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This Naked Man Failing to Conquer a Muddy Hill at a Festival is a Modern Parable

He’s been dubbed Naked Mud Monster, and there is a lot we can learn from him.

When Jorge Luis Borges wrote his Book of Imaginary Beings in 1957, it contained many things. It chronicled all of the mythical beasts that have featured in folklore and literature since the start of the word, from the Cheshire cat to the centaur, the hippogriff, trolls, unicorns and even golem. There was a pony with a beak, a giant catfish that caused earthquakes, and a monkey that sits by writers and drinks their leftover ink. But on not one of those pages was there ever any mention of Naked Mud Monster.

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Over the weekend at Splendour in the Grass music festival in Australia - which featured Florence & The Machine, Tame Impala, Blur and more - this heroic scene was captured on camera. He’s been dubbed Naked Mud Monster by the person who uploaded this to YouTube, but we’re going to more affectionately address him as just Mud Monster. Look at Mud Monster, gaze at him, appreciate him, learn from him. He’s wide framed, built like a Volvo estate, with the powerful legs of a horse and the hair of a rural surfing instructor. Over time, evolution has tinkered with Mud Monster, slowly engineering him to fulfil his ultimate goal: to ascend wet and sloppy mounds whilst butt naked. He doesn’t eat food per say, he feeds on the nutrition of a thousand cheers.

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Within Mud Monster, there is clearly a showman. Those rolls after his first fall are exaggerated and theatrical, for the pleasure of the crowd. But there is also some pride in there. Even in his current circumstances, as a naked man smeared in shit and portaloo flood water, desperately scampering up a small hill in front of hundreds of onlookers who are filming on their numerous devices, he still has an unshakeable sense of dignity; which manifests in his die hard reluctance to reveal his penis to the crowd. Instead, he cups his junk tightly, like a free climber hanging from a skyscraper. The harsh truth is, if Mud Monster were only willing to reveal his manhood to the crowd, to just be himself - his naked, knob swinging, mud glistening self - then that spare hand would have probably helped him to overcome his mortal enemy: the little hill by the toilets.

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Yeah, fair enough, this clip might not be news, it might not be vital, and it might only be 66 seconds long, but it is something. A parable maybe, that raises more questions than those mountains of ice on Pluto. How long has Mud Monster been here, trying to mount this admittedly small hill? What is Mud Monster trying to reach? The only thing at the top seems to be portaloos. Does he want to reach the portaloos, or has he become so fixated and obsessed with reaching the peak that he’s forgotten why he ever started? Or, perhaps, Mud Monster is actually in servitude for some awful crime. A modern Sisyphus, punished by someone, probably a mud king, for something, probably indecent exposure, and now destined to run naked up a hill only to roll back down each time, repeating this action perpetually, in front of a crowd, until the sun eats the earth like a wotsit.

Does Mud Monster come to this festival, or does the festival come to Mud Monster, like some sort of annual pilgrimage, every visitor descending to the same wet field to get a glimpse of their swamp god, their sodden Vishnu, as he slaps his bare feet against the bubbling dirt and accelerates into climb number infinity point three recurring?

On the last captured climb of the video, he slips on some discarded shorts, ironically, probably his own. Finally, the video ends the only way it can, with Mud Monster rising again, rising to give it one more shot, rising to give the crowd one more reason to cheer, rising because rising is all he’s ever done, and thus the footage completes its loop, depriving us of the satisfaction of any sort of conclusion, whether it’s Mud Monster’s defeat or victory.

One day Naked Mud Monster, one day you will reach the top of that hill. Then you’ll face your next battle: what to do once you get there.

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