*
Thirty years prior to the erection of the statue, there had been no statue. What I mean is there was no concept here of the representation of biography in stone. Opinion was not public as such. Things were understood, but not flouted or deified. It’s hard to imagine that now having turned that cultural corner, and several others, but it must have looked something like this:
| • |
simple, home-cooked meals like chicken and dumplings (signifiers, to be sure, but much less imposing – digestion, plain and simple and non-figuratively) |
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kick the can |
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birthdays were the only celebrations and everyone was the same |
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wheat, corn, alfalfa |
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other things that are now unclear, tainted as they are by knowledge. Memory is unclear and not to be trusted. |
**
Some say that after the erection of the statue (the first erection; the second will be later or at least told later), there was crystallization of the previous period some call “love.” This meant that we could never go back, but back to what is unclear. The word love is unclear. In the thirty years after the erection – between the erections – we set up the Council of Bluffs. It was given to this council the act of recording. The statue sat precisely in the middle of the square – 20 feet extending on all sides. Watchers, a specific order of councilors, one sat staring out NW, another NE, another SW, another SE. They sat silently from eight in the morning to eight at night and recorded everything they could see, hear, smell, touch and taste in notebooks before they were relieved by the nightwatchers who continued their work in the dark (they were specially equipped to handle the night). Other councilors called wanderers perambulated across the very insular land recording the things they came across and, more importantly, the changes in those things. I can tell you anything about that time:
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A can of peas weighed 12 ounces exactly and cost between ¢59 and $1.12. On the 50th day three years into the Between the Erections, a can of peas cost exactly ¢73 until 4:53 PM when it sank suddenly to ¢71. |
***
Then the time of darkness descended suddenly when the defacement of the statue, which had come to exemplify the measured and ceaseless recording, to suggest it had become erect. The defilement was recorded by one of the nightwatchmen, who were impotent to do anything but record. An underground group of anarchists, The Darkness, perpetrated the crime – they dictated this to the nightwatchman – stating that life is never recordable, never measurable. When the statue was seen and the report filed, the council’s normal monotone was wracked by pandemonium. Ironically, it is not clear which councilor panicked first. This period too is dim. Violence destroyed the statue, yet somehow the recordings survived. One councilor even continued to record for a period of several weeks. The last page of his notebook reflects not just the actions that had sent our civilization into a bloody civil war with no sides, anarchistic and illogical, but the recorder’s inability to remain objective: “This nameless period cannot hold. A man with a knife stands before me in the rubble of the statue – ah, pieces of sanity – he shouts incomprehensible slogans to the sky (people are overcome by base ideals) – something about wrath, perhaps, fortitude – and plunges his blade into his own hand.” The text is effaced by blood, like a room where the ceiling keeps receding.
****
Nearly thirty years of bloodshed slaked our people’s thirst. I was born into a period of artistic blooming. The Museum of Amputated Poetry was built as was the Garden of Rubble. Great lawns were cleared. Some call this the Museum Reach, though that is not an agreed upon term. We are still discussing it. It was a time of vast growth and unforeseen output. Individuals sat quietly in contemplation, the fear of one era changing into the intense desire for isolation, solitude and silence. Less than thirty years, though, this lasted as the elders, esteemed monks, divine in their noiselessness, began to die. On his deathbed, the last elder, a good thirty years our senior (The Darkness left an unspannable age gap), gasped words like those heard in the halls of the museum. Popular belief suggests that his words were unknowable, but others say that he pronounced the word “populate.” Whether he said this or not, we understood. Our civilization, in the midst of all this beauty, is in peril.
*****
Since then, it has taken us nearly ten years to rediscover love and we lie on park benches and stare at the sky, moving constellations with our finger tips and listen to the choir of chorus frogs. Now in the bountiful air, sharp with desire, I record our history so that you will remember it. We must not forget. And we must not remember. Just listen to the croaking of frogs.
(structure of the chirping of chorus frogs)
