Numbers, Disappearing Towards Infinity
25 years from now, in 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities.1 As recently as 125 years ago, in 1900, that figure of the global urban population was as low as 16 percent of what was then the total number of people (1.6 billion) on Earth.2 That is a reckoning spanning roughly six generations in historical time. Eventually, the planet might just as well be one big city, with an outlying suburb, and concentric plantations.
The total urban population will have multiplied approximately 26.5 times (from 256 million to 6.79 billion) in the 150-year span between 1900 and 2050. To put things in perspective, it’s worth considering that the world’s total population increased by just 1.325 billion (from around 275 million to 1.6 billion) in the 900 years that it took to transition from the early medieval period (1000 CE) to the beginning of the twentieth century (1900 CE).3
In just the last 150 years, the world’s population has grown a little more than 6 times what it did in the previous 900 years.
How heavy a dent does that make in time?
Numbers add up to more than just what counting them means. Quantities transform into qualities. We are not just more people squeezed into space, traveling through time. We are a different kind of people. Space feels different, as does time.
Escaping the Sinkhole
Sinkholes are metaphorical expressions of a world made too heavy by our currently preferred form of inhabitation.4
How to achieve and retain a kind of equilibrium while thinking through a world made permeable by sinkholes and other forms of collapse?
Trying to answer this question within the bounds of historical time may be next to impossible. This may be the reason why a section of global elites seems so eager to opt for one of two possible escape routes: either to leave the space-time coordinates of the planet and find another home in the stars, say in Mars,5 or to cheat death and achieve immortality (or increase longevity to a hitherto unprecedented level) so as to escape the vortex of the present and immediate future.6
The first is the ambition for a spatial form of escape from crisis, while the other is the desire to defer attempts to redress it to the unforeseeable future, to let “time” (or more accurately, “another time”) be the arbiter of what needs doing.
It is interesting to note that both of these impulses stem from Silicon Valley, where an overwhelming ambition to leapfrog the messy state of the world using tech has had a long history. As if machines could solve the problems that humans have created, by themselves, with a little help from the universal tendency towards entropy.
Unlike wannabe-Martian captains of industry, for most of us, the vast majority of the soon-to-be 9.7 billion people, neither space nor time is an option to escape into. There is no Planet B, or Time X, available. We are here and it is now, or never, forever.
It is at moments like this that we feel the need for a greater amplitude of the imagination. We could begin by asking whether or not we can, at least momentarily, sidestep history.
Numbers, Disappearing Towards Zero
For most of our existence as a species, we humans have lived outside of history. History is co-incident with the rise of written records. The beginning of recording incidents in the form of documents and chronicles annotates the rise of the first states and the earliest bureaucracies. That is also the beginning of surpluses and soldiers and cities, datable to the fourth millennium BCE, roughly 6,000 years ago. Our sentiences, on the other hand, have inhabited these human bodies for roughly 300,000 years.7
294,000 years within this span therefore lie outside history. From an evolutionary perspective, those 294,000 years have had a greater role to play in the formation of human consciousness than the processes unraveled in the 6,000 odd years of historical time.8 If human existence was divided into fifty temporal steps, then forty-nine of those steps would lie outside history.
For most of history, and for all of what stands outside history, our hold on the planet has been precarious, our settlements and cities, fragile. This precarity stands at the base of our psychic evolution; it underwrites our fears, our anxieties, and our joy. Our myths, our archetypes, the engines of our dreams and hallucinations, our fear and fascination around fire, are all formed in the post-volcanic spike of the Toba volcano, which was so big that we almost didn’t make it.9
Perhaps the art that we make, the stories that we still tell, form part of the mechanisms that help us cope with the ever-present possibility of sudden extinction. That possibility is hard-coded within our consciousness. And yet we wake up every morning, make coffee, make art, make tea.
Every time we hold a teapot to make tea, we choose not to be paralyzed by its delicacy and fragility. The attitudes that some seem to be intent on cultivating stem from the paradigm of the delicate teapot: a fear of wrecking things that we hold or come into contact with. This represents our fear of authoring our own extinction.
