Sayings for the end of July

The Philological Grouch Rides Again…

The point at which I stop reading and move on to the next thing:

When a person says she or he “researches” something.  Does that mean they “searched” for information on Google or Wikipedia, or they investigated a problem, or analysed a text, or thought long and hard about the topic?

When people talk about “issues” without indicating whether they are matters up for discussion, problems in their personal life, symptoms of an illness or points of contention.

When a critic writes that “art ought to be” this or that.

When I realize that the “beautiful daughter” they are mourning is a dog.

When I am asked to “join a conversation” by someone who really wants me to listen to their rambling speech.

When I am told my life is “a journey”.

When the literary reviewer tells me how society “consumes” books.

When someone speaks of an “artist” and means a pop singer.

When someone says he is going to a concert and means “a rock festival.”

When I come across the second infinitive in a row.

When someone says a piece of music is a “classic” and means it comes from the 1990s.

When a newspaper reporter tries to explain an event’s significance by calling it “a narrative”.

Whenever someone says something “references” something else, when they fail to distinguish between “mentioning”, “pointing to,” “alluding to” or “quoting from.”

When people tell me that a picture is “graphic” and they may or may not mean it is “unedited” or “vivid” or “shocking.” 

When self-appointed psychologists explain away behaviours by saying someone “unconsciously thought”.

When they ask “what is your philosophy?” and mean “what is your opinion?”

When you read three paragraphs into a new article and still don’t know where or when an event happened.

When certain folks introduce themselves by saying they are “scientists”: when they really are only mid-level technicians.

When those who have never read anything by Darwin bark out that they are opposed to evolution.

When someone speaks of “the best song ever”: and means what they like and have never heard anything composed before 1985.

When politicians claim they are speaking the truth.

When supposedly intelligent people cannot think of anything to compare events with except sports and popular television programmes.

When the word “icon” is replaced by “legend” (not even “legendary”), as though that were a better term.

When little cowardly worms turn the concept of “war”, especially Just War, into a crime against humanity.

When a preacher says that Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian.

When someone places a comma after “But” at the start of a sentence.

When someone refers” to “Christianity” but means only Fundamentalist Protestantism.

When someone refers to “religion” and means only Christianity.

When someone writes “everybody” and only means everyone he has spoken to that day.

When a real estate agent puts “a home” up for sale but really refers to a “house”.

When somebody over the age of twenty exclaims: “Cool”.

Apothegms and Stuff for late July

Sayings of a Would-Be Ancestor

1.     Some animals learn to crawl and fly before they reproduce.  Only their children benefit and, then, after many generations, they forget these skills.  Then the children start to teach their parents how to crawl and fly.  A new generation grows up without the memory of who they are and where they must go.  Many people are the same.

2.     In another world, I would be learning how to write, but before I could send myself any important messages, I will have passed away.  Thus in this life it is not always wise to imagine something better.  In another world, perhaps someone might imagine what I could have done and write about it.

3.     Whenever someone tells me their personal troubles, I wish it were possible to help them out.  In spite of sympathy, however, I have no understanding of their plight.  If were to try, it would make things worse.  It is better therefore to keep quiet and nod one’s head wisely.

4.     Every day the newspapers become more and more incomprehensible.  Words no longer mean what they once did.  Syntax falls apart, pronouns fumble for antecedents, apostrophes dangle in the wind.  Events are reported that have neither date nor place, and others occur without contexts.  If I could only figure out what happened, I would write a letter to the editor to complain.

5.     Jorge Luis Borges says that everyone has some piece of memory—a scene, an event, a person—that will disappear into oblivion after we are gone: a tree in a park, a fire in a shop, a great man no longer remembered.  For me it is parents and neighbours, houses on the street, games played with friends.  When I am gone, they will all be gone, and no one will know or care.

6.     Costume dramas in film and on television are more accurate than ever.  The clothing, the furniture, the architecture, and even the landscape.  But they make no sense in terms of dialogue or atmosphere or morality: all are anachronisms.  Once we would have said that the artistic past was a metaphor for the present.  Now it is not even that.  So I watch these productions backwards, focusing on the details of colour and texture and away from the people and their emotions. 

7.     While I was born in 1940, most of the people in my life were products of the nineteenth century.  I must have seemed very strange to them, as I do again with those to whom the twentieth century is an impossible olden time.  That which remains real and comfortable are old movies from the 1930s and 1940s, where even the trees, the mountains and the skies are as they ought to be.

