There are a few things said and written that are actually true This is one of them
Everything is temporary, it is merely a matter of perspective. Everything that you say will be forgotten Everything that you create will be destroyed or slowly decay into oblivion Everything that you write will be erased To Everything that you hear, listen carefully, for it it rarely repeated.
It is highly unlikely that even your grand children will know your name, or what you did or what you said. Perhaps if you were great, by deeds good or evil, some might remember, But greatness is often earned, but rarely acknowledged and quickly forgotten.
So you would like a small measure of immortality ? Just a lingering sense that your little life was not utterly in vain and will not be utterly erased, then this is all I can give you .
The Stones that Speak
In deep time all objects return to their native elements. All metals are chemically reactive. All resins oxidise. All ceramics are inert, but only by degrees. All objects will decay and their purpose and history be known to only by the eternal gods.
A select few of the objects hewn by Men from the elements, gifts of the gods, will partly endured.
A few moths ago I visited the Museum and art gallery in my home town. In a basement was an exhibit of archaelogical artefacts from
the very dawn of civilization itself and possibly the actual place
where writing was invented. Here was exhibited some small humble
artifacts of the craft of the scribe.
The stone tablets are not
the nicely shaped ,polished slabs of dressed, hard stone. They dont
look like the polished slabs that Moses was said to have carried down from the Mount , as our cultural archetypes suggest, They had a humbler origin.
The
stone tablets were actually small hand sized, potato shaped clods of
clay, completely covered with cunieform script. There was not a spare
patch on this stone that was blank.
They were in this shape
because perhaps the scribe, his apprentice or his slave had to take a
handfull of clay, and kneaded it by hand into this little clod of
uniform consistancy. When the scribe had been satisfied that this green
clay was of suitable quality he embossed it with his stylus, a piece of
reed. When the records had been made, the clod was roasted in a
fire and the clay transformed to an enduring ceramic. It would probably
have been carefully kept by its owner and presented from time to
time to various officials, probably around tax time, for this little
tablet was a record of a mans possessions. So many oxen, goats, wives,
children, slaves and other chattels. The little tablet also bore
the seal of the scribe, his monogram. I suppose that made it
"official".
I could still read the original writing, as written six thousand hot summers and wretched winters ago.
This
little tablet with its charming, but now irrelevant record will endure
the curious gaze of a million passing admirers, fires, floods and
thefts. But chemistry will not be thwarted for ever, its elements
will be leached, the substance will return to the earth that spawned
it. But at least this scribes' writing, his slaves work will remain
readable, even if the meaning is lost for maybe one million years
before the particles of sand in which it gets buried sinter together
and tablet and sand and clay again become indistinguishable as
sandstone, solid rock....once again.
The art of making
stones speak is an ancient one. Only the technology has moved on. There
are now incredible devices to be had, that are cheap enough for the
common man to purchase and use. cutting tools are now
encrusted with Adamant, not merely to bemuse the incredulous
stares of the idle and curious, but to cut and polish because before
Crystalline Carbon, all other minerals must rend.
So Here after this maudlin discourse is a positive idea.
With a diamond encrusted saw blade it is possible to cut the
hardest stone, and that stone is dressed by the blade to a near mirror
finish. It is literally easier to cut a lump of quartz in perfect
halves with an angle grinder and diamond wheel that it is to cut a
block of frozen butter!
It is now also possible to purchase for little money diamond encrusted rotary burrs.
It
is very easy to use a diamond rotary burr to write , to engrave ,onto
the hardest rock as easily as one would write on paper. If you cannot
cut a rock, at least write something on a smooth quartz pebble.
Archaeoligists
are forever fossicking around in ancient garbage pits and fossilized
latrines for the artefacts of civilizations and people that have come
and gone. They are looking for what these people did and said and from
that we learn what lessons it pleases us to learn. One enduring problem
that the Archaeologist allways faces is the dating of layers and
artefacts. The years have only had consistent numbering since the
time of the Caesars and it mostly never occured to ancient artefact
creators and monument biulders to date their creations. Even the mighty Romans named the years , not by a number, but by the name of the current Consul.
If
you do write in stone, date it ! Thats all I ask, that , and that
you do actually write something in the stone. What do you do with
your stone ? It really does not matter, but a landfill would be a good
place to place it. It will be here that some future fossicker, treasure
hunter or archaeologist will find it. Only stones will survive in
that envoironment and with them maybe something you wrote some number
of uncountable eons ago. I suggest that future discovery is
virtually certain. If you have the time and patience, write the
same message in the differant languages that you might know.
Write
something, anything. Possibly a simple greeting, greeting or
curse...it hardly matters. However I would ask that you consider
the
thing that you write because it will endure for maybe up to one million
years ! Date it ! Best method is to refer to current
astronomical events, as these can always be back-caulculated in the
distant future.
