Reading · Lodestone Chronicles

I’ve been doing this version of Lodestone—here—for a year now. And, as many of you know, this is but the most recent expression of a decades-long effort to get stuff out of my head and into an even more unstable medium. I like that. Also, though, it makes for a horrible business, which is what so much of ‘content production’ is these days. I’d love for people to feel that an entirely speculative list of cookbooks is worth some recompense to the author/s. Or that an occasional essay on death and art had some value other than the time you offer it. In a world of marketing and networking and all that jazz, it might. But it’s also true that that world is becoming, it is on its way to something else.

So, here I am, largely where I want to be—tapping out these messages in a digital bottle thrown into an ever-enlarging digital ocean, continuing to use em-dashes and play with language in a way that I enjoy, even if The Machine worms its way closer and closer to me.

Happy Anniversary to all of you. Thanks for reading. I cannot say I’ll keep doing this as long as you keep doing that, but there will probably always be something. I appreciate a world of curiosity and play, and it has been a joy sharing it with you.

It has been a while—something noticed in looking back over the last year and finding not a single example—since I’ve offered a link to something on the Internet. This used to be a function of Lodestone, back when it was a desperate rearguard action to find the little grains of wheat amongst the ever-expanding chaff fields.

Let me, then, suggest a little visit to the Wikenigma. While not nearly as monstruous as its eponym, it does offer something as equally engaging, a record—in Wikipedian form—of things we simply don’t know. Obviously, this is close to my heart, and it is entirely possible there to find those little rabbit holes that might be the purest good of this unreal world. The article on ‘chills,’ for instance, articulates very clearly what we know about them as a phenomenon, but also that we have no idea how they happen, or why. Check it out.

In the spring of 1937, a Franco-Soviet archaeological mission disappeared somewhere in the Zeravshan foothills.

For decades, all that remained were rumors: a sealed chamber, missing photos, a vanished queen, maps charred and then drowned, a crate delivered sans provenance.

Now, fragments of the expedition—and its finds—have begun to surface. Vessels and implements made from local clays but shaped in distant styles, domestic forms reworked into ceremonial ones, fulsome in their power, fragments repaired and re-fired time after time, long after their initial creation, each a new/same creation evoking/invoking something. Though initially dated to the Late Bronze Age, the assemblage contains elements that span centuries and geographies. It is a confusion.

And as I begin the work of reconstructing the remnants, and starting again to build a sort of interpretive framework, I’m faced again and again with a figure that presumably lies at the heart of all of it (although in fact was found sitting absolutely upright, encased in a silver wire frame), and one named only in a fragmentary—and perhaps funerary—inscription: She who refused the feast of obedience. Whether ruler, heretic, or invention, this wayward queen seems to be a key piece for a puzzle I’ve not seen the whole of. If you’d like to help out, let me know.

A poem, not a haiku, but something of the changing seasons, and of this place, and so I include it here.