Prof S. A. Leach, Department of Textual Studies
---
The document in question was discovered on the vast moors several hundred Earth-miles to the south of the site of Song of the Husband. The vat in which it had been preserved was largely undamaged, but the surrounding settlement was in ruins; evidence suggests that the site was once occupied by administrative buildings and spaces for the communal care of children, as well as some large residential dwellings. We might reasonably assume that the society from which the piece originates was considerably technologically advanced for the general standards of the planet, partly because of the excavation nearby of ruins resembling mining infrastructure.
Of course, I am aware of the dangers inherent in designating this artefact a ‘diary’, and thus connoting the specific meaning of that term within Earth cultures. Certainly, our conception of a diary as an ‘inner’ voice externalised, a dialogue with ‘oneself’ or an imagined reader invented solely to facilitate ‘private’ expression, is somewhat inapplicable to a society for whom the category of the individual was irreducibly complex. [1] However, a few notable features of the prose inform this categorisation. It is marked by a certain casualness of production (that is, a clear contingency of expression upon immediate circumstance), is addressed to no other individual or collective, and is alternately fragmentary and clearly structured, in formal terms. In comparison to other documents from this period and region one might call the writing ‘artless’, if one were more disposed than I am to a binary division between self-aware ‘art’ and other forms of production – or perhaps more confident of this society’s concrete cultural practices or assumptions which might justify such a distinction. Above all else, it is the distinctly unguarded, ‘ordinary’ quality of the writing (again, in relative terms) which, I believe, sanctions the assumption that what we have here is something like a ‘diary’, something from which we can learn about a singular experience of a life in the words of the person who lived it, at a remarkable time for this writer and their world.
With all this in mind, I want to resist the urge to narrate. It will become clear that in doing so, I am also in no small degree resisting the general tone of what has been discovered. Taken as a whole, this writing constitutes a series of reflections on consequential events, with a clear chronology. It is the nightmare of the self-respecting anthropologist or historian, however, to find oneself blithely passing off one’s ‘own’ assumptions about the way in which one thing follows another as accurate accounts of a situation under study. This is enough of a minefield in Earth-history (and I am not even an Earth-historian – I am a scholar of literature and society). We do not know how the people of the Lye Planet experienced causation; we are only just starting to understand the way in which some of them told stories. I will endeavour, therefore, to ignore the clear thrust of the piece towards tale-telling. Instead, I will present a series of possibilities suggested by the text, in the hope that colleagues at the LPRU may take up one or more of these lines of enquiry.
***
Firstly, it seems that during the early period of the Decline, communities on the moors (and, in all likelihood, further afield) became familiar with the more or less consistent presence of travellers from other parts of the planet. At the height of the Decline, the key factors driving these journeys need little speculation: climatic instability, the sudden inability of certain regions to produce sufficient food, a growth in territorial violence. However, it goes without saying that the movement of people in general occurred before notable societal collapse, as we learn from the Moorland diary:
Between Moor and Star We hear They climbed into Here – when Now was a Seed – Story/tellers – wore a different Plain once, let spool on the Ground – pulled Them to Us
A few things are unclear about this account: whether the people the diarist makes reference to here were representative of a broader trend, whether they crossed the moors only once or multiple times, and indeed when their visit(s) occurred in relation to the diarist’s lifetime. We have learnt from Kiran Leonard of ‘solitary nomads, who took to journeying from village to village in pursuit of knowledge or enduring distraction’ during the Decline period. From the evidence of the diary, a dominant strain in the attitude of this sedentary community towards these rovers was that they were out for mere distraction, rather than more concrete material needs, and thus were somewhat undeserving of sympathy:
Wanting Shine of Tree-Bark, they came – wanting not Wood-Flesh under, to build their Bodies – wanting not Shelter of Canopy
We can easily imagine this resentment: what right did anyone have to take their minds off impending disaster when everyone, the whole planet, was going to have to live through it? What good was entertainment when the world was known to be dying? It appears that some of these visitors were virtuosic performers, bolstering this disdain:
When Now was a Seed, We hear, Story/tellers spat – made What-Is go sideways till it sliced our Skins – Heat to cook up Howls – They displayed Themselves, put Us inside of spinning Voices and Bodies
Push Here from you, We told Them when Now was a Seed – put on again your Fabrics of another Place, You are overflowing You are too much Movement - Now is Grown and We find those Words again in our Old Heaps – scatter Them for new Story/tellers, who try to push from Them the Cold Sun
As is indicated by the second passage above in particular, I am dwelling on the treatment of these travellers in the past because the response to them seems to have conditioned this community’s disposition towards migration throughout the Decline period, well into the diarist’s lifetime. As more and more people passed through the settlement, even in light of the need many must have been in, the community’s insistence that these were ‘story/tellers’, out for diversion and nothing else, became all the more trenchant.
