The Colosseum is a trap.
While circling it one early morning in June 2014, I could hear the Roman crowds shouting as the Caesar enters. I could hear them roaring when animals or men were bleeding.
If the Colosseum were a person, it would have been a bewildering one: A feminine rounded shaped mandala with a distinctively masculine vicious atmosphere and purpose.
All who entered this building are trapped in their undertaking mission, unable to free themselves, not even the Caesar.
Since I could not identify with the surroundings – it was even difficult for me to leave a ceramic shard behind me to the memory of Alexandria Library, which I see as an essence of human knowledge and spirituality we lost for stupidity.
I recalled the elephant story we studied at high school:
“And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
Shooting An Elephant, George Orwell
About the idea of Mound Hacker’s journies