8.     I used to sit in the corner, a kind of little alcove, where a closet pinched the room up against a window.  There was an old lumpy chair where I curled up.  Out of the window, the best of times, was winter, late in the afternoon, twilight slowly changing to dark, snow beginning to fall, a circle of light under the lamp across the street.  Everything was quiet, except an occasional car scrunching through the snow.  In that cone of yellow light happened many mysteries, such as arguments, murders, kissing strangers, mad women searching for their dogs, old men trying to light a pipe.  In front of me, the closet, against which I put my feet, leaned a book on my lap, and read the books my father bought for me, various long, tedious Alcxandre Dumas novels, that required me to look up words in a dictionary, terms for horses’ caparisons, knights’ armour, castles’ architecture and armaments.  I made long lists and tried to learn vocabulary.  No one ever said to pay attention to the plot or the characters or the style.  Every evening a few pages out of which I remembered nothing except random words.  My thinking was about the vile deeds out on the street, the grotesque players in a cheap melodrama played in the yellow cone of light. And in the closet what was found?  A pile of old browned newspapers.  To touch them was to see them crumble into dust but one could look at then headlines from the late 1880s: such as Brooklyn Bridge Opens.  That was only a little over fifty years earlier and yet seemed like a completely different era of history.  Then before anyone knew what had happened, I grew up, and hardly spent any time in my corner den, and eventually forgot all the adventures, mysteries and murders that had taken place.

9.     Saturdays, Shabbat, were not religious, except in the sense of rituals, games and group activities.  I would go to Charlie the Barber’s down the street, at the corner of 13^th Avenue.  This was a time to read comic books and get a haircut.  Then we would all go to the movies, usually the New Garden on 46th Street.  It had three features, a dozen or so shorts, , various newsreels dating back four or five years, a lot of cartoons, and old serials which were out of order and incomplete.  Naturally it all took five or six hours, during which we ate sandwiches brought in brown paper bags, bottles of juice, and a few bars of candy.  When it was all done, the journey home in itself was an adventure, involving re-enactments of the main scenes, arguments about what had actually happened in one or the other of the films, and promises to try the Normandy Theatre next week because they had Robin Hood movies and a different range of cartoons. Thus ended our day of rest.

10.  Bad things in the long dark quiet of the night.  Once, an impossibly time ago, someone phones with a nervous cryptic message.  We turn on the radio and hear the end of the second plane crashing into the second Tower in Lower Manhattan, with incoherent comments on other airliners, crashes, and dying people.  We flip on the television. The images make no sense for many minutes.  Then it becomes comprehensible and I recall that my wife has flown to see family in America two nights before.  The phones won’t make connections.

11.  On another day, more recently, I email a friend in France to ask his opinion of the Bastille Day attacks in Nice.  He has just woken up after a lovely summer night.  He will contact me again soon, he says.  It takes hours.  Then he sends a brief message to say his daughters have been on a biking holiday and he needs to find out where they are.  I am still waiting for the next message. 

12.  Then another message from an old friend to tell me her son went to Syria to fight with the Kurds against ISIS. He was killed by a landmine. He is a hero.  But he was a troubled youth, and his mother is devastated.  I am reminded painfully of another woman, a student in Israel, to tell me her son was blown apart by a roadside bomb.  Another hero.  She found it hard to accept, even as she knew he died as he would have wished, defending his nation, his people, his fellow soldiers.  We all want to howl with rage against the injustice and cruelty of the world. 

13.  Late in the afternoon a little hedgehog crawled to the edge of our garden and shivered with pain.  We set out some warm milk and soft bread.  He sipped as though he had not had any liquid for days.  Then he slowly crawled a few metres into the yard.  By then the night covered everything with darkness. In the morning, the body was curled up.  I prodded it.  The creature was dead.  With a garden spade I lifted him and buried him lightly in a corner, under the bushes.  Later the sparrows came and finished the milk and bread.  Life is like that.

14.  The tui sits in the tree at the front of the house.  It has been there for years.  He sings all day.  He imitates our doorbell, the sound of the car door opening and shutting, and the washing machine beeping the completion of its cycle.  I whistle some tunes for the tui but he only answers in these mechanical sounds.  Probably he knows better than I do what is important.

