions.
But we did.
Part Five: Dispersal
Six months after “The Rolling Giant”.
Deep under the earth, some cheesily composed “musak” abruptly stops playing. A young undergrad has just plummeted to his death. At the foot of a concrete stairwell, a rotting wooden door creaks open.
The sound of chirping crickets echoes through the nightscape of a gently rustling forest where the ghost of a once beloved shopping centre in Dallas Texas used to be. A place where memories were born. Where the past goes to meet its final resting place.
Then some four-eyed geek speaks on behalf of Dallas Midtown city council to a bunch of bozos in a gazebo to answer some questions about this thing that’s gonna be built on the place where that really cool mall used to be or whatever.
Something, something, yadda, yadda, who cares when everyone is still talking about that Valley View Centre? Remember what a cool place it used to be? With the shops and the play areas and the cardboard giants on wheels? They were so cool! Have you seen all the people making art and posting about it online? Oh wow, look! Someone recreated the shopping centre completely with 3D models? It’s got all the halls and stores, even the back areas for the staff and everything! I first found out about it from my friend who went there a bunch when they were a kid and shared an article with me about it getting demolished. It’s so sad. I wish more people knew about the giants though…I’d love to make something like that one day. I can think of loads of people to model it after!
A rumble of thunder rolls above the forest over the lifeless body of poor Wyatt. Clouds blanket the greying skies. The world turns dark.
And then, light.
Just a small peek. Made all the brighter for how much of it is being concentrated through such a tiny gap.
There’s something curious about the titles of these videos, specifically the first upload “Renewal” and this, the most recent of all, “Dispersal”. The zero-experience botanist in me sees these words and immediately associates them with cycles of life and death. Bodies and trees dispersing their nutrients and seeds respectively before a period of renewal takes place, during which new plant life forms, perhaps providing sustenance to other forms of life through the very Earth in itself.
But memories of the past were technically never intended to be spread and dispersed in the same way. Sure, natural selection informs the behaviour and evolution of new species of animal and gigantic craters likely billions of years old can still be seen on the moon to this day, but no life form since has ever questioned where those things all came from. Because it’s all in the past now.
The sliver of light shines upon the giant cast in deep dark shadow.
We cut to a familiar scene: Wyatt is once again running from the rolling cardboard effigy of a dead botanist with hands made of blooming flowers. He shimmies hurriedly across concrete bars suspended several feet above a hard linoleum floor with his heart in his throat. His only escape lies just a few meters away behind an awkwardly placed support beam: another stone staircase leading back up to the surface.
He hugs the wall. He clenches his phone, it’s camera still recording. He raises his legs over the beam. It creaks and gives way. He slips.
This time though, he lives.
Instead of tumbling backwards over the precipice and to his doom, Wyatt’s weight shifts forward at the crucial moment and he steps into the stairwell that so teased viewers six months before. Behind him, a metal support beam clangs to the ground several feet below and the giant watches from afar, no longer able to impede Wyatt.
He has made it.
On the surface, this seems like a cop-out. A way of rewriting a contentious ending for the sake of an arbitrary “happily ever after” to satisfy all those requests for another instalment by giving them an extended alternate timeline epilogue.
But Wyatt still died. We all saw it happen. “Dispersal” does not shy away from this fact at all. The episode starts by playing out the sound of his death from a third person perspective. We hear him scream as he plummets to the floor. His dead body remains in the forest of green precisely as it was before. Everything from the cracking of the walls to the shimmying across the concrete plays out exactly the same as it did in “The Rolling Giant”. Even the camera motions are exactly the same. This is not a do-over or a second chance. Neither Wyatt nor the giant takes the time to notice or acknowledge the fact that this scenario has already played out once before, because this is the first time it’s happened. So how did it happen twice? Because we willed it.
Kane Parsons did not bring Wyatt back from the dead. At the very least, he didn’t do it alone.
Wyatt clumsily stumbles back onto the surface surrounded in green, having miraculously avoided tripping and falling back down all those stairs (seriously though, I get what Kane Parsons was going for, but that camera shake was just nauseating). Before he clambers into his car and confirms that yes, this is indeed the real world and not some weird fake-out pocket dimension, a strange and seemingly out of nowhere anecdote fades in on the screen:
“Anatomically modern humans have existed for approximately 300,000 years. Recorded history accounts for roughly 1.6% of this time.”
