Strange times

I am feeling dislocated today. I literally was; the university-wide walkout/teach-in/general strike induced me to find an alternative for my once-a-week one hour seminar, now desperately off schedule. So I invited the participants, if they wished, to be my guests for lunch off campus.

Waiting for them at the coffee shop across from campus, I let the chanting of slogans fade into the background and began to read the pages of a dissertation about a Neolithic site in Taiwan, where groups of post holes signify the ghostly presence of houses long gone. Something about the task, the time, and the place made me realize how oddly we write about once-inhabited places. Because my student is not a native English speaker, I am editing as I go, not simply reading and commenting. And so I am thinking about every sentence and clause in a way I only ever do with my own writing (and far too rarely there, really).

The post holes, my student says, "are" dwellings. Which of course they are not, and never even were.

I have written about post holes myself; about the concept of them, using them as my example of a trace in contrast to a monument. I admire the work of two other colleagues, who also write about this most humble of traces of everyday life. But I have never quite had the reaction I had today: the post holes are not even holes, of course; they are color contrasts in soil (my contribution to this meditation); they are where there once was a post set in a pit (my colleagues' far more important contribution); and we take these long-vanished posts as structural beams that used to support walls and lintels and through these cross-beams, roofs. (I want to write rooves, it is what I say...)

Ghost houses. Not-dwellings. But what made me so self-conscious about this today was the comment I found myself writing, which was about post holes of different diameters: be sure, I said, to explain why there are post holes of different diameters-- the larger structural, the smaller to support walls, furniture, or other fixtures.

The post hole isn't even really a trace for me. It is an index that points towards something that once existed, but that left no physical trace: the rooves, the benches, the shelves and lofts I imagine were there. The dwellings.

And so ancient Taiwan was there with me today.