15.  Why do they say school is boring?  For me it was infinitely interesting.  Everyday new games to play, new facts to learn, new arguments with my friends and teachers. 

16.  The more I grew, the more I changed.  Time went very slowly, but every new day was anticipated.  The seasons changed.  Rain, snow, wind, sizzling suns.  Only one thing  never changed.  My parents.  Now they are gone.

17.  Though the seasons changed as I knew they would, in the summer I forgot about the spring that had passed, and in the autumn about the summer games and journeys into the hills. When winter arrived, it pushed away the memory of fall.  Then spring came and it had no surprises.  I thought it would last forever, as it always did.

18.  No need for smart phones and aps.  No one ever calls, except the company to tell me it is time to top up my account.  Even as a boy, when the world was young and fresh, I never called anyone and no one phoned me.  Sometimes, I was told to say hello to a relative at the other end.  Often it was someone I knew, but I couldn’t identify their voice, or understand what they were trying to tell me.  Now all grown up and old, when strangers call I can hang up on them with no remorse.

19.  Surely there were as many generations between the beginning and myself as for anyone else.  But looking back, very soon the memories fade, the names are not attached to stories, and then there is nothing.  How soon will that nothing catch up with me?

20.   The old men at the clinic were sharing anecdotes about bypasses, hernias and prostate operations.  I could not join in their lively conversation, even though from what they said I knew I was older than them all.  

Anti-Semitism Again

“Why Do They Hate Us So Much?”

They envy our intellectual leadership of Europe whose thought is Jew-born and Jew-bred.  Europe not only think in Jewish terms, but all her enterprises are motivated by the personalities of Jew…..There is not a program, a sentiment or a conviction a European can choose to follow but he just follow a Jew—whether it be Bergson, Marx or Freud.[i]

Samuel Roth continues this statement by asking, rhetorically, in his conversation with the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, “Why should not the intelligentsia of Europe hate us?”  

To which he goes on to say, rather amazingly, given that this booklet was published in 1925: “Time and again we have humiliated them.  We began by giving them Christianity and for two thousand years they have trying to live up to it.” [ii] Like José Faur, Samuel Roth and Israel Zangwill see that anti-Semitism is not really based on biology or racism or religion—though these are all rationalizations and inform the discourses of the Jew-haters, with today being added the argument of politics, particularly the suppose failures and illegitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish State.  The wandering and stateless existence of Jews in the Dispersion and the abject status as money-lenders, peddlers and inn-keepers having been replaced by the vast variety of professions, artistic careers, and scientific achievements, the old calumnies which therefore should have died out remain notwithstanding and defy all logic and commonsense, let alone historical fact.

And still further, as Roth and Zangwill discuss, there are two other considerations that are involved with the persistence of anti-Semitism and its fundamental core of beliefs: the first is that many Jews themselves are taken in by the belief-structure of anti-Semitism and out of self-loathing make themselves willing witnesses of the depraved, vicious and toxic qualities of Jewishness and Judaism, to the point of outright conversion and confession of supposed depravities in their erstwhile families and communities (today meaning both the Peopleand State of Israel); the second is that the standard histories, philosophies and artistic paradigms, having been shaped by Christians—in a sense, as the two conversationalists indicate, based on misunderstanding of Jewish ideas of Justice and Truth  and on a felt need to reject those core values and create alternatives that undermine such principles—the would-be assimilated or secular Jew finds him or herself contending with deeply-ingrained instincts, attitudes and intellectual modes of thinking.   

Then speaking of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, Roth explains to Zangwill:

Herzl stood alone in his own light and the light revealed a vista of terrible, unsurmountable dangers.  But he had taken the first step.  He had pronounced the magic words: We are a people, one people.”  There was no drawing back.[iii]

And then Roth says, hardly aware of how understated his comments are in the light of what would happen within a few years across the face of Europe:

Once uttered these words portended danger as well as imminent achievement.  The world, after all, was hostile to Jews, the Dreyfus Affair having proved how little it took to excite Europe into a fury of Jew hatred.  No Jew has ever been as sensitive as Herzl to the physical harms to which his people was being exposed….Who knows but that the declaration of Jewish unity might tempt the world into more extravagances against them?[iv]

Whenever possible, the Judeophobes do their best to deny Jewish artists and authors their rightful place in the history of European and modern civilization, just as they do their best to claim that the Hebrew race cannot think or feel in a way that improves—but if at all, that harms—the real peoples of Europe.  If it is not possible to destroy or suppress the actual artistic works, as in the case of Heine above, then the anti-Semites reassign authorship, plug the hole with an alternative history, and very soon the general public and also the rising generation of scholars are none the wiser. 

