This Place is a Message

10,000 years ago we were, well, pretty primitive. Definitely prehistoric. Some would say we still are - especially if we have to resort to this particularly dangerous and ultimately very costly form of energy. So, assuming a non-continuous culture - which is a fairly safe assumption for anyone who has read History - how shall we warn our descendants - or the lucky descendants of the next species to inherit the earth - that the stuff we've buried is better off left in the ground?

THE ANSWER:

Here is the mysteriously poetic answer for a WIPP low level storage facility in New Mexico, which needs to be kept out of human - or other - hands for 10,000 years. It is meant to be posted on a great, granite rock protected by a surrounding wall of concrete, inside of a gigantic earth berm. Two more, higher levels of warning would follow – all in one of 7 existing languages - none in Esperanto, I'm afraid, although it would be a much better choice, assuming some knowledge of the current alphabet. (You can learn Esperanto in 3 weeks, or 30 years for members of the Bush administration.) One of the interesting things about this message is that it seems to be directed towards a civilization that has been, as they say, 'bombed back to the stone age.' It reads like a kind of verbose, oxymoronic haiku somehow. Poignant, evocative, yet never ham-handedly obvious. Or even clear. It may have been the work of some follower of Leo Strauss, who thought important truths should be made as indecipherable as possible. And after all, this is the Neoconservative Age, so it would be fitting to honor its founder in some way - and what better way than by means of 10,000 years of deadly waste? It is as if the author considered it his or her job not to spell stuff out plainly, but to hint at some profound reality:

This place is not a place of honor.

editor's comment: It is a place without honor, then? I am surprised they'd admit it.

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Quite right! The history of our dealings in nuclear power of all sorts is marked by evil consequences - and too often - by evil deeds.

Nothing valued is here.

Valued!!? No - greatly feared and with very good reasons. This is a deadly poison. And not only for those who might dig it up, but for their children. . . . . and their children. And the animals and vegetables you depend upon for food.This is terrible stuff, and it isn't even the worst stuff we have - some of it will be killer for 250,000 years. For all the trouble we've gone to to mark its location, and protect it from time and the elements, however, you might be forgiven if you thought something of value WAS buried here. It's a conundrum.

This place is a message and part of a system of messages.

Say WHAT??!! That doesn't even make sense in our own time to a native speaker of English!
Please don't ask me to explain what 'English' is - please?

Pay attention to it!

Ummmmm...........pay attention to what exactly? It's not as if the 'message' is coherent!

Sending this message was important to us.

Though not important enough to actually say something.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

(Note the past tense and the modifications: 'we considered ourselves. . .') Yet we had nothing better to do with our most deadly by-products than to leave them for you. . . . . whoever you are. And we kept on making them, even though we hadn't the foggiest idea what to do with them.
So we were powerful, but unutterably dumb.

Harry Shearer, perhaps my favorite 'pundit,' though he might not care for the designation, thought the last line sounded like an epitaph.

But do you notice the glaring omission? It never says DON'T DIG HERE! – the one, essential thing.

Also, suppose you had no knowledge of English or of the Greco/Roman/Cyrillic alphabet(s)? Suppose the sense of that enigmatic symbol for "radiation" (in itself a euphemism) had been lost long ago?

Why, do you suppose, the 'message' is so obscure, so circuitous, so indirect and vague, reeking of ennui and malaise, when it seems that conveying it is SO very very important? Do our futurists think that we can only communicate with the future in the most enigmatic way?

I don't think so.

I think the need to leave a warning for future generations was tempered by Present Politics. To say outright, 'This place is filled with deadly poison. If you dig here you may die a horrible death, or get cancer and damage your genes so your children will look even stranger than you probably do" would alarm our present populace and alert them, remind them, inform them, about the deadly nature of the substances that are being buried all over the damn place. Like slow-acting landmines, laid for our posterity.


Ooooh - is that an ANGEL carved on that
lovely rock? Maybe it's a solar symbol, like the Celtic cross.
Pretty, huh? Perhaps some beautiful gift is buried here........

Note, though, that a DATE is given: 12,000 AD. Given the patronizing tone of the 'place that is a message' which seems to be a message written by Dr. Seuss's Evil Twin, why do the authors think that 12,000 AD will have meaning for them? Enough. It is just another enigma.


This was one designer's idea of the way
the site should look - but it lost out to the cheaper
earth-berm-granite-and-concrete number.
Too bad. I kind of like the sculpture garden
the designer had going on there - and it was quite forbidding.


Here is a less ambiguous message left for us by
OUR ancestors. Of course, they had nothing all that dangerous to send
into the future, whereas we have
unexploded ordinance, mines, darling little cluster 'bomblets'
- and tons and tons of deadly substances that we
obviously don't have a clue as to what to do with.

So what were they saying to us? That life is good
and that the abundance of the earth is ours to share.
If we don't destroy it altogether.
But maybe they hadn't imagined such a scenario yet.

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