A History in Seven Parts
“Is this a sign?” someone asked.
“Obviously” replied another.
I.
Gray and stone-like in appearance, the bench sat on the beach directly in front of the shoreline. When it was first discovered, onlookers attempted to move it, but no matter how hard they tried, the bench simply would not budge. It was as if it was a part of the earth.
Later, it was discovered that the bench induced visions in all those who sat on it. The visions took on many forms. Some people found themselves reliving scenes from their early childhood, moments long forgotten by the conscious mind. These visions tended to bring about a sense of total clarity. Afterwards, many of these people would reconnect with their family. They began to exercise again. They would look around at the world and proclaim often, without a hint of irony: “Ah, aren’t we lucky?”
Other visions were more abstract, harder to parse. People would regularly see themselves floating in space. Quickly, they would begin to realize that they were in fact giant, larger than the planets and stars which surrounded them. These people would float on in silence, kicking planets with their giant feet and crushing stars between their giant fingers. People who experienced these visions tended not to talk about them, though it was clear that they had had a profound effect. There were also rumors that a select few people (generally believed to be investment bankers) experienced no visions at all.
II.
Many argued over the meaning of the visions (in scientific literature they were referred to as bench-induced fugue states, or BIFS). Adherents of psychoanalyst Carl Jung claimed the bench to be a potent new gateway into our collective unconscious, where we could—without judgement—come to truly see, perhaps even love, our shadow self. Some art critics posited the bench as an ambitious installation piece, though remained divided on how to interpret it: was the work merely another cynical, uninspired comment on the realities of global warming? Or was it in fact a scathing, self-reflective critique of the art world’s inability to act in the face of ecological catastrophe?
“A new and particularly insidious form of petty-bourgeois delusion” argued certain sections of the left. To them, the bench phenomenon indicated that our social imagination had become so decayed, so atomized, that we now looked to magical benches—not history—for our answers. What these criticisms tended to dismiss was the growing evidence that in many, the bench was known to induce beautiful visions of revolution. After leaving the bench, people who experienced these visions would tell of worlds where borders had become obsolete, where money had disappeared, where markets seemed laughable (“To put a price on nature! On Love! On Living! Ha!”). Like shamans, these individuals would hold court amongst growing crowds of curious onlookers. The one constant for those who saw revolution was this: in the new world that was created, everything seemed much brighter. This concerned many.
III.
There were many ideas regarding the origins of the bench. Some claimed it was experimental military tech, a kind of urban MKUltra (“Those who control the benches control the world”). Others saw it as the work of a mysterious and ancient extraterrestrial civilization. Perhaps, they would say, these visions were their way of guiding us towards the next step in our planned evolution. These theories proved particularly popular after a heterodox archaeologist claimed to have uncovered an identical park bench which he said could be dated back to 12,000 BC (“What we have here is clear evidence that these Bench People actually existed. That they not only lived but thrived on earth long before our civilization came into being”). This revelation—though derided by the archaeology community at large—lead to a sudden growth in groups which proclaimed cult-like devotion to the ways of the bench (The Bench within Us and The Wisdom of Bench: Looking Past the Present being foundational texts).
These groups quickly took on a more religious character, and debate raged as to whether the Bench People were the simply the first humans—voluntarily leaving our earth millennia ago for undisclosed reasons—or if they were indeed genuine extraterrestrials who merely chose to visit and populate our small planet. These debates inevitably led to violent and irreconcilable rifts within the bench-worshiping community. As Benchist sects began to form, each developed its own unique identity alongside a specific set of rituals and routines. Some replaced crosses with benches. Others required that their members navigate the world in bare feet (“The only thing separating Us and the Earth can be The Bench”). The most destructive were the First Benchers, who would drive through cities with large, comically sized hammers, smashing all public benches that they deemed to be too similar to the One True Bench.
IV.
