A Work Progressing

I once saw the killer of poems. He was not intentional, he simply moved through the world with such disdain that poetry could not survive near him. Not even poetry that was awful.

I followed him for a while, wondering what agendas he might have. Not too closely, for fear of being discovered, and for fear of my safety. Flowers wilted in his passing. It was not obvious, but I know it was true.

His clothes might be called shabby, but they weren’t dirty. Shabby because they didn’t fit well, one size bigger than it should be. The weight was all wrong, they were heavy, with creases that didn’t match the structure of the man. His shoes did not match. They were close, black with laces, round toe, serviceable. At a distance you couldn’t tell, but upon closer inspection one shoe had six holes for laces, the other had eight.

His gait was also unusual, his arms swung loosely from the shoulders, moving like a clapper in the bell of his heavy coat. It gave the illusion of a distorted timing of a natural swing. His shoulder roll projected his neck to go forward almost horizontally and his  head tilted up to compensate.

I notice that he comes to a complete stop on the curb, before stepping down to cross the street. This causes confusion for pedestrians behind him, there is a repeating ripple in the flow of traffic.

He appears to be traveling from the more residential areas to the city center complex. The dozen stairs up are as wide as the building. He shifts to the far right, then walks diagonally back to the center doors. I see his reflection in the glass doors. The gold lettering says ‘Senior Services Center’. He is old.

I see my reflection in the glass doors, with my mismatched shoes. I am old.

A friend once stated, “History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.”

This takes a little time to unwind. It has become popular to assume that history is a construct of “his story.” Linguistically, that is false. Yet, like many false etymologies, it reveals something worth considering. It suggests both a narrator and a gender bias. More importantly, it directs our attention to the second word.

Story.

Is it fiction? A myth? A rumor? A testimony? A narrative? A fabrication? Those are very different things.

For now, let’s set that aside and return to the Greek etymology. Historia did not mean “the past.” It meant inquiry—knowledge gained by investigation. History, then, begins not with an event, but with a question asked of events.

I’m struck by a modern ad phrase, ‘Inquiring minds want to know…’ it is a well used constructed phrase, it is circular, it’s an Ouroborus. And it does not help define the boundaries of the word.

A historian uses disciplined inquiry constrained by surviving evidence. The questions are asked of events through the evidence they leave behind.

This is complicated by the shape, quality, and verification of the evidence.

Evidence does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted.

Time is full of events, not all are noticed, very few are recorded. The record may have survived as artifact, but even that must be interpreted. They may have survived as a sort of textual communication. Making sense of records requires training and discipline.

This is ongoing, so we must revisit what ‘we know’ with the better tools that we make. History may have stones, but our inquiries are not.

The past does not change, the inquiries do.

Since inquiries are made by humans acting as witnesses, let us break that down.

The Trained Witness: They know where to look, but they carry the biases of their training. A 19th-century archaeologist saw a burial mound and looked for kings and gold; a modern archaeologist looks at the exact same dirt and analyzes pollen grains to understand climate and diet. The evidence didn’t change; the framework did.

The Accidental Witness: Often the most honest, yet the most chaotic. The merchant’s ledger or the private grocery list isn’t trying to sway posterity—it’s just recording the price of grain. Yet 500 years later, that accidental record tells us more about economic collapse than a king’s official decree ever could.

The Reluctant & False Witnesses: This is where history overlaps with detective work. Propaganda, self-justification, and trauma mean that the record is often actively trying to mislead us. A document doesn’t just tell us what happened; it tells us what the writer wanted someone else to believe happened.

The Absent Witness: Perhaps the most haunting category. The vast majority of human experience—especially the lives of the non-elite, the conquered, and the marginalized—leaves no written trace. Silence is also an artifact, and learning how to interpret what is missing is often a historian’s hardest task.

I recently read about a claim for a pottery stamp on a bowl. There is a known pottery maker in England called Dedham. Pottery found with this stamp can be very expensive.

This stamp appeared to say DEDHAM in all caps. No other piece of Dedham pottery has this form of stamp. Other humans thought they saw an R instead of an E. They suggested it was BIRDHAM. 

Some scanned it with Ai, and Ai saw the R and the I. So it concluded it was BIRDHAM.  

