I truly can’t abide this incremental urge to interfere with our ancestors’ graves – as the ultimate act of disrespect. They lie it’s not so; we treat these bones with deep veneration – but those scuttling scavengers couldn’t give a fig for any psyche or soul as assigned to the skeletons at which they scratch and scrape. Another example of our mercenary, middleclass, modernist mindset; It’s only material, past it’s mortal use; one day we’ll all be atomised anyway – or at least the bits they can’t reclaim and ready recycle.
  Collecting rubbish from dead men’s lives. Repossessing their lavatory leavings. What to do with the sifted, sorted, idle evidence? Maybe make off-beat musical instruments from the brought-up bones? Tom tom-skulls and kneecap-castanets, a femur oboe, rib-xylophone… could furnish an art house symphony orchestra.
  For what hypothesis? That this piece of crockery in this place confirms my specious speculations – as a random seed removes a million years, while that corncob doll brings us bully back again. These consequential half-arsed homilies do us no good by degrading the Ancients; diminishing History, undermining its appeal – for we elderly people, who know how much it counts.
  The reason they commandeer consecrated graves is because they contain personal possessions of the people interred – formally positioned, to remain undisturbed; anointed, immaculate; armed for any afterlife – as hallowed grounds were deemed sacrosanct to generations since. But not by these rampant recent fuckers – get in with the diggers, crawlers, excavators, front-loading double-bladed backhoed bulldozers – rip it all up. What’s in it for me?

   The vanities of our colonial powers. Mighty museums full of pluck and plunder from Africa, Asia, India, China – all of them at it like graverobbers’ dogs. Victorian adventurers smuggling out barrels of boosted booty to establish a thriving artifactual industry in cosy, curated, Kensington courts. Brought craning queues out curious ogling elephants, orangutans, coffins, corals, urns and idols, in relief or round… Yet it’s hard to be outraged by those peer-pressured, grubby, grabby opportunists have provided distraction from our mundane urban lives for 200 years with eyeball access to far-flung, forgotten, primitive pasts. And one has to wonder if cutting-edge cubism would actually have happened without the Trocadero Dogon masks?
  As boys’ own heroes in chapbook comics over-stimulated an entire generation of prospector punks – looking for adventure, whatever came their way. Stoked and steamed by Fleet Street fantasists drumming up sagas of pirates, Zulus, cowboys, cannibals, slavers and spies.
  And their zoos are great. With due dilemma? On the rights of any creature that has no understanding of a conscious SELF – is pointless ponder sensibly left to stoner teenagers. Is it best to place animals in city centred cages or organise tours to their habitat homes? Why not send a team of cine-sharp-shooters into each unknown recording precious data then broadcast back to every front room with wide-screen sensurround ultra-HD?
  Immanuel Kant defined ‘sublimity’ as: Nature’s Might. For the winsome way we stand transfixed by a sudden snowstorm, sunrise, waterfall, misty mountain range. To recall occasions when I sat stock set at a surging seaside and watched those waves come crazy crashing, reaching for me… metronomic, beating, brutal… time stands still… for a bloodless bit…
  The present paradox: how to bead balance our obtaining information on organisms living in unpopulated lands with any damage wrought on their usually unique, exclusive environment – even with pure, unimpeachable intentions?

  So, should we leave parts of the world untouched? Just stay away? While our nerdish edgy arsey academics have to push in, like magpies, rats or cats or cockroaches; looting, rooting, ravishing; slash and burn. Sod the local natives, let’s get this PROGRESS on the road.
  Might be best they hurry on up. Fuck it all completely – then disappear – off to Mars with that billionaire bastard and his cunting car. Leave Mother Nature to rest in peace.