this story came to me all at once, pretty much out of nowhere, back in the late 1980’s.
I would say I transcribed it late at night between stints avoiding my graduate schoolwork back when I was working at IBM during the day.
the disk on which I originally saved the file died, and I was shocked to find that while I had backups of most “important” stuff, I did not have a backup of wiegand. I found one of those services that recover data from dead disks. do you want to know how they did it? the dude opened up the drive, put the spindle on a turntable, that is a record player, and with some alligator clips contraption wired to the pinouts, spun it up and read the data out. yep. that’s only part of the provenance of these bits.
in 1992 I wrapped the text in the html more or less as you see it here.
actually, the original had some images that I thought captured some part of the theme I was going for: paintings from the caves at lascaux, a statue of an unknown akkadian king, and so on. I later decided to elide those images, as I properly did not have rights to reproduce them, but maybe its useful to know that that’s the sort of thing I had in mind.
I have long been fascinated by lost time, the many ages and cultures of which we know practically nothing. how many lives, how many nation-tribes, entire cultures complete with their own histories, world views, relationships with other nations or supertribes, shared cultural contexts and religions or mythologies, all of which are entirely lost to us now. maybe the stories were handed down from poet to poet or even represented in some form on skins or wood or some other material that has not survived to come down to us. all we have is what may have been carved in stone or painted in hidden caves that just happened to have the right temperature and humidity over the millennia since these people, just like us, wandered this same earth.
some elements of the story are inspired by classical epic poetry, including the “life within the life” from the mahabharata, written perhaps 2,000 years ago, but with an oral tradition probably much older. or the oldest known story, the epic of gilgamesh, a mere 6,000 years old. other elements are an attempted imagining of the stories that must have been told in the time of the cave paintings in southern europe perhaps 10,000 years ago. yet we think men might have marched across the plains of europe for 20,000 years or more before that, or across the african savannah in and around the rift valley for nearly 1,000,000 years. how many such stories have been lost in the misty vales of time?
a long time ago my friend sam told me about a literary theory that spoke of successfully capturing “the texture, the feel, the smell of a time gone by”
that’s what I was trying to capture here — the smell of a hypothetical tribe of hunter gatherers living somewhere in the southern central eurasian continent, after the domestication of horses, but before recorded history, and of whom nothing now is known.
I wasn’t really thinking about meter or any of that. I just wrote what seemed to come naturally. but on reflection, it turns out to be similar to some vedic meters, with four foot stanzas of eleven or twelve syllables each, more or less.
go figure.
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