It was interesting in the comments how many people still concluded it was Dedham.

Being trained is not based upon opinion. Being trained provides the basis for opinion.

My friend wrote, ‘History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.’

I would write, ‘History is the edge between what survives and what inquiry can reveal.’

History does not advance because the evidence changed. It advances because someone asked one more question.

Yadaphenia is a failure to witness—to recognize or accept the significance of genuine patterns.

This failure is not singular. It may arise from several distinct causes:

* Refusal — “I won’t accept what this pattern implies.”
* Inattention — “I never really noticed it.”
* Habituation — “I’ve seen it so often I no longer see it.”
* Premature closure — “I already know what this is.”
* Lack of inquiry — “I never asked the next question.”

When these failures persist, they often culminate in cognitive closure—the mind becomes satisfied with its present map regardless of how reality is arranged.

The most reliable sign of cognitive closure is simple:

The question stops.

Speed leans toward processing.

Time leans toward thinking.

Attention leans toward meaning.

Meaning leans toward wisdom.

Wisdom leans toward knowledge.

Knowledge leans toward humility.

Humility leans toward wonder.

Wonder leans toward inquiry.

Doom Cycle
I am on a ship, a steady place with warmth, food, entertainment, and more food.

When you step out in the bow of the ship, you may witness dolphins keeping pace, sometimes cutting across the bow, leaping, zig zagging for miles. If you are focused you may also see something curious.

In the front of the ship, on the distant horizon, you can see an island rising from the sea. The closer that the ship comes, the more it rises. The proof is that if you reverse it sinks again. If you turned 90 degrees to the left or right it stops sinking, but it does not rise.

Only if you move directly towards it, will it rise from the depth.

When you arrive at the island, you have a decision, ‘Do I get off?’, and if I get off, what happens if I stay? Does the ship leave?

Let’s witness each case independently. If you get off you will notice something immediately. Everything seems normal. The island should still be drenched, it rose from the sea just a few hours ago!

There is water here and there, but much less than expected. The good news is that there is shelter, warmth, and food similar to the ship, but in a different style.

As long as you stay on the island, and the ship stays, things are in balance and life goes on as expected.

If the ship plans to leave temporarily, and then come back for you, you face another more serious dilemma. As you watch the ship leave, it slowly sinks, taking your former safety, comfort, shelter and tremendous amounts of food with it.

Your island is now safe and stable, but something has transferred to the ship, and now it sinks. This appears consistent.

Here is further proof. If you land, it appears to be dry. You walk about, get back on the ship and sail away. If you go to the stern you can look out and witness the island sinking again, the farther you sail, the more it sinks, until it completely returns to the depth of the ocean. And this too, is continuous.

Here is the deeper question, and it refers back to the old adage, ‘A tree falls in the forest, you are not there to hear it or see the fall. Did it make a sound?’

Does the ship sink and rise, does the island sink and rise, without you?

If it continues, that points to one thing.
If it doesn’t… what does that mean about the universe we witness?

The world is filled with these examples. But it is less consistent than our thoughts. The rainbow is witnessed, but disappears upon approach. The tree disappears when we approach to see the leaves. The forest disappears when we approach the tree.

All of this can be a case of ‘incomplete witnessing’ but it is still suspicious to me.

The ground had always been there, a counterbalance to the sky. The ancient ground looked different—rough, jagged, ready for erosion and shaping. It waited for a very long time.

Eventually the ground became soft mounds, connected to other soft mounds, that were connected to larger mounds reaching the mountains. It was a cascade to the sea. Rainwater ran over them and between them, carrying away varying amounts of surface earth until the water met rock, and slowly, even the rock wore away.

But this place remained a series of soft mounds. Plants came and went, and came again. The earth became soil, enriched with generations of plant debris. The debris fed smaller lives, which drew larger ones, each in search of something edible.

The animals, too, became food, and the cascade continued.

Eventually humans came near the place, but not until a very long time had passed. So much time that the soil had become deep and rich, while the water lay far below in the water table.

Humans followed the traces of other animals and the traces of edible seeds. There was enough to gather, but not enough to settle for long. Other places offered a steady supply of shellfish.

