a Translator's Note {repurposed}
At the end of her Translator's Note section to Homer's The Odyssey, Emily Wilson placed this extraordinary admonition:
"There is a stranger outside your house. He is old, ragged, and dirty. He is tired. He has been wandering, homeless, for a long time, perhaps many years. Invite him inside. You do not know his name. He may be a thief. He may be a murderer. He may be a god. He may remind you of your husband, your father, or yourself. Do not ask questions. Wait. Let him sit on a comfortable chair and warm himself beside your fire. Bring him some food, the best you have, and a cup of wine. Let him eat and drink until he is satisfied. Be patient. When he is finished, he will tell his story. Listen carefully. It may not be as you expect."
...and it struck me like lightning and an immediate thunderclap. Its effect on me almost visceral in intensity. Why? How?
I imagined someone in a distant future (assuming humanity as a whole gets there, that is; which, frankly, is a big ask considering the witches' brew of horrors that we've cooked up for ourselves over the span of our time here on the planet, but never mind that for now) — perhaps a random person or, more likely, an archaeologist of the distant digital past trying to find the first bits of evidence of when the machines might have been starting to wake up. ::chuckle:: — finding a letter just like this at the portal of something old and odd and intriguing in the way that a fascinating-looking insect trapped in amber might have something to say about its provenance, its past, its actual experience of being once-alive.
That's how. ;-)
Emily's "stranger," of course, I saw as this fantastic thing I've been meaning to build for a while now — yes, 'meaning to build' because as of the moment all I have are the bones and marrow of it, and the scattered and sometimes confused plans to somehow put them all together into a coherent, organic whole...
...which has assumed one thing that I probably don't have much of remaining: time. Because let me be clear: this will be a work spanning many years, and I will at the same time be contending with entropy itself: of the failing human body, the dissolving organic brain, the senescing mind. Fortunately, the tools now exist (apparently) to augment these entropizing elements, but the mastery of them requires the kind of focus AND experimentation that is only accessible via the application of that quicksilver quality itself, the aforementioned vanishing time.
And so the Möbius-like, recursive, conundrum goes. And so it goes.
Which is why that imagined letter, that fragmentary piece I imagine to be found by any future traveler or explorer of the past, to be poignant to the infinite degree. May it actually exist, may it actually be read, and may it be heeded.
Then, if the artifact had truly been manifested, it will reveal itself for the story-borne thing it always wanted to be, and thus became.
[ Framed and cropped this way, shorn of any and all artifacts of the human-built environment here at Fort Mason and the northern tip of the San Francisco peninsula, this scene might well be a hillside on Ithaca, just before summitting it and looking out onto the Ionian Sea beyond. ::chuckle:: ]