It bears elaborating that my use/coinage of the term ‘story/teller’ here, and in the diary extracts I have quoted, is a necessarily clumsy translation, but also conveys something central to the community’s repulsion at both waves of traveller. The exact sense the word seems to carry in the original is in fact closer to an English word like ‘unreal’ or ‘unworldly’; I have, however, avoided these straightforward adjectives because the planetary term straddles a curious ambiguity. This is the semiotic distance between a thing that is itself apart from the real or the known, and something that consciously emanates a rejection or suspension of those categories (in the way that the earlier travellers appear to have done through their performances). As a term of abuse or indictment, it designated the migrants as simultaneously bearers of fictions, and, in a sense, fictions themselves - in that they were represented departures from the actual, the knowable. We will understand the full significance of this accusation later on, as we discuss in greater detail the semantic system of this people. For now, it is enough to say that these migrants were visible reminders of everyone’s vulnerability to the effects of the Decline, of everyone’s possible future displacement, and, ultimately, of the community’s eventual fate: to take on the status of fiction (non-existence). One can imagine the therapeutic value of asserting that the Decline-migrants were positively flaunting their ‘unworldliness’, that their disruption of the fabric of everyday life in the settlement was some kind of ostentatious performance, that the psychological and ethical crisis they presented was of their own malicious intent.
One begins to wonder if the earlier visitors ever came at all, or whether instead the story of their passing was a useful myth for the community in their rejection (as we shall see) of those in need during the Decline. Supporting this speculation is the fact that this gesture to the (relatively) recent past of the community is the only such reference in the entire Moorland diary; as shall later be discussed, other than this visitation, there is an astonishing silence from the diarist on anything other than what we might call for now, for brevity’s sake, ‘deep’ history.
***
The second general point that I want to make following this translation is that, put simply, the Decline played a powerful role in prompting communities into new forms of social organisation. At first glance, these structures might appear to represent departures from the tenets of the ‘planetary mythology’ that Kiran Leonard has written on. To re-state and paraphrase Leonard’s claim: central to the ideology of the planet prior to the Decline was, simultaneously, symbiosis (reciprocity between equal elements of the world, such as in biological processes, craft, or farming) and one-ness, that is, a designation of ‘different’ aspects of the world as identical - not only as equal parts of a ‘unified living God-organism’ but also as parallel statements of a single phenomenon. Leonard writes that this set of beliefs ‘strongly discouraged hierarchies and individualism’, and yet, as we shall see, hierarchy (of a sort) was deeply ingrained in the diarist’s society. [2]
A crucial addendum to this hypothesis, though, is that on further investigation a continuity between the basic assumptions of that ideology and the social structure adopted by the diarist’s community can be divined. It is just that these connections, under the weight of the Decline, encompass incoherence and contradiction. The relationship between thought and practice is certainly not characterised by a linear determination; we should not understand the ‘planetary mythology’ as a doctrine in accordance with which societies were administered, nor as a collective consciousness that arose naturally from the ways in which communities conducted themselves.
In light of this, the Moorland diarist’s society appears to have been organised as follows: the residents of the settlement lived together on a relatively small area of land; many residential buildings were communal, and agrarian work on collectively held sections of moorland was shared roughly equally. Neither the dynamics of labour and ownership, nor the structure of the family, seem to have provided any model of hierarchy to be projected through the social body as a whole. This is believably consistent with a worldview that claims a general metaphysical state of interdependence. Complicating this image of harmony and collectivism is the undeniable presence of a single authority figure. Confined to as few words as possible, the role of this figure appears to have been to make things happen. Or, in the diarist’s words:
This One holds Action – this One down inside the Name, deep: Act-Holder – This One makes Action still, makes Lives move around It – We Others keep Lives still only.
‘Action’ applies not to the everyday practices necessary for personal survival, the care of others in the community, or the generation and maintenance of supplies, but to decisions of great public significance. I would like to note that I am following the diarist in making such a distinction; actions that maintained life as it was, rather than causing decisive change to the routines of the community, hardly seem to have been considered actions at all. (Alternately, it could be that the word I have been translating as ‘action’ was introduced specifically to refer to the doings of this authority – before the inauguration of this system of command, behaviour may have been expressed through language in a thoroughly different manner).
This figure was the representation and distillation of all responsibility associated with the organisation of communal life: town planning, agricultural strategy, public ceremony, calendar creation, political power, spiritual authority, law-giving and interpretation, punishment, expansionism – the list could go on. In theory, however, it was not the whims or preferences of this individual that determined the actions they took, but the behaviour of another, possessing an altogether different kind of power. This parallel pole of authority would periodically leave the settlement for the wilds of the moor. [3] Whilst there, they would undergo a mystical process which was never revealed to the rest of the community, but which consisted of being buffeted by incredibly fast, incredibly cold winds (perhaps the LPRU’s meteorological department will be able to investigate a possible relationship between this frequent extreme weather and the effects of the Decline.) On their return, this ‘cold-holder’ (as the diarist refers to them) would speak a few short phrases to the central power, the ‘act-holder’, who would then pass a binding decree affecting any or all members of the community.