So steady, in fact, that after harvesting, the shells were thrown to the ground and stepped upon, over and over, until they formed mounds of their own—places upon which humans would eventually live.

This place, this mound, was not made with human hands. It was made from debris of far greater magnitude.

Everything waited for the next great change, and that change was humans choosing this place to live. They came with tools to level part of the mound. They came with tools to seek the water deep beneath the soil. They came to plant their own seeds and place their own animals in pens and corrals.

They thought themselves masters of this place.

Yet the place had already hosted forests, grasses, countless lives, and kingdoms of creatures that had come and gone without ever knowing they belonged to something larger than themselves.

They built a structure to shelter themselves from the weather. The shelter almost seemed to morph on its own, growing taller, growing wider, giving shelter to a growing family.

In the lifetime of humans, it seemed forever. In the lifetime of the soil, it was only a moment. In the lifetime of the ground, it barely registered beyond the present.

In the ‘now’ the structure still exists. It is a shadow of its former self. Paint blasted by the weather, bare wood desiccated by the heat of the sun, a dry, mottled place, abandoned by humans.

In their time, it seems old. They never look at the ground, or the plants surrounding. There may be a dim reckoning that the tree may have been a sapling, but only because they are slightly aware of how a tree grows.

In the ‘now’ it has become an image, a frame of the surrounding landscape. Bringing meaning to a place that has already been a place for eons.

For humans it is a discovery, that tells us something significant.

refursive (adj.)

Characterized by recursive return, reflexive examination, and revision through recognized discrepancy. A refursive process returns to a point of fracture, refuses concealment of what has been revealed, and allows that revelation to alter future operation.

refursion (n.)

The process by which consequence reveals a discrepancy between expectation and reality, leading—through recognition and revision—to an altered future state.

Usage note:

Unlike recursion, which repeats a process, or reflexivity, which examines a process, refursion describes a process that is changed by what it discovers upon returning.

A refursive process returns, but not unchanged.

This word is the result of needing a blend of ‘recursive’ and ‘reflexive ’, with a touch of Edge Theory’s ‘fracture’.

It was a tedious push and pull, but the end definition fits the condition that has been occurring in my recent writing and thought. It might even be helpful to others.

Oh sure, I know change is coming, it’s in the song, it’s in my DNA! Meiosis is my new word of the month. I’m really okay with change.

It’s the ramifications that concern me. 

I’m good with adapting. Okay, mostly good, I do tend to flip back to ‘automatic’ responses. Like turning left on a corner, when I don’t need to anymore because I moved.

The biggest ramification for me is the decision making that some ‘changes’ force.

When I was growing up, for most of the time when you watched TV, you had three channels to switch between. Okay, maybe two more that didn’t really count.

You could even have a weekly booklet that told you the line-up for the week, with actual descriptions of the programs. Then change occurred, everyone was thrilled with more choices.

Four or five choices would have been great, but we got over 600 choices. Good luck trying to read a weekly booklet that was seven inches thick.

I know, it’s an isolated example that includes technology. What should I expect over time?

Okay, here is another one. I spent my youth being healed by Vick’s VapoRub, little blue jar of wonder. It was on my chest, rubbed into my abrasions, stuffed up my nose… I even had it shoved into my mouth, way back there next to my tonsils.

I rarely see it today, but there are nine different versions of NyQuil. I don’t know which one is right. Certainly there must be some that are wrong for me, or there wouldn’t be others on the shelf.

The ramification of change is the need to decide. I like Reuben sandwiches because there is only one decision necessary. By picking a Reuben, all other choices are already made. Run away if they ask what kind of ‘bread’.

By the increased level of the average blood pressure, I’m sure that forced decision making is high on the list for cause.

How many breakfast choices are necessary, or even healthy?

Is it a road? Is it a journey? Is it ambition? Is it the long ball struck cleanly with a three wood, rising against a blue sky? 

My father says, ‘Hey, let’s go for a drive!’ What that really means is ‘Let’s journey’ It’s 2;30 in the afternoon, no suitcases, so it can’t be far, but it might mean dinner at a restaurant before coming home. That means restaurants near the destination. Everything will flow from the first few blocks of driving the car. Technically we have the four cardinal points And everything between. Each turn he takes eliminates choices, but the turn do not define exactness.