This is the reason I love making art, consuming media and talking about it. Because sometimes a piece of work will come along and plant the most nonsensical ideas into my head and then give genuine weight and meaning to make me really believe in a statement as ridiculous as “the past is a zombie”. The way in which a person or a whole collective can weave seemingly disparate words, images, ideas and experiences together to form a coherent and hypnotically compelling argument in favour of concepts that under other circumstances, would get someone thrown in bedlam for speaking aloud out of context.
When a profound connection like that is made and an understanding is reached between a writer at their desk and a reader on the far-flung other side of the world whole generations apart from each-other, it feels like genuine magic is happening. Even the most accomplished artists who know how the human psyche works and know how to reach or convince others through their works knows this too, whether they admit it or not. Because it’s not something that can be done overnight. A lot of things need to fall into place in order to beam a powerful message or a subjective experience as raw and unfiltered as possible into another person’s head through suggestion and interpretation alone, all so clearly and concisely that it barely feels like anything is happening at all until you actually stop to think about it after the fact. What’s even more magical is knowing that everybody has this kind of potential in them and that they can not only come completely out of nowhere at any moment, but also take parts of the world by storm.
For what it’s worth then, here are the final ideas that were formed into my brain upon seeing THE OLDEST VIEW in its entirety.
The universe has allowed things, creatures, places and memories to die and fade from reality without resistance. Life has continued forward without the need to hang onto them and without issue. Seeds disperse and bear new fruit while soil and flesh feed their growth in cycles, but impermanence has remained a constant. It has been an immutable fact of the universe for literal aeons.
No other creature aside from sociologically modern humans regard the past so heavily and have so much power over it. Only us humans today would treat the past with so much importance that they would use it as a bribe, a threat, a bargaining chip, even a currency. Only humans would ever become so curious about the past that once they were done raiding the planet’s rich history, they would impose the names of real figures and deities onto the stars above whose own sources of light had long since died out millions of years before. Only humans would invent religiously charged festivals centred entirely around remembering the dead and keeping their spirits alive through the power of remembrance. Only humans would create discs made of gold, pack them with Earth’s greatest hits and discoveries and then launch them into space in the hopes that someone or something else out there will find and read it, like a message in a bottle floating in the ocean. Only humans would invent and launch weapons with such capacity for destruction and death before locking them away in a box and then fretting over what kind of message would be able to communicate the proper weight and context to people in the further future. Only humans would do this exact same thing to pieces of pop-culture paraphernalia like toys, books, lunch boxes, magazines and albums of music. Only humans could make entire pieces of art that are specifically engineered to be impermanent, only for their audience to turn around and say “no, you don’t get to take this thing away from us. You don’t have the right”.
When primitive humans first etched drawings of hunters and mammoths onto the walls of caves, was it but the first of many sacrilegious intrusions upon the natural order of the universe? Did those humans know that their creations would stay there and be studied by advanced humans long after they had died? If the universe could talk back to us, what would it have to say about what we’ve done? Would it even know what to do with that information? Was anyone or anything ever meant to wield this kind of power? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it neither? One thing is for sure though: this power we have over life and death is not to be taken lightly. That shopping centre was supposed to be a tomb. We turned it into a museum. So long as people keep copying and sharing the virtual recreations that are made and showing others how it was made, it will never be demolished ever again. The giant was supposed to die. We dug it back up. Now it rolls and shakes along the roads above ground in a never-ending solo parade of our design. We allowed Wyatt to escape and live again because he lived in our heads, rent free. Do with that information what you will, because it’s all you can do. What is undone can be done again.
Whenever we pay respects to history and keep a memory alive, we effectively become arcane necromancers raising zombies from their graves. We are constantly living in an unmoving state of liminal space-time that feeds the past into the future in its own artificial cycle of life after death that can either only stop when we say so, or when there is nobody left to keep it going. I’m not sure if humanity even cares about that possibility because they’ll keep it going for as long as they are still alive. No matter what the universe does, humanity will keep preserving itself and everything around it. It will keep remembering. Whether or not we’re even the only creatures in the universe to ever do so, it’s what we do best.
Will there be another instalment to this series? Will there be a surprise upload a few more months from now continuing the unlikely adventures of Wyatt and the Bodacious Botanist on Wheels? I thought I knew, but now I don’t. THE OLDEST VIEW is a video with no end and at the same time, it’s only just begun. I’m not sure it ever even started at all and yet, it’s still happening.
We are all living in part four.