Part I: The Special Tunnel
There are places that create through you. Find those places and become a vessel. Your best creations are not your own.
There is one such place we have taken to visiting over the past year or more, a kind of weekly ritual which we undertake. It is a tunnel under a road, next to an indigenous site of invisible mounds. Invisible, because the mounds were destroyed when a road was built next to it in the 1940s. Dismantled, and turned into road fill.
It started as a whim. I saw a trail called “Leake Mounds Interpretive Trail” on a map. My partner and I had an hour to spare, and so we decided to walk it. We were struck by the place immediately. Decaying historical markers everywhere dotted the overgrown trail, explaining the history of a people long gone. Explaining an absence. As a 1-star Google reviewer commented, “Interpretive is a euphemism for imaginary…This is a gravel path through an industrial complex that leads to a flooded tunnel running under a highway…The “trail” ends up in an equally depressing empty field on the other side of the thoroughfare…” In my book, quite a lovely recommendation. Because sometimes an absence becomes a presence. A mold has been created, a hollow space waiting to be filled with Something. So take the shadow road. Tall grasses will reach out to take your hand, as the door to Elsewhere swings wide open.
I heard a story once of a man who saw a UFO very near here. Late one night, while driving home with his newly born grandchild. A little future Atlanta Surrealist Group member, in point of fact. And I’m not in the least bit surprised.
Each time we come here to this tunnel, my partner sings. And me? I draw along the walls. Each of us creates automatically, letting the tunnel use our fingers, use our mouths. I don’t know how this pattern first started. Really, we just came to this place, and this is what the place wanted of us. And we certainly weren’t about to say no.
I think that this must be what prehistoric man felt like, way back in Chauvet Cave. Strange figures drawing themselves alongside cave walls, unknown gods speaking through uncomprehending flesh. A poetry lit by firelight and by shadow. The original poetry. Perhaps an outbreak of song accompanied these events, too. If it came naturally to us, then…
Part II: The visit on December 6th
Our visit began with the usual activities. My partner sang, and I drew a figure of a sun in birth.
We had a bit more time than usual on this day, and decided to play a surrealist game. In it, the first player wrote down a question on the walls, which the other did not look at. Meanwhile, the second player formed an answer to the unknown question in their head and told it to the other, who proceeded to write it below the initial question.
We were both feeling pleasantly unsettled after all this, as though we had fallen into a new, more magical world. We exited the tunnel then, and headed towards the empty field on the other side. On the hill next to the road we saw an unexpected sight. A collection of “ice flowers” had somehow expectorated from the foot of plants, a phenomenon never before witnessed by either of us. Some kind of fairy enchantment at work, perhaps? We thought of JG Ballard’s novel “The Crystal World” almost immediately, a story of a world overtaken and transformed by an outbreak of just such frozen sculptures. The delicate and beautiful harbingers of a delightful science fiction apocalypse. We picked up a few of these translucent flowers, and they shattered in our hands.
After a time studying these, we made our way to leave. Yet we ran into more white marvels on the other side, too: a field composed of dead leaves gone ghostly-white. We’d somehow missed this field on the way in. Or perhaps it had just appeared? Perhaps these, and those ice flowers, too, had been coaxed into being by the tunnel-spirit? A response of sorts, to our surrealist magic? Or maybe this was merely a lesson in seeing with eyes unclouded, of proper perspective? Either – both – who knows…
Addendum: A Collection of Tunnel Artifacts
