Some true-life mysteries strain credulity and compel you to accept, should you engage with them, that forces or conspiracies or unknown faculties are a-swirl, busily creating a clandestine world totally divorced from the one you perceive with your apparently unreliable senses.
Then again, some mysteries aren’t like that. They’re not supernatural or even particularly unbelievable—just maybe a bit perplexing. By way of example we have the airship scare of the 1890s, when person or persons unknown evidently constructed a workable lighter-than-air craft, and tooled it around the American heartland. Or the Coral Castle of Homestead, Florida; a megalithic structure created by one man, as far as is known, through unfathomable (or at least unrecognized) techniques. In both cases we have phenomena that while impressive, aren’t beyond human ability. It’s the motives and precise methods we find mysterious.
To this category we must add the case of the Toynbee Tiles. They comprise a puzzling urban mystery, one that’s been going on for at least a quarter century. One that’s now quite real for me, because just yesterday, I espied (and photographed) one of these enigmatic messages for myself.
Toynbee Tiles are smallish hand-crafted mosaics, probably polymer, that have been somehow inserted into the pavement of busy city streets, and sometimes highways, all up and down the U.S. Atlantic coast and Midwest, as well as in several South American cities. Several hundred have been discovered to date. All of them display variations on this message:
Toynbee idea In movie 2001 Resurrect dead On planet Jupiter
What the hell does that mean? That’s a big part of the mystery. A few researchers have gamely taken it on, though, and formed some hypotheses. “Toynbee idea” probably refers to British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), who did indeed put forth an idea, in his 1969 book Experiences, that emerging technologies might one day bring dead tissue back to life.
The rest of the message seems bound up in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which mostly takes place in close proximity to the planet Jupiter, and premiered the year before Toynbee floated his “idea.”
So the crux of the message (which was examined in much greater detail in the 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles) seems to be that we can (and should?) bring the dead back to life, perhaps by reassembling their constituent parts on or near Jupiter. Whether or not that idea should be properly attributed to Arnold Toynbee, the message as a whole sounds not too far removed from the things you might hear from the denizens of the streets in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Cleveland—all cities known to have been “tiled.”
Sci-fi-esque ravings, then, aren’t unusual in the big city. What is unusual, and what makes this thing so compelling, is that someone took those ravings, put them in an enduring (and arguably, aesthetically pleasing) form, and propagated them not just widely and deeply across the United States, but also in Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
And how on earth did he imbed those things in the pavement, anyhow?
Theories abound, and even a couple of suspects have been identified. I won’t go into it here—I’ll refer you again to the documentary for that. Truthfully, I’ll be happy if this mystery is never entirely solved. Life should be well-stocked with unsolved mysteries, is my contention.
Instead I’ll offer up the case of the Toynbee Tiles as something we can simply enjoy…but maybe only for a while. Assuming the tiler is a lone individual, possessed of no unworldly abilities, then the time of his tiling is finite; perhaps it’s already ended.
The tiles, too, are perishable. Dozens or maybe hundreds have already been dug up or paved over or smashed under tires to unrecognizability. There’ll come a day when they’re all gone, and those of us who’ve seen them will be quizzed by disbelievers like we were claiming to have seen Bigfoot piloting a UFO.
Go see a Toynbee Tile, is what I’m saying. Mine is at Third and Prospect in Cleveland. Where’s yours?