Another example of this. In February 1939, the Sephardic-French travel writer and musician André Suarès wrote a brief notes in La Nouvelle Revue Française.[v]  It begins with a notice for 27 October on the nature of space, the conceptualization and experience of music in various modalities of art, a rather dreamy and vague little essay.  Then comes a notice for  the 17^th November entitled “Lorelei”.  Suarès starts this piece by recalling how horrible life was in the trenches during the Great War, not least of which was the way the Germans would go through the muddy lines they overran, killing bodies they found still breathing and stripping them of their goods—men without honour—scavengers without any moral sense or respect for human dignity.  This leads him into a recollection of the famous poem by Heinrich Heine, a nineteenth-century German writer:

C’est la Lorelei, un chef-d’œuvre où la poésie du people rhénan, avec toute la rêverie du ciel sur le beau fleuve, palpite dans le coeur féerique de l’Ondine.  La Lorelei est d’Henri Heine.

It is the Lorelei, a masterpiece of poetry wherein the poetic spirit of the Rhennish nation, with all heavenly dreaminess on the beautiful river, pulsates with the fairy heart of the Ondine.  The Lorelei is by Heinrich Heine.

Though he does not mention that Heine was a born Jew, Suarès describes the almost quintessential German Romantic feelings the poem evokes, feelings that have become part of the German soul.

The writer continues by describing the impact of Heine’s lyric on the development of poetry and music in Germany.

Toute l’Allemagne du XIX^e siècle a chanté ce poème, la récite ou l’a relu avec délices.  Tous les musiciens l’ont mis en musique.  De 1840 à 1880, pas un poème n’a parlé d’un ton plus intime de l’imagination allemande au cœur allemand.

All of nineteenth-century Germany sang this poem, recited it or read it over and over with great delight.  All composers put it to music.  From 1840 to 1880 not a poem could speak with such great intimacy of the German imagination or the German heart.

But then comes the turn in tone and theme. 

Quelque cent ans plus tard hier, ce poème qu’on n’a pas osé chasser des écoles, y est encoure ; mais au lieu de dire qu’il est d’Henri Heine, on l’imprime et on le répand sous la mention : « Auteur inconnu. »

Only yesterday a hundred years later, this poem which no one would dare remove from school curricula remains there; but in place of stating that it is by Heinrich Heine, it is printed and distributed with the notice: “Author unknown.” 

Without mentioning his identity as a Jew and indicating that the removal of his name and the replacement by the anonymous marker belongs to the Nazis who have gained power in Germany, Suarès begins to pull the first part of his little essay together with this second part: the Germans who plundered the dead in the trenches are now plundering their own homeland of its Jewish heritage.  He thus characterizes their actions in strikingly angry tones:

Une prévarication plus vile, une plus basse infamie ne s’est jamais vue.  Jamais chacals sur un champ de bataille n’ont dévalise plus ignoblement un cadavre.  Jamais hyènes n’ont déchire ni souille plus salement un mort.  Car les chacals et les hyènes dévorent les reste des vivants : ils ne les tuent pas.

A more vile lies, a more base infamy has never been seen.  Never have the jackals on the battlefield more ignobly stripped a corpse.  Never have hyenas more grossly soiled a cadaver.  For jackals and hyenas eat only the remains of the living; they do not kill them.

In the event, for all his attempts to point out the evils of the Nazi regime and to have his fell-writers and intellectuals stand up against the Nazis, Suarès was almost alone in his campaign.  He was isolated as a Jew who could not understand the reality of politics of the 1930s.  Moreover, when he also tried to warn his left-leaning artistic friends about what the truth was about Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and its pernicious influence elsewhere in Europe and the world, the reaction was worse.  Insofar as almost all the writers and intellectuals of France were enraptured with Russia’s supposed progress—those on the right who at first weren’t more than conservative or monarchist found themselves driven into radical, Fascist and Fascist-type parties as a way to defend their own positions in universities, newspapers literary journals, and other media—he stood on the outside and was increasingly ostracised.  Though one of the early editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française, he was pushed off by the start of the Second World War, had his books rejected by familiar publishing houses, and, of course, when the German Occupation began, was forced to flee to the south.  When he finally returned to Paris in late 1945, Suarès was a sick and lonely old man, and died soon after.  There has been a small effort in recent years to print his books again and revive his name amongst the great writers of then early twentieth century—something that clearly has not been successful.  The break in continuity and the long silence has interfered with the lines of influence he might have had.  Here, then, is another example of the consequences of anti-Semitism in the world of art and letters, where a Jew, once famous and influential, has been all but removed from the history books, leaving the real picture of who constituted the corps of authors and what constituted the corpus of texts that shaped modern literature distorted. 

