Jane Meenaghan: Tartaria
Tartaria is an ode to history lost and found. Great Tartaria, an ancient empire of superior technology and virtue suppressed from history, yet whose traces can be found everywhere supposedly, the story arose from historical misunderstanding over the use of "Tartary" as a place name for modern Central Asia through Siberia. Tartaria, as an alternative theory and a practice of defiant, Gnostic skepticism towards the arbiters of consensus history, emerged in Russia with a distinctly nationalistic indigenous flavor. But in its transmission across the worldwide web, Tartaria has become a universal Great Vehicle, a body without organs, unbounded infographical apocrypha in the recesses of Facebook, YouTube, /x/, etc. - talk of collapse at the hands of a worldwide mudflood, antique photographs of gadgets and automata in strange resolutions, every construction site in Manhattan barring windows below reasonable ground-level caught red-handed on iPhone, every continent’s architectural wonders under an admiring scrutiny (who, when, and with what technology, really could have built them?). Tartaria was lost, but it is also found — not in modern-day Russia, but in every corner of the world where conspiracy digs at the archaeological ruins of consensus history, discovered and uniting everywhere as a hyperstitional pure land.
I wrote my song from the perspective of the crumbling empire, departing from the opening lines of the Orthodox Song of Simeon the God-Receiver, rejoicing with a death drive as it is buried in mud.