Everywhere you went, people could not stop talking. All around, people spoke of revolution, the end of religion, a new world order. Streets seemed to overflow with the sound of conversation, vivid and thick, as if everyone’s mouth was now permanently open. The Benchists wanted to recreate the earth in the bench’s image. Visions of revolution gave new life to previously dormant global struggles. Everyone was exercising again (running clubs became running communities became running societies became running nations).
What many people did not know—even many in positions of power—was that this was not the first bench to be discovered. Previous benches (and there had been many) were containable; respective governments had been able to isolate the area, camouflage the bench in question, chalk up all visions to some form of mental illness, psychedelic experience, or mass hysteria. Hard-line conspiracy theorists sometimes mentioned reports of these mysterious benches, but even they, it seemed, did not fully believe in it. The idea was simply ludicrous.
In response to this concerning trend, a secretive group known as the “Bench Society” was formed. Members came from all around the world and included physicists, theologians, economists, historians, army generals, and accountants. Their job was simple: first, to keep the existence of these benches hidden from the prying eyes of the public, and second, to understand their purpose. On the first count they had been mostly successful, but on the second, little progress had been made. What was clear was that the benches were made from an as yet unidentified material, their origin was potentially extraterrestrial in nature and that they did not respond to gravity in ways currently understood by contemporary physics. The secret of these benches now exposed to the world, the Bench Society worked hard to minimize the damage.
Though there was a small but vocal minority who proposed that the Bench Society make their work public, the majority did not agree. The bench created too many questions. It was an enigma, one that human knowledge did not yet have the tools to reckon with. The mystery was not only a challenge to many of the fundamental tenets of science and religion, but to human reason more generally. The leaders of the Bench Society, in hushed tones that betrayed a deep, confused terror, would ask themselves: how can our society continue to function if the ground falls out from beneath it? How can we create law if we cannot be sure of the reality in which these laws rest upon? What happens to society then? For many members of the Bench Society, there was only one answer to these questions: chaos. They foresaw death and destruction. Masses of people upon masses of people acting out of evil, sinful impulse. Already the religious underpinnings of Western society were crumbling. Already the word revolution no longer inspired revulsion or a faint, pained nostalgia for the naiveites of youth. It was alive. It lived and breathed and acted on the world. When one uttered it, they could feel it move around their mouth like a piece of flesh, bloody and real. These thoughts kept members of the Bench Society up at night, and after each of their near-daily meetings, many shared tips for mindfulness techniques which helped to quell the ever-growing sense that society as they knew it was about to implode (“Imagine that you are the sky, and your thoughts are the clouds”). After two weeks of intense deliberation, an action plan had been formulated. The bench was to be neutralized.
V.
It was to be a multi-pronged attack on the reality of the bench. To do this, the Bench Society would have to make the bench—and everything associated with it—mundane, historical, and precedented. Theologians would incorporate Benchism into the mainstream of religious experience. They would draw previously unseen lines between current bench phenomena and the history of religious revelation in general (“The bench offers a stable, solid place to sit within an increasingly unstable and erratic world: it is not hard to see how this supposed miracle, the appearance of a solid bench near a beach, could become a new site of religious ecstasy, vision, prophecy”). This was not an aberration, but rather an extension of our current understanding of human theology. Psychologists would find links between the bench and humanity’s relationship to earlier esoteric phenomena such as alchemy and witchcraft. Like the dancing plagues of the middle ages, the bench-induced fugue states (BIFS) were merely the latest bizarre and poorly understood manifestation of social contagion. The answer to these visions, they declared, lay not in bench itself, but in the psyche. Scientists affirmed the sudden appearance of the bench (and its immovability) to be a naturally occurring process, the unexpected but not entirely impossible result of mineral calcification, most likely caused by the rise in ocean acidity due to global warming. The bench-like shape of these ossified minerals was indeed curious, but again, not impossible. Cumulatively, these actions all had an effect. But the final—and most decisive—action taken by the Bench Society was the one initiated by the economists.
VI.