After three blocks we are going west to the bay. No more than thirty minutes away, could be the old fishing grounds near the Butler plant, or perhaps under the Bridge. Maybe the Naval Station and the ruins of the Whaling Plant.

We pass the Butler turn off, the choices narrow. We slowly pass the Bridge, so we are heading to the Naval Station, we went through and the road dead ends at the Whaling Plant.

This is where my father changed everything. He made a sharp right turn on a very bad road that climbed the ridge. At the top it wandered a bit before it descended to the Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor. We walked about looking at boats and houseboats. My father told me about John Wayne making a movie here. It was winter, a warm day, but the sun was setting.

And the harbor had a restaurant.

That was the past…

I finally had a chance of a full-time job. As a student I had my share of seasonal work. Seasons are not always based upon the tilt of the earth, there are seasons of production, seasons of selling, and seasons of travel. I explored most of them.

Now I was locked into being a staff member at a college, with seasons of semesters. I suppose I could have treated it like the other jobs, a way station while heading to somewhere else. I didn’t. I liked it here, but I didn’t like the job I was hired to do.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the degree, training, or experience for the other jobs. So I had to develop a ‘drive’. It had not been something that I did normally. Not in school, not in factory jobs, and not even in the military.

I knew the ‘proper’ drive was to get certified for the areas I was interested. I thought perhaps that my drive might skip that part.

Strangely enough it did. For the next five positions, I obtained them without the standard qualifications. I just did the work. And when I found a position that required a four year degree, I made it work with 1.5 years. I was driven, with a 50 hour work week.

I did that for thirty years.

My father-in-law was a golfer. Yes he had an official job, but that was only to provide for his golfing.

He also had a son, slightly older than Sherry, so he had a partner. But he living states away from his condo surrounded by his 18 hole course. He looked to me, ‘Do you golf?’. ‘I play racquet ball. Golf can’t be that hard.’ , I replied.

That started months of the driving range work, short game putting green work. Finally I was ready. I was deadly with a two wood. Even more deadly with a three wood. I didn’t have to try very hard, I had a natural slice to right. So intense that most I landed in the adjacent hole, scattering the golfers there.

In compensation I did have a fiat long 2 iron, but my most accurate was a 7 iron. I could hop skip and jump to the hole it five drives. Maybe then a two putt?

My father-in-law never asked me to play on his course again. To many friends on his course, too many potential friendly deaths. We did go to several courses nearby, where we were strangers. I left my drivers at home and used irons to get close to par.

No.

This is about something found loose in a drawer. A hard drive.

It is an assembly in Thailand, made of parts that have parts that have parts.

Beneath the aluminum cover are platters. Upon the platters are magnetic domains. Within the domains are patterns.

Within the patterns are photographs, letters, accounts, arguments, dreams, and shopping lists.

Somewhere in that hierarchy is a younger version of me, waiting patiently in a folder.

Maybe something written about my father, some secret roads in the Sierras.

Maybe something written about the transition from military to civilian, something about the two divorces in marriage, and the lack of direction.

I hope there is not a treatise on facing the little dimpled ball. So easy to hit, so easy to drive.

I need to power it up. I need to see I different me responding to life back then.

Will I accept the spark and whine of a dying drive?

Utah can be a desolate country. Miles of desert in every direction. Not lifeless, but not life that is recognizable to inhabitants of either continental coast. It is best approached on foot, allowing the change to overwhelm you slowly.

Long before I arrived, Utes and Paiutes knew these lands. They followed water, shade, and seasons where others saw only emptiness. Later came wagons, horses, and men carrying maps. Most passed through. Some stayed.

The desert remained.

Then roads appeared. Steel, rubber, and engines began crossing country once measured in footsteps.

I was born into that change.

A 1947 Willys Jeep Station Wagon. All steel. Two doors in front, two more for passengers, and a rear hatch for whatever needed carrying. 

Veterans trusted my cousins. Farmers trusted my mechanics. I was built to work, and Utah always seemed to have work waiting.

I was formed by pieces, each with their own responsibility, each with their own unique characteristics.

