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Piles are victoriously stubborn. Basements and backyards spanning every significant time zone are breeding grounds for lazy piles. Piles are so pervasive that they are usually taken for background noise in the increasingly busy society they have helped to construct. Piles in our society, or most societies for that matter, live out their lifetimes completely unnoticed. They are an infrastructural nuisance to laboratory theories of ecological harmony, like a homeless person or a campaign ad. Piles are governed by this stagnation. Piles contain no internal process for mobilization. Piles can only be manipulated by outside forces – natural (wind) or man-made (shovel). Though a pile possesses no independent faculties for progression, it does exhibit a sustaining energy and sociological characteristics that qualify it as a system of its own. Since it is all systems, taken together, that culminate in our experience of reality, every system we encounter merits close study. This includes the seemingly innocuous pile. A system is a network of individual phenomena interacting with each other to perform a single function. Phenomena within a system can be as varied as the unobservable waves extracted from the radio spectrum to the diesel greasing tires of a tractor-trailer truck. Whatever these phenomena are though, they become redefined within the identity of the system they create. Frequency Modulation (FM) 105.7 over the St. Louis metropolitan area belongs to the Emmis Communication system. |
All systems are reliant on movement of some form or another. Some systems may appear to us to be in a state of aesthetic stasis, but this is an illusion manifested by our limited perspectives. Even the timeless botany of a slumbering mountain moves through the often neglected durational dimension. Our species has grasped the importance of movement from the earliest stages of our environmental awareness. Like the migrating patterns of birds, the pollenizing dance of the bee, or the trail of hominids out of Africa, the continued prosperity of our sociology is intricately linked to the rediscovery and re-purposing of movement, pile migration to be precise.
Out of respect for the sensibilities of the ordered mind, we will clarify what we mean by the term 'migration.' In the parlance of this text, migration is a near synonym for movement or relocation. We refrain from using either of those substitute terms in the title because they imply a purposelessness of locomotion. While the mere act of pile movement is, despite the hundred page argument that follows, quite pointless, we see the act of pile migration as a necessary and cyclical adjustment of the environment to better suit the exterior needs of the organism. When the season becomes too harsh the bird instinctively knows that it must change its environment. We feel that the submersion of capitalism is such a movement.
The following chapters will discuss, in-depth, the significance of the simple act of moving piles, and why it is so important to the large-scale health of our culture. Before proceeding much further, though, it may be pertinent to define the word pile as we intend
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