He-she. You-Me. Of course I would not be so cruel as to take you all the way back, there is a great deal to be presumed and which I am sure you have considered. History, in any summing up, is infinite, theories only model upon what we can observe, and our observations are limited by our senses. So - there is much I will ignore. But look down and consider our history. What lies underfoot. Our history.
The city; any great city, is built and rebuilt upon countless predecessors.
The first few feet: cigarette butts, broken needles, plastic bags, aluminum cans, paper, cloth masks, filth, deeper into the broken china, clay pipes, the possibility of a lost coin or pocket watch. Dig deeper.
Underfoot. We stand blithely unaware upon the great abyss of history, treading it down, it lies, by and large, sealed from us beneath layers of cobbles, concrete, pavement, asphalt. Where it pokes up it's fingers, where we've thought to preserve it in such and such notable castle or cathedral or house, these are but the slenderest fractions of our history, splinters being eroded even as we consider them.
The asphalt, the concrete, the pavement and the cobbles, they protect, insulate us from this great collective unconscious.
Consider the dead. We trample their skeletons, they outnumber us a thousand to one - more, simply, the innumerable dead, they are legion, skeletons lying in cold graves, ashes scattered from pyres on the banks of the Ganges, flesh picked clean and gathered by vultures and rained in excrement across far Mountain Peaks, the crushed and pecked bones of American Indians fallen from trees, gnawed and chewed into soil, Pirates run through with cutlasses and left buried upon rotting chests, the evaporated outlines of countless drowned sailors adorn the bottoms of every ocean, Catacombs with their screaming dead, Egyptian Mummies dug from warrens of tombs, so numerous they powered steam trains, their cremains turned into soot and ground into pigment, a fine layer of progress and ash that blankets the Country, ancient Roman and Egyptian Sarcophagi, Chinese Emperors in subterranean cities guarded by terracotta soldiers and surrounded by mercury rivers, dig anywhere and you will find them. Dig, dig, through wells run dry and filled in with rubbish, crushed bottles and crockery, ancient lead pipes filled with poisoned water, through forgotten tunnels and underground temples, through abandoned mines, veins of gold, silver, lead, pickaxes and shovels left behind, through layers of knapped flint and arrowheads, past the bones of Sabre-Toothed tigers, Ice age rhinos and Giant Sloths and Wooly Mammoths, bones crushed to suck out the marrow. Dig into caves sealed by the ages filled with drawings of man; animals, hunts, symbols, that flicker to life by the light of your burning torch, The 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown of fingers in handprints blown onto the walls, the exhale of breath breathing life into the images, the pecked paintings of buffalo and bison and great mammoths, the beginnings of symbolic thought. Neolithic, this, the very dawn of Magik, understanding - now - intuitive - that Will and Intention become reality - or is this still just memory? Merely the recording of a successful hunt? It's impossible to say.
It's not impossible at all.
We will dig again later. Together.
It's necessary, this underground, it's our foundation.