The Kathu Pan hand-ax maintains a stony silence about why it was made and what it was used for. But, as a praise-poem to its maker’s skill, it is eloquent. Each indentation in the hand-ax holds not just the memory of its maker’s fingers judging the symmetry of its curved, convex faces, but also the memory of each individual stone flake and the hammer blow which cleaved them from the banded ironstone core.
Related Quotes
Silences
“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.
It is from this journal that I know how my parents believed their love and the birth of their daughters to be a part of something important—a movement fueled by borderless love. The poems, or at least my interpretation of the poems, mourned not just a lost love but also a certain measure of lost optimism about the current condition.
The wealth built in Kimberley set many white people on a trajectory to prosperity. It was a springboard that created a base for further investments and enrichment when more gold deposits were found on the Witwatersrand. The glittering stones buried under the soil created individuals with long-lasting legacies. After 150 years, their surnames are deeply engraved in South Africa, appearing in names of universities, scholarships, towns and a collection of artifacts related to literature, arts and culture. Unfortunately, the generations of those ancestors deprived of mining licenses more than a century ago, had not much to show their labour.
The question must have lingered in me because the next morning I awakened to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, the eulogy standing in the air before me like a composition. That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference.
The eulogist had been remembering herself as a young doctor coming under the formative influence of the older one. The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, a dramatic buildup occurred, one that had layered into it the descriptive feel of a young person’s apprenticeship, medical practices in a time of social change, and a divided attachment to a mentor who could bring herself only to correct, never to praise. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that had stirred me; caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy, not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but— even more vividly—the presence of the one doing the remembering.
Silences
“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.