Our presence, and our actions involve risks, to our surroundings, and to ourselves. It is wise to be aware of these risks, but when anxiety about wrecking things overtakes the possibility of making things, then we find ourselves, not beset by necessary caution, but by egregious paranoia. If we let this happen, we become held hostage to the thought of a reality even before it has had a chance to unfold. This is what happens when a latent image hovers over the manifest in its unfolding, an ever-present instance of threshold tension. How, then, do you touch something, anything, when you’re so afraid of the consequences of contact?
This is when we summon the figure of three-legged time to project their un-filtered, muttering, thought stream onto our consciousness. They have an entourage, including the self-decapitating Hindu icon of goddess Chhinnamasta (Sundered-Head) whose smiling, severed visage counters any anxiety of self-extinction.10 This entourage has attendants and accomplices that follow three-legged time in a procession in which the normal breaks down and makes room for the extraordinary and the ordinarily miraculous, so that all manner of things, known and unknown, can leak in. We can now be infra-human and extra-human and we can reconcile the intimate, the inanimate, and the uncanny.
This is how human beings live with a finger inside history, and most of the anatomy of their dreams, outside, in non-historical time.
We require plenty of imaginative social and cultural problem solving, some hard science, and a lot of engineering to solve the questions of energy, food, sickness, and the equitable distribution of resources amongst nine billion people. But our psychic bedrock needs all the resources of figures and dreams from outside history, from deep time. How can we even begin to talk about things we do not have language for? How must we unfurl our tongues?
Tongue and Triskelion
The ambition to grow (the ongoing increase in the weight of urban infrastructure), the intention to live well (the question of the depth of the quality of urban life), and the sense of purpose that comes from identifying and homing in on an Archimedean point (in a notional outside) from which this ambition and intention becomes equally visible and accessible is a kind of impossible-to-achieve trifecta. Alternatively, it could be a provocation for a different imagination.
Ordinarily, we would say that when choice is at hand, you can have either ambition to grow or intention for a better quality of life, no matter what purpose you identify, but you can’t have both. Either ambition must be mitigated or intention must be cast aside—and purpose will have to be found while navigating this quandary. No homeostasis can be arrived at within these limits. We could consider this a cybernetic fault line: a failure of the feedback loop to insist on a correction that cancels out the effects of an overwhelming ambition to grow by asserting the intention for a better quality of life. But perhaps we need to replace this failing equation with a more robust image: a different argument for inhabiting time and space.
We propose an image called We Own Our Tongue (2024). When you look at it, it looks like a hand holding an image which features a three-legged entity, a triskelion, bearing a face that bites its own tongue while running on furrowed ground. It is an image of the “holding” of a three-legged multitude in motion. We have always known that the number three, one more than the binary dyad of one and two, is the beginning of the many. Let us assume that it also embodies a way of looking at time, with one leg planted on the present, another on the past, and the third on the future. Running with these three legs in motion is a kind of staying still, while still whirling. It is a contemplative kinesis through time because the motion of the steps into the past and into the future are always counter-weighted by standing, while running, on the present. It is an image of the (forever) inescapability of the present. The matter of a bitten tongue, however, presents a narrative complication. Three-legged time bites its tongue, and so, cannot tell the time it is standing on. Perhaps this is a form of liberation from historic time.
If time were to have an “asynchronous” image, this would be it. From here, one could access the past (a step away) or the future (another step away), while balancing on the monopod of the present. And because language would be stripped of tense, strictly speaking, one would not be able to speak, at least not in a grammar that takes time into account. We could be everywhen, and nowhen, at once, and holding our tongue while we are at it. Holding on to the secret, the ineffable, the unspeakable.
The tongue attempts to form language anew. It measures the unspoken with the untasted on the ground of the untested. Listening deeply to this stammering silence is listening in every possible way to everything possible. The tongue twists, too, to listen. The possibility of utterance comes from listening to more than one reality at the same time.
When the tongue twists, it unfurls. It is sinuous, serpentine, articulate. It entangles sometimes, stumbling on its length—the uncoiling of historical time, of time itself. The world, like the tongue, must unknot, must gasp at its own audacity.
Bite your tongue and be surprised by what you can utter because you saw it in a dream. We cannot know if this dream-terrain maps onto the past, the present, or the future, or some other way of thinking about time besides the arrow of time.