The replica benches appeared very suddenly, first in the beaches surrounding the original, then in nearby states, eventually making their way to every continent on the globe. They resembled exactly the original bench: plain gray, stone-like, and immoveable. People at first did not know what to make of them: was this merely hollow imitation? A cynical attempt to profit off of this century’s first genuine miracle? No one had claimed ownership for the replicas, nor attempted to exploit these new “sacred” sites for profit, which made their purpose difficult to comprehend. Much like the original, why these new benches existed remained an open question, frustrating and opaque.
Some of those who were first to sit on the original bench—many of these people now aligned with the First Bencher’s sect—visited the replica sites. They stated immediately that it did not feel the same. The bench was not comfortable (“Less legroom”). It shook when you kicked it (“And I can barely kick”). It produced no visions (“Very boring”). To them there was no doubt: this was a fraud. This remained general consensus from all those who had sat on the original bench, but as the replicas continued to propagate, slowly, these voices were drowned out.
Soon, there seemed to be new benches everywhere you turned. Every local news station had its own two-to-three-minute segment reporting on the latest bench sighting (Bench Spotting with Jack Carlyle, Seat Seeing with Joanne Jackson, Whose Bench is it Anyway? with Freddie Perlman). Benchist communities were plagued by persistent in-fighting as each sect attempted to find the “correct line” when dealing with these replicas. People even began to claim that these new benches were not replicas at all, that they did in fact produce visions, but only to those who believed. Eventually, it seemed that the difference between the original bench and those that followed ceased to matter; a bench was a bench was a bench. People began to lose interest, their world now contaminated with miracles, and if someone talked about their vision in public, one could feel a collective, subconscious sigh in the tired eyes of those who listened (“The visions, to me, are like dreams: I’m glad you had one, I’m sure you learnt something, but do I need to hear about it?”).
The economists had succeeded. For them, the problem of the bench was—like everything –a simple matter of supply and demand. What gave the bench value, they said, was not the bench itself, but rather the scarcity of the experience that it provided. This was what afforded it near-messianic status. This is what they needed to change. The magical bench needed to be one of many magical benches. There needed to be an entire marketplace full of magical benches. For if all benches are magical, then none are. The bench becomes a thing, and things cannot change the world. And so, their solution was simple: increase supply until it outstrips demand. A Bench once again becomes a bench. Crisis is averted. Society is saved. Reason wins.
VII.
In time, people talked less of the bench. It was retained in the collective memory as mere curiosity, a temporary insanity, something to be discussed and explored on an intellectual level but no longer felt and understood on an emotional one. Benchism died a slow, agonizing death, and though it remained a point of interest for many students of theology, this interest was generally confined to within the thick, labyrinthine walls of academia.
Children would learn about the Benchists in school the same way they are taught bedtime stories. Perhaps there was a moral lesson to be learned, their teachers would say. Maybe this bizarre chapter in human history illuminates something about our eternal wants, needs, hopes, and dreams. Those bench believers were just like us, but also, they were not like us at all.
Those who were around at that time would laugh when they were presented with photos of it.
“Wasn’t that silly?”
They snickered when thinking of their friends, relatives, and lovers who had once believed, had once been so sure of the bench’s divinity.
“How did we ever …”
They would move their eyes back behind their eyelids when they sat on a bench, play-acting, pretending to receive a vision, as if to say: even if at one point it may have seemed like I believed, I did not, I do not, for look at me now, laughing at its inherent absurdity, would someone who believed ever do that? Would they really?
“Of all things, a bench!”
Sometimes though, late into the night, when the world seems impossibly still and one can feel the cold, crisp air of evening, the kind of air that only seems possible in pitch-black, those who had once believed would remember the visions the bench had provided them. They saw them again, over and over. And the thought would come to these people, sometimes when teaching a class of school students, sometimes when treating a patient at the hospital, sometimes when cooking for their children, or their children’s children, or their entire extended family: what really happened to me?
Luke McCarthy is a writer, filmmaker, and critic currently based in Melbourne, Australia. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, and Overland, amongst others.
Image: shorewood-hills.org
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 