Martin Prechtel on World House

Shamans say the Village Heart can grow a brand-new World House if it is well-dressed in the layered clothing of each indigenous soul's magic sound, ancestral songs, and indigenous ingenuity. 

The wrecked landscape of our World House could sprout a renewed world, but a new language has to be found. 

We can't make the old world come alive again, but from its old seeds, the next layer could sprout. 

This new language would have to grow from the indigenous hearts we all have hidden. 

It shouldn't be the tongue of oneness, not one language, not a computer tongue of homogenization, but a diverse, beautiful, badly made thing whose flimsiness and inefficiency force people to sing together to keep it well-spoken and sung into life over and over again, so that nobody forgets to remember. 

We need to find gorgeous, unsellable, ritual words to reanimate, remeasure, rebuild, and replaster the ruined, depressed flatness left by the hollow failure of this mechanized, orphaned culture. 

For this, we need all peoples: our poets, our shamans, our dreamers, our youth, our elders, our women, our men, our ancestors, and our real old memories from before we were people. 

We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. 

Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing couple who just won't give up making their beautiful, wild noise.  

The world won't end if we can find them.