Tires connected us to the earth, most times with warm asphalt, cracked, but mostly smooth. Sometimes the raw rock weathered away to sand, again, warm but yielding. We were lighter than most vehicles, and rarely sank to our hubcaps, which disappeared after a few years.

The earth connection felt right, it kept our speed lower, more sure of our progress. The frame was still rigid, but the ever present rust had thinned the steel in parts. Several places in the floorboards had ‘windows’ to the ground.

The protective paint on the outside had also thinned, making a ‘mottled skin’, more like a reptile, instead of a city car. On the surface, the rust wasn’t hidden, and human hands kept it at bay.

We knew human hands. They came with the original parts that formed us. They came with replacement parts that kept us moving. We sometimes wondered how that happened, accident? Misuse? Or simply age?

A human hand turned the key that allowed the battery to connect. It sat there waiting to be asked, slowly draining its charge. Then suddenly it felt the surge it the generator and all was well.

Human hands gripped the steering wheel, there was movement, some backwards, mostly forwards. Air flowed around the body, hit the flat forward surfaces like a blast furnace, yet flowed through the radiator parts, cooling the water in the engine.

Friction reigned supreme through all of our parts. Wear was met with oil in the crucial connections. Oil seeped through gaskets, coating the steel in black sticky clumps.

In other places the oil was absent, springs creaked, the large ones near the wheels, the small ones in the hood clamps. Movement made noise, even when the engine was turned off.

We are a collection of parts, and parts have parts, yet we are also one object in motion. Some feel the heat, some feel the weight, and some feel the wind. None of us know where we are going.

A human came and things changed again. If our radio could also hear, we would know that the human wanted to take us out of Utah, out of the desert. The human no longer wanted to hitch hike, he wanted to ride in a vehicle as the driver, not the passenger as a favor.

More changes were made, shiny brake pads disappeared, old oil replaced with new, timing was adjusted, windows were cleaned. And early one morning the tires were turning.

We knew that the tires were not perfectly round. Sitting so long waiting, they had formed a flat spot. The heat of the desert, the heat of the road, and the weird rhythm of rotating tires mellowed.

Late afternoon sun from the front meant that we were headed west, the Bonneville Salt Flats in our future.

A day time crossing was possible in something newer with fresh parts. We needed the cool of the night to keep all of our parts together.

There were limitations, the tires were not aligned and serious shimmy occurred over fifty miles an hour.  That meant vehicles coming from behind had to pass us, making a terrible vortex of wind, sound, and light. But traffic was less at night.

The more difficult thing was the oncoming traffic that was going east. It was pushing air and sound directly into our path. It was like being shoved to the ground every two or three minutes.

The springs of the hood clamps screamed with metal abuse, as the ‘shove’ forced air under the hood, trying to flip it up to smash the wind screen.

There was a collective understanding that this needed to stop. But key was still on, the engine still turned, and the tires grabbed asphalt.

The Salt Flats were behind us, but the long grade up to Nevada was ahead. I don’t remember a meeting, or even an agreed consensus. But all of us heard a slight ‘knock’ from the engine. The third piston from the front had developed a ‘wobble’. Perhaps a ring, or a joint, but some part of a part was failing. We all could sense it.

The human could hear it too. He stopped to add thicker oil. The climb was still there, and the knock continued. The human changed the speed, in increased the passing from the rear and the front. It became a ‘perfect storm’!

At the top of the grade, near Wells, a push rod went sideways through the engine block. The third cylinder was broken. The engine stopped, the Jeep continued on in silence, most of the parts perfectly willing to do the job. Gravity won and the tires slowed, the human used the last of the rotation to steer off the road, the passing vehicles still causing havoc, but less so.

For the very few brief moments, it was black and very quiet. Then came the fainter ‘shove’, light, and rattle. It went on for awhile.

The Jeep engine took pride in the fact that bullets could disable a piston, but if the piston was then disconnected, the engine would still run, oscillating slightly, but run.

The human had few tools, and none for the piston.

The human could not stay, he was still moving west, but he left the Jeep by the side of the road, outside of Wells, Nevada. He left a note.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve left the Jeep. I suspect it never wanted the cold damp West coast. Be careful towing, most of the parts are useful. It did well in the Salt Flats.”