In the morning, in the trains running underground, we sit as still as tools in a box. Most of us keep our eyes closed. Some yawn and stretch, preparing their lungs and muscles for another day. Others look into the screen of their smartphones, and turn into birds crashing into scaffolding, brightly coloured bricks stacking up in puzzles. I look at my fellow travellers, as if they were a landscape. Scientists tell us that we all belong to the same species, that we all are one thing. But around me I see foxes, rocks, rivers, trees. Our clothes are the same, our haircuts, our artificial smells. But to each other, we are as foreign as planets orbiting in the same galaxy. Yet, we are all here together. Ready to be employed, just outside the gates of the tube station. To become something else from what we are. Something bigger than ourselves, something ‘useful’. Citizens, workers, customers, spectators. When we will be out of here, in the dim daylight of Northern Europe, we will fit together within the frame of the mosaics of which we are fragments. We will have names, and our names will lock together into the bigger names of the machines of which we are parts. We will create companies, networks, Nations, markets. We will create everything, and will turn into nothing.
But not yet.
Down here, buried underground as if we were already dead, we are in fact yet unborn. We could be everything. Out there, the clothes we are wearing will denote our identities. In here, they are little more than the worn-out costumes of a group of theatre actors, asleep in their costumes at the end of a performance. We could be anything. We are everything. Mute to each other, without scope, without names, we contain all that escapes the grids of our social existence. If the infinite space of the Internet is filled with our chit-chat, with our lies and pretensions, the small space of this carriage contains nothing but our silent infinities.
On the tube, early in the morning, people look beautiful because they are hardly people at all. We are shells of flesh, filled with secrets. For a few, precious moments, we are asleep to our functions, to what is expected of us. On the tube, we can’t do anything but be. Not an easy task. Many of us try to escape it, thinking about the day approaching, leaking inside phones, or books, or newspapers. They flicker, moving in and out of the landscape.
The train stops; rocks, rivers, foxes and trees walk out, others come in. As they brush against each other, the dull politeness of their ‘sorry’ mantra spells out the categorical request for one moment more. One more minute in which simply to be, without having to justify one’s own existence. When I look at them, or at my reflection in the train door, I wonder if we could call our strange, temporary assemblage a community. Can we call ourselves a group at all? No more than a pile of books left on a table can call themselves a group, or a community. We are a library of stories, without a catalogue. A galaxy of corporeal matter.
What would happen if the train, instead of moving up, towards the surface, continued its journey down, further away from the daylight? What if we were to stay here, locked in this silence without end? Slowly, our stories would come to surface. Lost in the depth of a tunnel, endlessly unfolding underground, like astronauts travelling through the darkest corners of outer space, our flesh would begin to display its story. It wouldn’t be anything resembling the tiresome communication of those who live up above, on the surface. We wouldn’t be talking to each other, telling each other who we are, asking each other’s names. We would simply present ourselves as language, like colours that show themselves in the sun for their own sake, not for each other’s amusement or education. Soon, the batteries of the phones of those glued to their digital gaming would run out, the words of books or newspapers would turn into the dust of boredom. Even panic, or depression, would cease to have any room. We would find ourselves free of all human pressures, of all human demands. No statues around us, reminding us of the tyrannical mediocrity of societal expectations. No horizons to travel, until the whole of the Earth will have revealed itself as the inescapable repetition of the same. Simply, the depth of a lucid dream, in which the vastness of ourselves as unknowable objects and unreachable landscapes will expand to the point of melting together. Not into one however, as the prophets of community would like. Rather, like matter compressed within the infinite imagination of a black hole, deep inside the universal library of the first primitive particle, waiting for its big bang.
The train stops again. An electronic voice comes out of the speakers. She calls us customers. She tells us not to obstruct the doors. To mind the gap. To be considerate of others. Where does she live? Is she the companion of the driver, locked inside the little room at the head of the first carriage? Our only earthly guide through the maze of the underground, the driver probably suffers from the loneliness of all leaders. He has been told where to go, but not why. It was not an ideology, a ‘greater good’, or a magnificent prospect for the future to tell him where to drive the convoy. It was a map that did so, much louder than all the guests inside the compartments. Excluded by our nebula of bodies and stories, the driver lives in the company of ghosts. The ghostly presence of the map, stretched in front of him, and that of the gentle, irremovable electronic voice nestled inside the speakers. While the darkness of the tunnels and the brief blooming of light at each stop paint the driver’s journey in two colours, the ghosts fill his cabin with their incessant speaking. Unlike us, the driver is surrounded by orders, expectations, talking. It is not to us that the electronic voice talks. She talks to the body locked at the front of the train, bound by a Sisyphus-like quest of pushing the train through the artificial night. She keeps company with him or her, but the kind of company of relentless obsessions in the head of a person with OCD. She, the map and the driver are together. Together they make the train function as expected, together they regulate the doors and the flow of flesh and stories in and out of the carriages. They are a community, bound by language and commands, by ‘ought to’ and ‘ought not to’.
If the train was to sink deeper in the ground, never to surface again, I imagine the driver would struggle for just a few seconds with his or her spectral company. It would not take him or her too long, before smashing the speakers and tearing the maps into pieces. Would the driver come out of the front room, and join us in the carriages? Or would he or she remain alone, like a solitary planet at the edges of a travelling universe?
The train stops. It is my stop. I ought to come back to myself. What is my name? I ought to come back to my functions. Who am I supposed to act like?
I walk out of the doors, slowly. I whisper ‘sorry’ to somebody walking in, as if saying the last farewell to the silent constellation I am leaving behind. I am coming back to the surface, back to belonging, to which I don’t wish to belong. The theatre doors open again, the curtains are up. As I walk out of the train, onto the platform and up the stairs, my thoughts drift back to the carriage, the changing room where actors are still nothing but shells of flesh; where we are still all of the stories that we could possibly be and we exist side by side, without having to swear together on the same flag.
Soon, when the sun withdraws from the spectacle on the surface, I will be back here. Travelling back, from work to home, from home to work, I will again be a part of this endless reflection of parts, in this space that knows no unity. I will sink again into the game of mirrors of the underground, where the fragments are the world and the world is nothing but a fragment. Where our names don’t exist and existence is all there is.
Soon.
