Hi. I’m trying something a bit different for this post. I’ve read the following piece out loud for you, so you can listen instead of reading if you prefer. The full text is also below, as usual. Welcome. Happy reading.
I drew the world mask again for you, better this time.
Here they are: the Wilds, wearing a mask of Urbia. The two of them together create the World.
To recap from the last Missive, I’m not living in Urbia anymore. I left it 10 years ago, though I do still live on the mask. I’m right at the edge, past the corner of the left eyehole, near the knot in the elastic band, in an area called the Negotiations.
The Negotiations is a narrow strip running right along the entire edge of the mask. From anywhere in the Negotiations, you can take a saunter over the edge to the inner, hidden surface of Urbia, the Underside of Urbia. It’s very strange there, it’s like the underground of Urbia’s underground. I said saunter, but people don’t generally go there with a skip in their step. It’s just a bit of a slippery slope, you see, people sometimes end up there without intending it. Just a light misstep and whoops there you are on the Underside of Urbia. So much lurks there. I can’t write too much about it, it evades language. Language, especially written language, belongs in the realm of Urbia and originates in Urbia. Because of that, everything in Urbia has corresponding words that can be used to name them, describe them, assess them. It stands to say that most things on the Underside of Urbia simply have no words. Only some things on the Underside of Urbia have words, but the words relate only to how that thing appears to someone who has their two feet firmly planted in Urbia, peering through an eyehole to the Underside, or, for those perceptive enough, gazing through the sometimes transparent veil that is the delicate surface of the mask. The Urban words of some of these things are: monk, shaman, art, disease, nirvana, poetry. These very things, seen from anywhere on the Underside of Urbia, look very different and have no words. At least, not in the way we think of words.
From the Underside of Urbia, all it takes is a slight letting go for gravity to grab you and bring you down to the Wilds. It’s a short, often painless trip. No so from Urbia. In Urbia, all gravity does is make sure you stay firmly on the mask’s surface. To leave Urbia, you always have to pass through the Negotiations first.
The Negotiations are marked by the existence of smaller side roads bordered by forest. No traffic lights anywhere. Small farms. Homesteads. If you see endless fields of corn or soy, or a really big milk silo, you’re not in the Negotiations, maybe not even near it, you’re in Industrial lands, part of Urbia. If you see signs for provincial parks, even though it might seem like you’re in the Negotiations, nope, these signs indicate that you’re still in Urbia. If there’s a parking lot at a trailhead and there’s instructions for how to pay for your parking—Urbia. Don’t be fooled by all the ways in which Urbia tries to co-opt the Wilds. The Negotiations are indicated by unpaved roads, small farming homesteads, some trails, intact forests. A total lack of Urban ambition.
The Negotiations, not surprisingly, is named for the immense amount of negotiating that happens there. The Wilds negotiating with Urbia. Urbia negotiating with the Wilds. Each encroaching on the other’s stake on the world: Urbia aggressively, single-mindedly; and the Wilds with an unseen preternatural force, a paced perseverance invisibly and valiantly fuelled. Urbia forgetting, always, that if it weren’t for the Wilds it wouldn’t be there; without the Wilds to support it and animate it into existence, Urbia would be a curious, silent mask hanging on a wall among other nameless masks in an Airbnb in Cabbagetown, Toronto.
This isn’t the only negotiating that happens in the Negotiations. It’s a place just quiet enough for humans to be able to negotiate. Negotiate what and with whom? Negotiate themselves with themselves. Negotiate their death. Negotiate their life, too. Negotiate with their departed and their not-yet-arrived. Negotiate the erosion of their Humanness. Negotiate their ties to Urbia while standing on the very edge of the mask, looking out over the Wilds, endless to the very last horizon. It’s a view that cuts your breath short for a moment. Dizzying. Disorienting.
The Negotiations are a clash of worlds, a meeting place where one logic collapses while another rises up to repurpose the falling ashes. It’s teeming with contradiction and conflict, like a shoreline where water meets earth, where pebbles and waves in all their crashing emulsify against all odds into a fertile substrate for swimming snakes, clouds of small flies, ravens picking at fish carcasses. It’s the place of solve et coagula, the threshold that properly seasons all Urbanites daring to step foot in the Wilds.
Indeed from anywhere in the Negotiations, you can step your foot off the mask gingerly and with intention, thus avoiding slipping onto the Underside of Urbia. Such a careful, pre-meditated step will land you instead squarely onto the face behind the mask: in the Wilds. This is not for the faint of heart, for the shoppers of Bay & Bloor, nor for those waiting in line at the drive-through. It’s definitely not for rapid travellers of the lower stratosphere with 7-hour layovers in Frankfurt.
Have you been to the Wilds? Have you seen it? How to describe it?
Thank you for reading…! I’m four stories in and loving the process and where it’s taking us. Thank you for reading and for being there. I would love to hear your reactions, insights, thoughts. Please comment below or shoot me an email. With gratitude xoxo
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