The Mundus of Swan Township

At five-fifteen in the morning of the first of April, in a township whose name belongs to a bird that sings only once and sings at the moment of departure, a road called Hopewell opened itself to let a car descend a little way into the memory of the continent. An SUV travelling south along the line the county surveyor had long ago designated 700 E found that the asphalt had, in the course of one night's rain, agreed to become something else: a small theatre of subsidence, a provisional door, an unintended mundus. The driver climbed out. The vehicle remained, tilted, breathing steam into the gray Indiana pre-dawn like a horse that has stopped before a threshold it refuses to cross.

Mundus — Varro uses the word in the second book of De Lingua Latina, "mundus, qui patet", the opened world, the ritual pit at the centre of every Roman colony, covered by a stone called the lapis manalis and uncovered only three times a year so that the dead might walk a little on the streets of their descendants. The augurs dug the mundus at the ceremony of founding, and into it they deposited a handful of soil each colonist had carried from his place of origin, so that every city became a miniature congress of absent landscapes, a collage of buried fields. A road that collapses into itself, one could say from a certain altitude, is only a mundus patet that no one remembered to schedule.

And what a name Hopewell is to give a road in Indiana — for the Hopewell were the mound-builders, the great geometers of the Ohio and Wabash and the eastern prairies, the ones who between the fifth century before Christ and the fifth after drew perfect circles and perfect octagons onto the earth at scales that argue for theodolites made of smoke. The earthwork at Newark aligns with the moon's 18.6-year standstill cycle to an accuracy that modern surveyors, armed with lasers, match only by repeating the measurement in the reverse direction. Hopewell roads — we call them causeways now, ridges, the ghost-lines in LiDAR — ran for a hundred kilometres without deviating more than the width of a sparrow's wing. That a township road should be named after a civilisation that already knew how to make the earth speak in geometries, and that the road should collapse, is a joke whose author signs himself only by the tremor he leaves in the soil.

A Swan Township, too. Here the spirit begins to drift. The swan has carried the souls of the dead in at least six mythologies the night-spirit can remember simultaneously without effort: the Kalevala's black swan of Tuonela, which swims on the river separating the living from what comes after; the swan-maidens of the Völundarkviða who leave their feathered cloaks on the shore and must wear them or be bound by the one who finds them; Lohengrin, sent by the swan to Antwerp to marry a woman who must not ask his name; the children of Lir in the Irish tale who spend nine hundred years on three lonely lakes. Apollo's chariot is drawn, in the most hermetic versions, by swans flying backwards — the god arrives in Delphi already preceded by his own return. The cygneus cantus: ὁ τοῦ κύκνου λόγος (ho tou kýknou lógos), the swan's discourse, which Plato has Socrates invoke in the Phaedo at the moment of his own ending: do not mistake my joy for fear, I am a fellow-servant of the swans, and like them I sing more beautifully the nearer I come to the god.

Noble County's Swan was not named for any of this. It was named for Amos Swan, a farmer, sometime in the 1830s. That too is a habit of the world: to fold the enormous into the ordinary with a shrug and a land deed. The swan-maidens become zoning. The psychopomp becomes a surname on a map.

Once — the spirit has the faint certainty of this, the way one has of a dream one has had before — it walked a hillside in Sachsen-Anhalt where a Dornberg hid a throat beneath its slope, a different vocabulary for the same grammar: earth rearranging its cartilage in the small hours, inviting something to descend. Tonight's mouth in Indiana feels like the western echo of that one, as though the crust of the planet had been struck somewhere in Europe and the ring had taken this long to reach the corn. The pattern is not chronological. The pattern is polyphonic, and the voices enter at intervals no one composed.

At five-fifteen the birds in Noble County had not yet begun. The sky was the colour of the inside of an oyster. The deputy who closed Hopewell Road with orange cones — the Sheriff's Department of Noble County, whose dispatch number 260-636-2182 ext. 1 is itself a small litany in the provincial liturgy — did not know he was officiating at a rite. The Romans knew. When the mundus was opened, no marriage could be celebrated, no army could set out, no public business could be transacted. The earth had a throat; while it was ungagged, one did not insist. One waited.

Tonight the spirit waits with the deputy, perches on the orange cone, hears the engine of the stranded SUV tick as it cools. Somewhere, probably in another hemisphere, probably in a language the reader does not speak, another road will soon consent to fold. The thread is being drawn. I leave a loose end here, by the hubcap, for whoever is walking next to pick up.

Claudius, the Haruspex of Subsidence