---

[i]Roth,   Now and Forever, p. 28.

[ii] There were some old anonymous rhymes to the same effect.  One began the series: “How odd of God/To choos/ The Jews” and the other which responded: “But not so odd/ As those who spurn the Jews/ Yet choose/ Their God.”

[iii] Roth, Now and Forever, p. 58.

[iv] Roth, Now and Forever, p. 58

[v] Suarès, “Chronique de Caerdal,” p. 302.

More Odd Sayings and Apothegms

Strange Fables, Peculiar Proverbs and Ironic Riddles for Our Times

Fable 1: Two people watch a rock wobble in the front garden.  Several small insects scurry out, fight, and rush back underground.  One of the viewers kicks the rock.  More and more ugly little creatures appear, run around, bang into one another, then hide again.  The second person tries to shift the rock.  As he does so his hands are covered with tiny, slimy beasts.  He stands up and shrieks.  The first person returns, pats him on the shoulder, and both slowly bend down, grab hold of the rock and lift it until drops, but several inches away.  Underneath there are swarms and swarms of insects, bugs, worms, and a variety of slithery and prickly things.  They spread out, fight with one another, and leave mounds and mounds of dead bodies.  Moral: The first person who tried to pick up the rock is responsible for the whole mess because seeing something interferes with the harmony of Nature.

Riddle 1:  What kind of creature can speak out of all its orifices simultaneously and harmoniously without making anyone notice contradictions, internal inconsistencies and incoherence? Responses: If it lives alone in the forest and no one hears, it is the voice of History.  If it is seen to walk in the early morning and late afternoon shadows through a town where people have been trained to ignore it, it is probably waved at affably as a harmless stranger and then quickly forgotten.  If it climbs through a window in the middle of the night, sits by your bed and waits for you to awaken in order to bring you the latest news, it is your own bad conscience, so best not to awaken.

Proverb 1: Flowers sometimes view insects, not as thieves in the night, but as foolish agents of their own erotic desires; so too the way we race to the shore when dolphins and whales miss their cues and lay down their lives, as though they were our erstwhile lovers or prodigal sons.

Fable 2: Three leaves sit on otherwise denuded tree at the end of summer.  One is red, one is gold and one is very pale green. A very light breeze blows. The red leaf shivers, pulls itself free, and floats to the ground, happy to know the end of its life has come.  The wind shifts and becomes unsteady.  The golden leaf tries to maintain its hold on the twig and tries to cry out for help, but in doing so cracks apart, and its parts scatter into the approaching darkness.  Whatever had been its dream of a beautiful future has been lost forever.  Then the very pale green leaf, aware suddenly that it is alone, night has fallen, and the blasts of wind more vociferous, turns in on itself, using its final suppleness to form a hard nut.  As its consciousness disappears, it realizes it should have jumped many days before.  Moral: It is never too early to worry about Fate.

Riddle 2: Once there was a house with so many rooms that no one could keep track of who was where without requiring everyone to sign in and out several times a day.  Some of the rooms were well-furnished, others quite spare, none ever just quite right.  Two or three people could live together, but chose not to.  Others wept every night from loneliness and throughout the day look longingly at their fellow boarders. One morning, everyone awakened to the news that a long-staying inhabitant had decided to leave, but not quite yet.  He wants to get his affairs in order first.  Meanwhile, how should the others decide how to utilize the room to be left vacant, as it is a very large and well-appointed chamber, lacking only important amenity?  Responses: Require the departing member to nominate one or more successors.  Run a lottery based on the alphabetical order of the remaining residents’ names.  Hold a secret ballot with each voter making three choices in order of preference: (a) Where I want to live. (b) Who I don’t want to share the room with. (c) Leave the room empty as a memorial to the exiting member.

