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From 2016 to 2019 I traveled to areas with geological and anthropological significance, including the Southwest United States, Taiwan, and Iceland, meeting researchers involved in field excavations, visiting museums and zoos, observing the total solar eclipse, and considering the ways that people research, process, and consider their place in the history of this planet. A supplementary text gathers anecdotes from my travels, presenting a blend of world mythology with information gleaned from researchers, sometimes lapsing into Murakami-esque magical realism.
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Words in the Mouth of the Cave, 2019
All over the ball of dirt, the grass grew as cushion or carpet for the ground. It gave the ball of dirt color, too – a beautiful green carpet.
Most of the way to the site I was trying to reach the water behind my seat, and at the same time trying to remember a detail from the show about latency. It seemed that if I could reach one I could reach the other.
I switched the hat to my left arm and the shirt to my right, and remembered the one-sided man, a dangerous figure seen in many parts of the world. Approaching the exit my eyes burned with sweat and sunscreen.
I pulled off blindly and doused my face. I had no idea where I was or how I got there. I realized later I had entered an alternate reality, one in which animals talk and up is down.
HILL BLOCKS VIEW
GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST
In the darkness I could hear water dripping and echoes from my youth, and something brushed against my leg. The tour guide told me in a whisper that the oldest organisms were the easiest to find, and there were some on the ground if I wanted to try one. I put one in my mouth, and tasted my tongue. I backed away slowly, brushing away my tracks.
- -
When I woke the team was pacing off the perimeter. We walked on the ceiling as the rooms were subtracted. The structure was like dirt, and as I moved the trowel I thought, how high is this foundation?
I asked the museum official who happened to be sitting at a table full of skulls if I could take a picture, and since I had a tripod it took me a while. I apologized and she asked if I had seen the Southwest yet, and if there was a table there. Southwest? Was she asking about a mesa? I tried to explain that I saw part of it but I couldn’t remember which part, so I trailed off and thanked her before leaving.
Next door there were Airavata, Glyptotherium, Devonian fish, Nothrnonychus, Stegamastadon, and a billion year-old blob in a spaghetti box.
INVISIBLE AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE
DOWN-RIVER GIFT
RELIGIOUS GREEK STATUES 50% OFF
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Surface trenches revealed bones, corrugated jars, polychrome jars, fragments of plates, areas dedicated to grinding corn.
Tools from the Paleoindian period raise the possibility that fourteenth-century villagers found a much older tool, recognized it as ancient, and placed it on the floor of the room when they left.*
Some of the students showered in the baptismal, while others slept or sorted bones and pottery. A student played his six-string in the abandoned break room.
Dr. Schollmeyer showed me the remains of the creatures that I saw from my car. She noted that some of them used to be larger, and others hadn’t lived there for centuries.
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In each of the places, something was revealed or concealed, usually through the darkness. In Iceland, in the summer, it was light all night. I kept waiting for children to spin up the driveway, as Marker made them do.
I tore the map in two while at the same time dividing the food, splitting the slip with my left and halving the pie with my right.
Did I mention I had two bites of langoustine at dinner last night?
MINI MAL
HOLY MOSES WASH
I felt dizzy and backed into a rock at the beach, where I walked with my camera in a bakery bag, and bottomed out the rental in a pothole. I had to be carried onto the duck boat and propped against the tail. A dinghy driver rode up, and soon we saw his baby: a block of ice older than our country. I let it float across my tongue like the century.
MOUNT SNEFFELS
The man in the upstairs window of an auto shop said he didn’t think the barrier I was looking at was so interesting and told me he put it there to keep things from rolling downhill.
The toilet had completely stopped working in my room but when I got back my stool was gone and in its place a ray of sunshine.
I walked along a lava tube, which was cold and smelled like eggs. Someone in the darkness said, this never gets old, then she shined her light at the ceiling and said, spores! Her husband said, Mmmm, spores…
LAVA FLOWS IN TUBES
IF STUMPS COULD TALK
AUTHORITIES FIND ONLY SMELLS
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The earliest evidence of humans in the Americas is a series of coprolites aged 14,000 years. Dr. Dennis Jenkins led the team that discovered them. Now they are searching a different set of caves, finding projectiles.
The dry caves were on the shoreline. The desert was a lake. Dennis asked me what I noticed about the rocks on the ground. They looked like eggs to me. He said, Correct, they are rounded.
Down in the pit a line of ash marked the event horizon, below which everything was older except for toads, moving across millennia. Careful positions were needed to preserve context, as Dennis said the earliest finds were not necessarily the first, they were merely the ones he had intercepted.
They moved like toads, an inch per day, noting the northing, easting, and elevation, kneeling on gardening pads.
Things were arranged by time and space, with the oldest on the bottom.
At the rim of the pit, a researcher told me, These were not random movements — this was the same brain that designed the microchip, a complex being who mapped the land and knew how to live on it —
Someone didn’t just happen to come along and take a dump in my cave, said Dennis.
Stacks of corn and peanuts. Aged lands with wrinkles, and no sense of scale. Disembodied hands leaning on a landscape.
In many origin stories, when worlds become uninhabitable people move through the ceiling to the next world.
- -
Tourists chose their itineraries based on the shape of the island. We floated around and used our bracelets to pay for things. Our belongings got tucked in lockers, and after undressing in front of the others we retrieved them.
A man said he saw a mountain within a mountain and I pictured a molehill of nesting pasts. I vacuumed the sand out of my tires, walked around the river, read a little, ate breakfast.
My seatmate on the flight home was a butcher, a sailor, a pest killer, an accountant, and a gardener, and said his name was Morpheus the dream god. He said when he was a sailor the horizon was never more than 12 miles away (he said this as we flew over a mountain munching on peanuts).
People were named after their actions, or their physical attributes.
Naming was what the gods did to pass the time, like knitting or watching TV.
- -
I saw graffiti of a Nike Swoosh on a rock as I munched on yams and succulents.
TALL OUTDOOR TYPE SEEKS RELATIONSHIP
We waited in the vestibule with people coming and going (you had to turn the handle but they slammed it and it bounced back). Older men especially pretended not to notice, then a family of six came and threw the door and it hit me on the hand and they didn't bother to close it.
- -
Here, almost no one uses the Latin. Instead they say Terrible Lizard or Three Horn Face.
I spent the morning searching for a scrap of paper on which I wrote some numbers I wanted to reference, along with a bunch of signatures (I was trying out new styles). I dug through the trash and found a bag labeled Bean Threads, then dug through its contents: dirty balloon, a wrapper, clumps of hair, fruit pits, apricot skin, tissue, peach cores, pepper tops, floss.
When history cannot be accounted for, it must be created, or cobbled together using thrift store parts.