Mysterious monoliths and a klap from the collective unconscious

Of the many strange manifestations during the recent pandemic, the monoliths may have been the most peculiar. The first one was discovered in the of Utah sometime in November of the first year of the plague. It was, you may recall, a three-sided metal object more than 3m tall, reflecting the ancient rock formations — and the mystified shepherds who came upon it —  back to themselves in its perfectly shiny, eerily smooth surface. They were there to count the bighorn sheep that roam wild in Red Rock Country. They spotted the unidentified object from their helicopter.

In the years since, there have been many more sightings of these monoliths, from Romania to the Isle of Wight, Colombia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Norway, Finland and Ukraine — along with handy guides for their construction, in case you're suddenly struck by the need to make your own and erect it in a desert near you.

In March, one popped up in Wales on a remote hill near Hay Bluff. It seemed to be made of surgical steel. Another sprouted in a potato field in East Flanders in June. The most recent one popped up in the desert 30km outside Las Vegas, where you'd normally expect to come upon a mobile crystal meth lab, not a monolith.  

For a time it seemed that the monoliths in their mystery — who made them, where did they come from, how did they get there and who was taking them away again — were channelling some message essential for our times. They seemed like glistening symbols for this strange epoch we're living through — triangulating the vast, wild space into which they're inserted into some kind of meaningful statement. But what? Each monolith is complete, finite and utterly impermeable, mutely but seductively reflecting the landscapes around them. They also seem alive, humming and vibrating at an unknown frequency, in harmony with the natural world. Entirely mysterious, like alien forms, but emerging from the depths of our consciousness like a dream we've had before. 

They make me think of the Kekulé problem. Friedrich August Kekulé was a German chemist trying to understand the structure of benzene. He wanted to figure out the arrangement of the carbon and hydrogen atoms that make up benzene, which didn't follow the typical structures known to chemists of the time. Kekulé slept on his problem, or maybe just took a nap and there, coiled in his dreams was an ouroboros; a snake eating its own tail. He awoke to the realisation that his subconscious had supplied the answer his conscious mind had been struggling with: the benzene ring - six carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon. 

Cormac McCarthy, the recently deceased novelist, wrote: “The problem of course (not Kekulé’s but ours) is that, since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it wouldn't understand the problem in the first place, why doesn't it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: 'Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring!' To which our scientist might respond: 'OK. Got it. Thanks.' Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter?” McCarthy concludes very elegantly (and I'd recommend a reading of his entire argument) that it's because the unconscious, which is the operating system of human machines, is older than language and therefore uses what it can and must to make itself known to the human mind. The unconscious has to hit us over the head, sometimes repeatedly, before we catch its drift!

Which brings me back to the monolith. A monolith is a large, upright block of stone. Google monolith and you get Stonehenge. And what is Stonehenge other than a big circle of stones whose meaning has been lost to us? We look at the concentric monoliths set up in that field in the middle of nowhere and feel a strange susurration as if we're about to receive a message from the ether. These monoliths were erected  by people, like us, but also unlike us. We can't know what they were thinking, what mysteries compelled them to erect these stones, all we know is that in that bleak moor the stones have outlasted them by millennia. All that remains is the impulse to erect them. And the impulse to paint them orange in some kind of protest to stop oil! Desecrating the monolith as an act of rebellion.

In a way, setting up the later monoliths is also an act of rebellion - but a subconscious one. We may be vulnerable to germs, unseen threats and mostly to our own very great folly, but when you stumble upon the monoliths you get a big fat bitchslap from the collective unconscious, reminding us that once there was a generation of humans who set up these monoliths in the farthest, deepest most secret sanctuaries and left them there so that if, by chance, you happened upon one,  you'd see yourself reflected in the vast unknowable universe and pause to wonder at the sheer chance and brilliance of the encounter.