Beneath the Burj Khalifa (Copy)
An multi-form essay by Kushim Magani
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Think of the reading process as travelling down a chasm. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom, but completely at your own speed. The track you will hear is a ritual that doesn’t have a traditional beginning or end, but instead progresses depending on which step you are in the chasm. For the intended experience, please wear comfortable headphones as you play the stereo version of the track, however a mono version is available if the stereo version is too overwhelming.
It was mystifying.
I was walking on an urban beach and the sand I had been stepping on had abruptly smoothened. From a grainy, rough surface, I was suddenly on one so soft and velvety I felt I could sink right down into it. It was such an unnatural transition that it unsettled me to the core instead of comforting me. The feeling was akin to encountering a creepy, toothy AI smile, distended sixth fingers springing from its lips, its physique encased in an overly attractive elastic form that fits your algorithm much too well, in a space you imagine you would be spared from such feelings.
I rarely go to the beach. I don’t really like sand: it’s coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere. After you leave, it still follows you into your vehicle, into your house, and even onto your bed. As such, my daily life is quite removed from it. So I had no idea if the changing texture of the sand was a natural phenomenon, an odd outlier, or perhaps even something supernatural. Within me I knew that such an unnatural feeling could only stem from a man-made creation—a representation of the sand that we are accustomed to find on the beach.
And the change was … like a neoliberal terraforming of the ground below us, a slightly altered state that had been built literally from the ground up for a mildly more luxurious beach experience. A remastering of existing materials rather than a total remix.
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Later on I found out that the sand I had stepped on is taken from the Arabian Desert via the United Arab Emirates—a smoother and healthier strain of sand. Placed on the ground for happy beach-goers in ‘Australia’ to ensure maximum comfort and 100% fun for the whole family, away from the mild discomfort that the grittier ‘Australian’ beach sand provides.
Meanwhile the Emiratis themselves import Australia’s rougher sand for their own terraforming projects, transforming an ever-shifting desert into a sea of skyscrapers for their luxurious real-estate empire. The tallest ziggurat in human existence, the twenty-seven stepbacks of ye’ mighty Burj Khalifa, lies on a foundation of sand taken from ‘Australia’, where every step higher atop the tower, you get closer to the trillionaire sheikh-emperors communicating to the gods.
(A question: should Emiratis do an Acknowledgement of Country atop the Burj Khalifa? They literally are on Indigenous land...)
It’s an exchange of earth that acts like a relay, as the nineteenth century passes its baton on to the twenty-first, from one rapidly-urbanised realm to another, rapidly urbanising. Reality changes in the blink of an eye; the otherworld is transformed as the nearby gold extracted from the ground that funds it all transforms from gold to black.
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These changes aren’t new at all. Mankind has always manipulated nature to produce new and ‘better’ realities; it is the story of humanity over the last 20,000 years.
Sand.
Mud.
Rock.
All of the dirty ground below our feet have been cleaned up into soil, glass and clay.
We dug wells, planted seeds, and even led other animals to join us in our domestication.
And built ziggurats so that the priests could ascend to the Gods.
Every step we ascended was a disputation and death bed dilemma … we’ve changed so much yet we haven’t changed at all. Shamans have asked if we were meant to forage, hunt and scavenge the gifts within accordance to the Land the gods built before us? The ziggurat’s base is the ground that we stay on. Or are the gifts tools that the gods provided for us to take the role of creator, in order to build steps that form the ziggurat, to be that much closer to the gods? A borrowed sense of divine creation—defying the powers that be and giving rise to what we now call the artificial.
As time passed, the Land grew around itself, our memories grew accustomed to the state of the Land, and by the time newer generations arrived, they had already knew nothing else, becoming ingrained into their perception of reality. They may have heard of prior realities, just as we have from those before us, but they never lived it and probably never will.
The earth grows over the crumbling ziggurat and becomes one with nature.
Jakarta will sink into the sea and become one with nature.
And the Burj Khalifa will be swallowed back into the abyss, covered in sea and sand, and become one with nature.
Our current natures are so inextricably tied to the way we have manipulated nature, to what purpose the dirt underneath our shoes serve us. Perhaps in future generations our feet will become so delicate that they can only step atop a beach covered with the velvety sand of the Arabian Desert, just as we cannot imagine a reality without lactose-free yoghurt, seedless oranges and odourless fish oil.
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In his book From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (1947), sociologist Fei Xiaotong examined the relationship with agriculture as a means for finding a pattern to standardise the Chinese people as an entire community within the State. He observed Chinese peasants who had been weeded from the soil of the small farms that had previously dominated imperial China, as they moved to hyper-urbanised concrete forest, they could not sever themselves from their relation to the soil. They still managed to find ways to grow vegetables on tiny balconies, even if that meant they grew small amounts that wasn’t sufficient towards realistically sustaining themselves—it was so rooted within their natures that they had to, just as reflex forces you gasp for air as you hold your breath.
