I have been dreaming of that square kilometre so frequently that I have lost track of which image is real, and which comes from the city. In my dream, I walked down a broken alley and into a ruined factory. I wandered wide, wood-planked corridors until I found my way into a cavernous loft. The detritus of industry gives access to something foreclosed to we who are born after the End of History. Exposed pipes are a signifier of Authenticity, even if no-one pays for heating. The sun set through poorly-insulated windows. Wood and white t-shirts glow in the golden hour. I know you remember something similar: a secret gathering, concealed within the ruins of the ordinary. Forgetting is an active power. I have chosen to obscure the origin of this memory. A dream is a private myth. What better souvenir for we Contemporaries, who live on the unfulfilled cusp?
In my old age, yes, I have been known to indulge in nostalgic reverie. That square kilometre is still squatted with ruins, even as the Enemy gains ground. He wants to replace mythology with a condo, a plastic monument to an age without memory. At the base of each of the ruins that dot that square kilometre is a tarnished plaque. It reads: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Once, I could laugh at the vanity of monarchs whose kitschy monuments eroded long before the wandering Poet came across them. In my old age, I have attained the wisdom of the King who undertakes to memorialize against the erosion of time.
Once that square kilometre had a purpose. Quarantined by railroads to North, South, and West, it survived as an oasis, a museum. Now it’s become a geographical puzzle for the Enemy to solve. A stele engraved with cuneiform and stuck next to Café Dispatch, or some other weightless product of the ultra-modern. Two ages clash incongruously, and we know that our Contemporaries will predictably prefer the non-committal. The Contemporary abhors mass, in architecture just as much as in life, for it knows rightly that any Pharaonic pretender will be forgotten before their monument has even finished construction. No-one visits this square kilometre during the day except those members of a parallel society of Book Worshippers. Inscribed in a pre-historic alphabet, their first commandment reads: Never change!
An entire generation of the City sought in vain to bring History back to life by piecing together what it could remember. We could not achieve the weightiness of our youth, and now we are left to harvest chrysanthemums and radishes. They push up through the broken alley. Pebbles dig into the palm of my hand as I lean back, one night in that square kilometre. A crowd buzzes and smokes, white t-shirts glowing under halogen lamps. This was once the centre of my universe.
The onrushing present has us trapped at the moment of disintegration. Lines of flight point in every direction, but they all bring us back to the same point: the ever-disintegrating, eternally-cresting, never-breaking Now. We would be better off writing all our wisdom down in a book—to retreat from society and laboriously teach the youth how to live outside of time. Memory has mass. We who can remember are weighed down by the Spirit of Gravity, while the force of forgetting flies weightless through the wild blue yonder. I chase that vivid perspective of my dream until reality and myth become one image. And I live by that first commandment: Never change!