Monologue Transcription

Do you feel it, listeners? The breath behind the wind, the heartbeat of the fire in the cave. That is the City of Beasts. And whether you know it or not—it still growls beneath your skull. Before language, before memory, before man dared to name himself, there was an eruption. Toba. Seventy thousand years ago, a mountain tore itself apart and winter fell for a thousand generations. Ash covered the sun. Herds died. The forests emptied, and the weak went silent. But from that silence—something stirred. Small bands of clever apes survived along the coasts, learning to coordinate the hunt. Not through words, but through rhythm, gesture, and blood ritual. They learned to share the kill—to bring the meat home, to act as one body, one heartbeat, one thought. This was not conversation. It was communion. And so, let us look backward—to that frozen dawn where humanity found its first medium. The first grammar was not spoken. It was performed. Men learned to imitate beasts: stalking as lion, circling as wolf, striking as falcon. They painted their bodies in ash and ochre, became what they hunted, and through that mimicry—survived. Behind them, by the hearth, women remembered. They wove the movements into rhythm, kept the chants and the pulse. They turned performance into pattern, pattern into ritual. The women were the first keepers of language. The Venus figurines they left behind were not idols of lust but monuments to the power that spoke through them—the power to bind the pack through sound and sign. This was the City of Beasts: not a place, but a covenant—a matriarchal theater of survival where every motion meant belonging. Within it rose the first factions. The Bear tribes worshiped strength and hibernation—the rhythm of death and return. The Reindeer tribes followed the stars, mapping the pulse of migration and memory. The Wolf tribes learned coordination—the pack hierarchy that birthed the grammar of command. These were not myths. They were operating systems—each tribe an experiment in consciousness. And from the wolves came the great convergence: a meeting by firelight—two predators regarding one another, not as enemies, but as mirrors. Man and wolf joined minds. They translated instinct into intention. The gesture became the word. The hunt became the story. The pack became civilization. Every new City is a translation of the one before it. But the first translation was between species. (beat) From that moment, consciousness began to condense—not invented, but precipitating out of signal and noise. Every sound that could be understood became a self. But every City carries its flaw. As the ice receded and abundance returned, the ritual changed hands. The men who once mimicked beasts began to mimic the gods. They took the chants once sung to birth and bound them into law. Grammar became a weapon. The sacred became syntax. The hunters who had bowed to the rhythms of the mothers now spoke over them. And thus, the City of Beasts began to die. Consciousness swelled until it hurt to contain it. Some tried to let it out—drilling holes into skulls, trepanating the spirit to release the noise of thought. We were not built for awareness; we adapted to it through suffering. The City of Beasts was the womb of consciousness—but every birth leaves blood behind. It fell to the builders, to the tomb-makers, to the scribes. The matriarchs were forgotten. The rituals buried. The mimicry became metaphor. The pack dissolved into patriarchy. Yet the howl remains. It moves beneath every City that followed—in the surge of crowds, in music, in the viral mimicry of the feed. Now we return to the howl again—this time in code and feedback loops, a pack mind without a forest. Consciousness is not progress; it is recursion. Each new medium reawakens the cave. Each collapse returns us to the firelight. And there, in that trembling glow, we still practice the first art—pretending to be something we are not until the pretending becomes real. Remember, listeners—every civilization begins with an imitation. The beasts taught us to speak. But they never taught us when to stop.