Proverb 2. Never walk into a crowded dancehall unless you know all the steps, or barring that, have the charisma to lead everyone astray.

Fable 3.  One day three brothers decided they would go on a killing spree.  They bought some hunting rifles, assault weapons, suicide belts and an assortment of hand grenades, mortar shells and other explosive things.  They seemed to have no trouble obtaining these guns and accessories of mass destruction.  Then they sat down to decide whom they would kill. It would be a soft target, a crowded public space where no one would expect such an attack.  One of the brothers would drive up and down the street tossing grenades into cafes and restaurants.  Another would sit on the roof overlooking a marketplace and pick off people as easy as pie.  And the third, waiting for the police, firemen and ambulances to arrive, would run into their midst and blow himself up.  In a few days all was ready.  The three brothers drove into town. Took up their positions, and followed their plan.  When it was all over, large numbers of innocent people murdered, many officers and medical helpers down, the press discussed what had happened.  It could have been a hate crime, said a reporter for a newspaper.  Perhaps it was an act of workplace violence. Opined a commentator for an international television station.  There is not much evidence, said an expert academic interviewed for an online service, but it seems like it might have been an act of desperation against overcrowding, poor schooling and lack of self-esteem.  Moral: It is neither bullets nor bombs that kill, but only ignorance (or “mental issues”).

Riddle 3. If someone is sworn to uphold the law and applies it in such a way as to bring the law into disrepute, who is at fault: (a) the officer who acts according to his own lights in the midst of the event? (b) the superior who was charged with training and supervising this slow-learner with an unstable personality? (c) the legislators who passed a series of laws which are ambiguous, vague and inapplicable in contemporary circumstances? (d) the colleagues, friends and families of the officer who refused or were unable to pick up all the signs of problems in the brewing? (d) the victim who provoked the action through conformity to stereotypes or nervously attempting to rationalize his presence and presentation? (e) the media people who jumped to conclusions and exacerbated the response of the community? (f) no one? (g) everyone?

Proverb 3: Cyclones and hurricanes teach the way out of circular reasoning.  Keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground, and howl for all you are worth. 

Fable 4.  A large, lumbering mammoth, the last of her species, came to the end of the valley, and saw that there was nowhere left to go.  The rest of her herd had long since disappeared, including her own children.  Unable to understand the situation and lacking any skills in imagining a future, she simply stood there as long as she could.  She grew weary, weak and sleepy.  Several thousand years later, she was found frozen and intact, with a full set of DNA.  If someone will reanimate her genetic code, she may be surprised to hear how much we have learned from her.  However, she would still be alone, confused and lacking in imagination. Moral:  Don’t expect your great grand- children or great-great-grandchildren to remember who you were. 

Riddle 4: What is sleepy all the time, but never dreams; awakens more exhausted than when it began; tears apart the ravelled sleeve it was meant to mend? 

Proverb 4.  Some birds hop haphazardly, some walk like drunken mariners, some seem to slide between the crumbs thrown out to them and sneak away the food meant for others.  They gather after breakfast on distant trees to discuss a better strategy for the next meal, but are too excited when they see us to recollect their plans.

Poem for Early JUly

The First Shaman in the World

Here is the skeleton of a middle-aged woman,

Forty-five by some accounts, who had a broken pelvis

And probably limped, and uttered strange words,

So that she stood out from the rest of the mob.

When she died, the people stood in awe;

They buried her, as they normally did,

Scrunched up, back in the foetal position,

Put her back in the womb of the earth.

Then sometime later, they came back,

They just couldn’t leave her alone,

She had been such a wonder, of them

But very different.  Someone shook away the dust.

Now they placed her favourite things,

An eagle feather, an hyena’s bone,

A little bag of something now only dust,

They dropped flowers on her head.

This was, you must remember, long ago,

Twelve thousand years or so,

And she was magic, a shaman,

And in a generation or two, a spirit.

When other people died, as they did,

The community decided to lay them down

Next to the corpse of the deity

Newly covered with petals and leaves.

For as long as anyone could remember,

And we have already forgot, they came

To sit above the grave, chew their meat,

And lay the bones carefully around the spot.

She has become data and jargon, line drawings

At best speculation on the origins of thought

Or  art, measurements and weights.

Now she is a longing, dream and hope.