the taragarh fort is the only place i can go here where people are thoroughly
absent, where i’m actually alone. no eyes. 700 years old and unmaintained, a
glory pervades the place, which was made – like most of
civilization’s structures – for killing. crumbling staircases and paintings (a place made by goblins kipling commented),
weedy courtyards, algae and guano stepwells, room and turret enfolding in nested surprise (this place could never be public in the west – it's too full of litigation potential!), i meet no one in my 4 hours
wandering this monstrous beauty. it was made for this – failure, dilapidation,
emptiness. monkeys and me are the only sign of mammalian life. the honks and
bands of bundi are silent, the sleepy omnipresent activity which hangs from every aperture like laundry tucked away, endless religion shuts up, the dead mughals are
almost likeable in their deadness.
structures are not built for their stated purposes but for what they
become after their purposes have left. in the first silence i’ve had since the
brief interludes i had in hawai’i i understand why things are built, this human
rabidity – for the invested humans to die, their memory to be lost, their
visions forgotten, their sufferings and killings made irrelevant, and something
to emerge from the uninhabited spaces that speaks of a vigorous purity, a
meditative integration directly unachievable by a species so committed to compartmentalization, mono-narrative, destruction.
a ruinous fort teaches me this, and why human society has become for me the
noise of a broken muffler collapsing down a mountainside.
in losing purpose, purpose is found.
