Cannibals and Capital. Not the kind where human flesh is physically consumed as a delicacy, but the kind where one’s body and physical ailment become intellectual capital, feeding a machine that is so vast, powerful, and hungry that one’s life slowly ebbs as one, sometimes not so calmly, is bemused by the dilemma. Civilized cannibals.
I head up to visit my long-time friend, now an artist, who is painting her self-portrait with hard-earned fingerprints. Where to find the ladder? This instrument that passes from native to “civilized”, “integrated”, “one of us”. How to keep one’s individual voice in the sea of attempted organization of the discontent?
The trail is restricted to the cliff-top. The smaller barrier that might have been crossed to enter the Indian Ladder trail, reinforced a few yards later with an iron gate. To be fair, the iron gate was negotiable by someone desperate enough to jump from the cliff to the staircase over the deep chasm. But once inside, it was not unlike a prison. One would have to support oneself entirely off of the winter landscape inside a cave.
I stay on top of the cliff. Even, had I been able to make the jump, Petey would not have been able to squeeze through the bars. I am responsible for 2. It would have been a very solitary, isolated, life.
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