Who else bites their tongue, with feet suspended? The icon of the goddess Kali, who is worshipped naked, wearing a garland of severed heads that double as characters of the alphabet and the basis of language. She is night, death, the end of time, and a nurturing mother, all at once. She steps on her consort, the god Shiva, father of time, and so freezes in her tracks, stopping time, biting her own tongue—partly, we could say, out of shame, and partly, we could surmise, out of her sense of her own audacity. Her image is considered to be terrifying, powerful, but to some, also oddly comforting. As if the goddess of the end of time were also the benign, generous spirit of the moment. Because time, under her watch, ends at every moment, and then begins anew again, under the shadow of her loosened tongue.
If you concede that every moment is (or can be) the end of time, you can access a different attitude to the wreckage of that moment, one in which you can touch the wreckage and be within it without being immobilized by the idea that the wreckage is entirely your responsibility. Then the anxiety about the imminent violence of even a momentary touch that can trigger an avalanche is possible to hold at bay. To retain control is thus akin to losing control, supervision is subversion. You can control movements in history, maybe, but can you control tectonic shifts, the drift of continents and the flow of lava under the sea? Can you control a sinkhole biding its time under a thickening city?
Recognizing this means understanding that “control” and “lack of control” are two aspects of the same reality. That one is haunted by the other, and that the “wreckage” is haunted as well. This gives us a kind of “night vision,” an ability to see “phantom presences” (figures that fall outside the normally visible spectrum) in the darkness of our collective consciousness. Here, the human, the non-human, the ex-human, and the extra-human can all manifest themselves in forms that cannot be contained.11 They emerge like fountains, like eruptions from below some crust, as if they were being released from a core where the question of singular selfhood, or being, were suspended.
Old rocks, old, tall trees, a rich canopy, and ghosts of old, buried flora haunting the world as coal, sometimes breaking out in fire that’s been burning for decades, for lifetimes, underground at the edge of a mining town at the edge of the lost continent of Gondwanaland that has been adrift for fifty million years.
Going into a forest here is like going into your dreams. Sometimes the way ahead is obscured by the undergrowth, and the creepers, and the entanglement of everything with everything else. In this density, it is possible to become more than whatever you are—a beast, a god, a forest sprite, an emanation.
Worlds have collided before. They are still colliding.
The earth’s stories are shadows in an ashen landscape, lining up to form a chaotic assembly. Mountain tops were sea beds, and time’s arrow evaporates in the light of the moon. Solar storms pummel us every once too often, and it feels like the poles have shifted, again.
There is magnetic force to a gathering, a procession, a horde, a hoard of ways of being. They crowd, disperse, and condense again like a school of alarmed amphibians, unsure of which way to proceed, on the threshold of fantasies, speculations, hypotheses, and the shoreline of reality, shimmering and glowing. This crowd has no leader, only a nucleus in the figure of three-legged time. There is no hierarchy in the cavalcade. There is joy, rage, wonder, puzzlement. There is intelligence. A different kind of intelligence—one that allows us to think about modes of thinking and being that have been eclipsed by the calculus of capitalist rationality, or that have not yet been adequately considered, ever.
Wake, the delirium is waning. Walk, there is work to be done.
“Urban Development,” World Bank, ➝.
“Urbanization,” Our World in Data, ➝.
“Urbanization,” ➝.
“Why Are We Seeing More Sinkholes Across the Globe,” Insite, May 17, 2021, ➝.
Isobel Cockerell, “Silicon Valley’s sci-fi dreams of Colonizing Mars,” Coda Story, July 3, 2024, ➝.
Tad Friend, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2017, ➝.
Brian Handwerk, “An Evolutionary Timeline of Homo Sapiens,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2, 2021, ➝.
The emergence of written records around 4000 BCE in Uruk (in present day Iraq) is attested to in William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson’s The Ancient Near East: A History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1971), 25.
For more on the Toba supervolcanic eruption see: Alan Machado, Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2024), 1, 5–10; and Sam Kean, The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 217–20.
For more on Chhinnamasta, see: Elizabeth Anne Benard, Chinnamasta: The Aweful Buddhist and Hindu Tantric Goddess (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publications, 2000).
The manifestation of uncontainable forms (humans, non-humans, ex-humans and extra-humans) is explored against the context of the geological residues of the lost continent of Gondwanaland in our video, The Cavalcade (2025).
