Rebuilding Stories With Nine-Tenths of a Second
Sewing in silver linings with grey matte thread.
Mending the fabric where joy did rot and shred.
“Knotted. Tied. Stitched.” I said
“Deliberate, until I’m dead.”
One of the biggest, most powerful renewable energy sources in the world is slowing the Earth’s rotation every year by about .9 microseconds (or nine-tenths of a microsecond). I visited this place, once, although I have very little proof of it remaining after the theft of my phone at the time.
That void—the gap where my proof should be—is the mirror image of memory itself. As we create memories, there will always exist the equal opposite: the experiences we didn’t hold, the details we choose to drop…. Memories can be like that – seared into the soul like the branding of skin on cattle or barely recalled or shown.
At a local thrift store, I found a beautiful black and white ink sketching of an untouched barn in the wilderness – signed simply in 1998 by someone named “S. Northern.” Later I learn this is a purposeful and directional anonymous pen name for many artists. The feeling of joy in completion belonged to this artist at one point. Who brought it here to be discarded?
Missing pieces, lost stories, wisps of what had been… and the people that want to forget. Is there a way to save the story if the forces against it are stronger in their determination to destroy it?
The creation of the Three Gorges Dam in 1994 relocated millions of people in China and changed the environmental barrier of that portion of the Yangtze River forever. This was, of course, due to flooding and landslides in the wake of the dam’s creation.
What happened to the villages abandoned in this construction? Another missing memory – the void that will be filled by those left later to ask the questions. There are those that will like ripping out pages of a book, losing unsynced photos, and damaging the stories of the ones before us.
It is exactly this feature of the dam, too, that causes the Earth’s rotation to slow. This is the same cognitive feature that holds us back in understanding each other: the weight of what has been moved, buried, or repressed. To know what you want me to know about you, and to love you through the things you don’t. I can’t hold the saturation of positive without also holding the negative in shame. And it is mine alone to hold or share.
It was some ten years later a scientist discovered the rotation revelation. It was twenty years later I discovered the beauty in an anonymous, gifted art, and yet…I never took a photo in it’s original state before I gave it a new story. Is there character to be built, knowledge to be gained, from the things we neglect? Do you believe it’s worth rebuilding the story without relevancy?
With the slowing of the Earth’s turning, perhaps we have the advantage of slower time on our side. Just enough to recover the nine-tenths of a second, the anonymous name, and the truth of what is being lost.
