Ballagàrraidh: The Awareness That You Are Domesticated
The story of humanity is a move from the countryside to the big city. But it's happened so fast that a part of you still remembers Eden. That longs to leave your car idling in traffic, and flee into the wilderness. But there's another part of you knows that Eden is a fantasy, and you'll always be floating just above it; trailing clouds of civilization wherever you go.
ETYMOLOGY
From Gaelic balla gàrraidh, "garden wall."
PRONUNCIATION
For proper pronunciation: http://www.learngaelic.net/dictionary/?abairt=garden%20wall
THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS
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WHAT IS THAT MUSIC?
"HEART OF NATURE" BY DARYL NEIL ALEXANDER GRIFFITH
VIDEO CREDITS
Vimeo Creative Commons Attribution License:
Distress
by Samuel Grandchamp
https://vimeo.com/63207132
Vital Films - Close To Home
by Vital Films
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Robot Koch - Glassdrops (Official Music Video)
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ICELAND In the land of landscapes
by julienAMC
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ELENKA - Schmetterling (Music Video)
by Helgi Jóhannsson
https://vimeo.com/75504595
The Suburbs
by Yaël Bienenstock
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Kiwi Country
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The Thirst for Adventure
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SICMANTA PRESENTS Donnie Vincents The Rivers Divide Trailer
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Dark seeks dark.
by Hugo Martinez Toledo
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Reverie
by Daniella Golden
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The Pilgrims Litany
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Monster Rally - Honey
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TRANSCRIPT
Sometimes you move through the city and feel in your bones how strange and new this all is. The spectacle of modern civilization, just barely older than you are. With all its cramped logic, the artificial faces of asphalt and black glass; its rules and gridlines and rigid justifications for why the world must be the way it is. But there's a part of you that thinks: you are not at home here. That still remembers Eden, and longs to return.
Ballagàrraidh.
The story of humanity is a move from the countryside to the big city. But it's happened so fast our brains are still stuck in the hinterlands.
So now a part of you longs to leave your car idling in traffic, and flee into the wilderness. To live off the land, without tools or simulations, to experience nature in all its simplicity-raw, indifferent, and ferociously real. To feel the lushness and harshness of the wild, the clarity of eating and killing and growing stronger, the dumb luck of surviving the night.
But another part of you knows that Eden is a fantasy, and you'll always be floating just above it, trailing clouds of civilization wherever you go. Even our ancient symbols of nature are deeply unnatural. The plants we eat are sterile, swollen, unrecognizable to the food chain. Our domesticated animals are caricatures of their wild ancestors. The family dog is just another piece of technology, designed and bred to serve a purpose.
And you too are a domesticated animal, shrouded in synthetic fibers and synthetic thoughts. Even if you sleep in the woods with a stove and a backpack, everything from the buzzing in your ears to the howling in the distance will be trying to telling you, you are not at home here.
We need to believe in the fall from Eden. But all along, we were the ones who cast out the world. Who stripped it naked, taught it good and evil, and barricaded ourselves in a walled garden. We banished most of the world in order to get by. We couldn't handle the true state of nature-the overwhelming chaos-without first dividing it up in little boxes, in little frames, in little gardens.
Maybe we were wrong from the start. In the beginning, there was everything.
