My Black Sextant

We compose the story from relics, the bits of life which survive the consuming ages -- bone, shards of pottery, daggers and lunulae. So the ages are Stone and Bronze and Iron, and our reading of those cultures is from an implemental text. How else could we infer a history?

Yet the actual history (or the history which is fed by the most tributaries of truth) has a greater part in what was lost -- foods, flesh, tunics, anything made of wood. We see Stonehenge as a circle of massive stones (stones older than their risers by some billion or so years) but then there are all of those post holes suggesting other structures which have vanished. What might we say of the Avebury-Stonehenge sacred promenade with those other, possibly equally massive though entirely lost structures? Where did the people gather, what did they eat, how did they fashion their hair before pinning it up with brooches we have catelogued as primary evidence

So the lost is a huge shadow which makes hollow the history of stones and bones and weaponry, the greater half of our history which must remain a mystery. It makes our stories of the past uni-dimensioned, a synecdoche which may not faithfully inter the whole.

Our science of collecting the lost -- DNA and pollen analysis, electronmagnetic imaging, who knows what -- is giving the lost a stronger phosphor, a shore which we can sense the outlines of. More will be revealed, and our history will continue to fill out.

But I like knowing there is much I will never know about the story behind and beneath me. It has heft and depth, a shadowy resonance which is much the same as the unconquerable distance between I and Thou. There is an altar for that mystery, a language to reverence it, a nuance to chalice my communion with it, an eerie glow to attend its boneyard. It is the inner current of long-lost truth: it sings to my dark knowledge, that which feels like truth though I can’t prove it, the awesome and awful polarity some inner compass is calibrated by. My black sextant, this blog.

So I say history must always be held in dark plush, the dulled and nicked blade that remains eloquent in the lost purpose of the mouldered hand which once held it, and that hand like one wave of a tide which is forever mysterious as it washes through the heart.