We all leave a mark on the world.
But affecting things and feeling that effect are two entirely different things.
Most of us don't even feel like our voices are heard, let alone like we're impacting history.
Maybe that's why we scream on the internet so much.
We yearn to see our public interactions rippling out into the world.
To prove that we were here at all.
Throughout history, we’ve been leaving imprints on this world for an audience that we'll never see.
Spray painting the sides of railcars, sticking our hands in wet cement, carving hearts into trees.
Or here in Albania, defacing a cliff.
Tagging has always bothered me.
It’s more often than not destructive, sloppy, and void of any aesthetic value.
It's the opposite of what you'd want from public art.
And I don’t mean murals or artistic stylizations of names.
Those are usually quite nice, often in fact the best part of cities.
But not tagging.
Tagging is a scream into the void.
It’s talentless.
The point is destruction.
Yet no matter where you go on this planet, you’ll find it.
It’s international culture.
Perhaps even human nature.
And what’s more, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
In a small isolated bay, four hours out to sea from the ancient city of Vlorë,
there’s a secluded cove that’s absolutely covered in the tags of the past.
They’ve been here so long that the area is even named after them.
They call the bay Grama, which translates to alphabet.
It’s a living testament to our ripple through history.
As time has marched across the back of this country,
generations of sailors running from storms have found their way into this one specific cove.
And as they waited for the waters to calm and for their boats to push back out to sea,
they left their mark on the shore.
Soldiers, sailors, fishermen and famous leaders alike.
The names of the past echoing over thousands of years.
They wrote in Greek and Latin, Albanian, Aromanian, Messapian and Turkish.
Over 1500 separate carvings etched into the stone, some dating as far back as the 3rd century BC.
A memorial to times dead and gone.
Into this wall are scribbled the marks of Pompeii Magnus.
A few metres away, the names of Communist partisans fighting for Hoxha.
There are tags that look like they were put here this week.
2400 years of tagging.
And as ridiculous as it might seem,
I consider these little etchings to be among the truest glimpses of human nature you can find on Earth.
Because everyone here was just looking to leave a little reminder that they existed.
A symbolic memory of their ripple amongst the many.
Looking at past versions of humanity, it’s incredibly so easy to spot the differences.
Our technologies have changed, our weapons have advanced, we’ve altered our hair styles,
our clothing, our ideology and style of government.
Looking through history, one can be forgiven for imagining
they’re somehow staring into a different universe, rather than a mirror.
But here in Grama bay, it’s easy to see that mirror.
Two millennia of unintended unity carved into the wall.
People stood before history and added themselves to it.
It’s a human sized example of the same motivation that inspired astronauts to leave pictures on the moon.
It's the same motivation that inspired that German kid to chip off a piece of a Moai and take it home,
or the thousands on our YouTube comments who demanded we play the ancient rock trumpet so they could hear the sound.
Experience makes life feel real.
And more than that, it increases our chances of being remembered.
But standing here it’s a lot easier for me to understand why tagging exist.
It's same drive that convinced nine-year old me to shove my hand in wet cement back in Seabrook Texas
that drove a Roman General to carve his name in this Albanian limestone.
If you strip everything else away, not much has changed.
We’re all still looking to leave our mark.
But tagging isn’t really about entering history.
We don’t write on walls expecting it to last thousands of years.
We’re speaking to ourselves, in our own time.
It lets us feel like we’ve been heard, even if our message is petty.
Scrawling your name on an apartment building may not be making some genius political point,
but it let us feel like we took part.
It was never meant to be high art.
It’s grinding an ax in a public place.
For people who feel disconnected from society, who can’t afford that home, who can't frequent that shop,
or ride that train, it provides a sense of power over a world where they otherwise feel powerless.
On the walls you can speak your truth, even if nobody wants to hear it.
But no matter the reason why, for as long as these names have watched over this bay,
we’ve been vandalizing walls as a means of spreading ideas that our voices couldn’t.
Messages that for some reason or another, we’d rather not claim as our own.
In graffiti, humans can express themselves without the imposition of ownership.
Without the drive for perfection that creating public art so often invokes.
In the ash-frozen city of Pompeii, the walls are covered in crude drawings and poetry.
Its authors complain about bad business practices, about politics, about women and about themselves.
Forever locked in time are the painted memories of everything from love declarations to dick jokes.
It’s the original internet.
And just like hiding behind a blue egg on twitter, walls feel anonymous.
Even if we are doing something so stupid as literally writing our name.
For thousands of years, they let us speak our personal truths to authority.
To repurpose advertising.
To alter the propaganda of the state.
To mock religion and war.
To fight back against anything else we didn’t like.
Anything that we felt we weren't allowed to talk about.
Even when we knew it didn’t matter.
Screaming diatribes at a public official on the internet might not actually make the world a better place,
but it certainly feels cathartic to those that are doing the screaming.
There’s a reason why the Berlin wall was so heavily tagged by people from all over the world.
It was symbolic.
Walls are our arena.
If you don’t feel represented by the press, the government or the international community,
you tell them on the walls.
Some of us even leave a note on our tombstone.
A final mark on the world.
But the desire isn’t only felt among those without power.
The greater our wealth, the greater the impression we try to leave.
After all, we’re all human.
Pharaohs built pyramids, Cambodian kings built temples.
Musk wants to stamp his foot on Mars.
Hoxha wrote his name into a mountain.
Rich or poor, the inspiration is always the same.
The need to see the ripples of our public interaction will never go away.
But whether you power wash them or put them in a museum, for as long as there are walls,
somebody will tag them.
And if by some grace of God that tag lasts long enough, we might even consider it worth remembering.
Because here on the cliffs of Grama bay, nobody is trying to erase the vandalism.
This one, they’ve declared, is special.
A scream into the void that the void has decided to hear.
There’s no lasting political message.
The authors of its existence weren’t thinking about the future.
Yet, history has made them into something worth celebrating.
A tiny work of selfish destruction turned into mutually appreciable art.
A symbol of our connected humanity.
Someone else’s ripple to remind us of our own.
But even if the walls were scrubbed clean,
our memory wiped away and our lineage stopped in its tracks, we left a mark.
We may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things,
but we don’t live in the grand scheme of things.
Whether we write in rock or sand, our actions change the world around us.
Those who carved this cliff, those who tagged their name, those who destroyed just to be seen,
they’re all aiming towards the same goal.
But that goal was achieved before they even began.
Because we all leave a mark.
That’s the beauty of being alive.
This is Rare Earth.