Fei himself could not extricate himself from this soil. When he left for England for graduate studies, his mother gave him a red paper envelope; but instead of cash, it was filled with dirt from the bottom of their kitchen bed-stove. For no matter how far away, how unfamiliar and lost one is from their local dirt, sand and soil—your dirt that warmed you up at night, the local dirt that fed you every day ... your dirt can be of comfort anywhere in the world, no matter how strange and foreign the surrounding dirt is.
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Naturally, the State, the current pretend conveyors of divintity, has used soil to solidfy an otherwise fickle existence to be as intrinsic to humanity as the ground is to our feet. The Artaman League, the agrarian nationalist precursors to the Nazis, coined the phrase ‘Blut und Boden’ (Blood and Soil) as a banner of mystically welding the Nordic people to the soil through a projection of the state. One of the ideology’s most avid advocates, Richard Walter Darré, had established that the Germanic people were superior because they quite literally had a superior connection to the soil—this was how the ideology maintained itself amid eugenicist practices around inheritance for the Germanic race to be cast as the most desirable race.
From here, a racial hierarchy was compromised by the quality of the soil and the people’s relationship to it: in Darré’s view, the savages of Eastern Europe had only prospered because of Germanic migrants who had terraformed the region, covering the local soil with superior Germanic agricultural practices and techniques. Darré believed that the Germanic people should not waste their time with the inferior soil of Cameroon and Namibia.
“Arise from thy ground, from thy slumber, work what is wise,
Fashion new realms for the Gods, may they produce their bread!”
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The reality is that, beyond any State we have all emerged from the dirt beneath our feet in different ways, and are one with it rather than above it.
A common creation myth known across the world involves a god crafting mankind from the earth. We are taken from the ground, mixed with water, moulded into shape. There is even debate between the gods about our existence. We are unnatural, filthy servants of the gods—little more than blood inserted into soil.
The first recorded creation myths come from ancient Mesopotamia, just across the water from where the Burj Khalifa stands today. These were etched onto clay tablets with the very first scripts, the soil literally fostered onto the writing system, the clay being as vital to it, as our own clay human skin is to us.
Among these is the Enūma Eliš Babylonian creation myth. It describes man’s creation from clay from over the abyss. The gods complain of the difficulties in acquiring their bread, while Enki, the god of wisdom, lies asleep in the deep and fails to hear their pleas. His mother, the ancient sea, bring the tears of the gods before Enki.
And he calls back:
“Oh my mother, whose name thou has uttered, it exists,
Bind upon it the will of the Gods”
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The allure around clay lies in its nature as malleable soil, a medium that can be shaped by human hands to meet countless needs. We fashioned clay pots to store our grain, preserving sustenance for the future. We crafted clay tablets to record the first writings, capturing knowledge and stories for generations to come. Through clay, we have transformed the rawness of nature into abstractions of perfect geometry, creating forms that serve practical purposes and embody human ingenuity. A means of saving us from the terrifying chasm of emptiness.
“Mix the heart of clay that is over the Abyss,
The good and princely fashioners will thicken the clay”
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Are our realities just as malleable as the soil? Is history just a sandpit? A plot of hypocrisies, inconsistencies and misinterpretations: tiny minerals which we can use to build our own sandcastles, knock our neighbours’ down, forge our own stories? We witness other identities as rigidly as our own realities at this specific, frozen place in time. But it would all change so easily, and will continue to change—just as we have from the soil at our feet. And when the tide comes in, washing it all away, will we rebuild the same castle—or something entirely new? Perhaps the sand remembers our movements better than we do.
“Do thou bring the limbs into existence;
Ninmah will work above thee
Nintu will stand by thy fashioning;”
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Where is the breaking point?
Do we become too close to the gods when we stand atop the 163-storey Burj Khalifa?
Have we now manipulated nature to such an extent now that when the locusts fight back they will consume us all?
Or will the chasm of the abyss swallow us all when we are atop the next emerging monstrosity in Jeddah? They say it will be at least 200 steps.
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“Oh my mother, decree thou its the new born's fate.”
The kids make their sandcastles and draw lines in the sand before the storm comes in to swallow it all.
Spirit moves through all things.
Spirit ascends,
Spirit moves through all things.
Spirit descends,
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Why was walking on that beach so mystifying? The beach is one of the few places outside the polished floors of my home that I dare take off my shoes and feel the ground properly. I had always assumed that urban beaches were a tiny corner of untouched nature, left for recreational purposes in a sort of conciliatory way.
It might be that it just was a reminder of just how the ground below us changes in small, incremental ways—the realisation that something that seems so solid and so reliable is just as malleable as everything else around us. We have gone up so many mounds of the ziggurat that even the base has changed—so much that we can never turn back.
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Changes that first began as hyperreality has melded into the reality below us. Hyperreality is atop the antenna of the Burj Khalifa, the highest ziggurat of our era, and now the sand below is our reality.
Kushim Magani is a (Central & West Asian) writer and musician based in Naarm.