Importantly, these spoken pieces were not ‘advice’ or ‘counsel’. Neither ‘interpretation’ nor ‘translation’ are apt terms for what the act-holder did with what was spoken to them, nor for the relationship of the cold-holder to the wind. Neither ‘learned’ or were ‘informed’ by the previous occurrence in this chain of events – nor would it be quite accurate to even see this process as one of cause and effect at all. Instead (and this is where the strange continuity with the planetary mythology becomes apparent), the experience of the wind, the speech of the cold-holder, and the actions of the act-holder were related by being one with each other. These elements did not merely correspond, but were in fact the same thing; they were expressions of an identical aspect of the universal organism. That they followed each other chronologically was incidental. Likewise, the cold-holder did not understand themselves as subordinate to the act-holder, but merely as possessing a different version of the same capacity. In place of a clear description of the precise power-relation between the two figures, we have this series of statements from the diarist (it seems that the phrases on the left represent the cold-holder, and those on the right refer to the act-holder):
This community is an excellent rejoinder to those of us at the LPRU who would dismiss the influence of planetary mythology over social transformation in the Decline period, merely because such change might seem to break with our own simplistic and presumptive interpretations. The central beliefs of the mythology could provide ideological flesh for even rigidly hierarchical societal skeletons – could justify even the rejection of hungry, desperate people. Indeed, one of the directives of the act-holder detailed in the diary is the exclusion of the Decline-migrants from the territory populated by the community, and an enforced ban on the provision of food or shelter to them. This command is described without additional comment from the diarist.
***
As we have acknowledged, other than the visit of the initial story/tellers, the diarist makes no reference whatsoever to the society of the recent past. They present their community as having had no tangible history, no alternative form prior to the state of social affairs described in their diary. This is perhaps attributable to the writer’s youth (all evidence suggests them to be adolescent or younger), or to their disinterest in providing, in this text at least, any kind of schematic history of the settlement (evidence, maybe, of a totally different approach to chronology, which I attempted to accommodate for by caveat in my introduction). Despite this, the diarist was aware of an explosive origin to the social system contemporary to their writing: a rupture in an undescribed, unacknowledged status quo, but a rupture nonetheless, unambiguously connected to the Decline:
When the Cold Sun was a Seed We put our World down and picked up a Difference – We needed to tear into now – We needed Straight Lines – no Obstacles - no Glut
So there is a silence with regards to the past – with one possible, and crucial, exception. In reading the diary, we see a change in the relationship between the act-holder and the cold-holder related specifically to a conceptual category that seems to defy the idea of a linear history. Late in the text, the diarist describes a decision on behalf of the act-holder to establish a clearing in the centre of the settlement for the display of objects recovered from the moor. Such artefacts were presented as records of earlier (or, merely, other) incarnations of the community, in order to bolster a sense of profound connection to their specific patch of moorland, alongside what we might call an appreciation for tradition, cultural origins, and continuity. The time period these objects were assigned to, referred to by the diarist as ‘the Now shared with Tree Cores’ seems to have existed in the mind of the community as somewhat ahistorical in the transcendent authenticity and value that it conferred on discoveries.
We learn from the diary that this practice began when some small contraptions described as ‘Breathers of Small Music’ were discovered in the roots of a tree on the high moor, and that soon the search for more and more such objects for exhibition became the main topic of the act-holder’s decrees. Regular parties of ‘archaeologists’ (my gloss, of course) were sent out from the settlement, often forbidden from returning until something for the clearing was found. As the endeavour got underway, it seems that something unprecedented occurred: the act-holder began to ask the cold-holder questions, began to task them with the recovery, from the moor wind, of specified pieces of information.
Below is part of the diarist’s description of this shift. Specifically, they detail here a situation in which a mysterious artefact (a structure of unclear proportions) has been brought to the settlement. The act-holder has declared an intent to reproduce the exact context of the object’s ‘original’ use – or rather, its use in the enigmatic ‘other’ time - in the exhibition space, harnessing the full capacity of the community to do so – if the cold-holder can discover this use.
Incidentally, in case it wasn’t already apparent, it was the diarist who held the position of cold-holder - for their entire life as far as is apparent. I want to introduce this piece of information in as sober and anti-sensational a manner as possible, although of course I acknowledge that it makes this particular document dizzyingly exciting – not to mention daunting - from a research perspective.
When the Act-Holder brought those Parts of the Now shared with Tree Cores into Here that One held Speech out to Me which was closed – did not hold, grasped instead – and to build Myself because I was down in that Name Cold-Holder deep I had to Fill the Hand held long
to hold the Doings of the Parts of the Now shared with Tree Cores – all of Us could hold those Doings if I did – My Holding, the Edge of their Holding
One of the Parts comes Now pulled into Here by many Friends in one Body – A Space – a Basin fit for Life to swill in – a Seed Pod rattle – a great Cave in the Cliffs swallow – a Bulb Creatures make from hardened Hair – all These – and to open Closed Speech I will hold Cold and know this Space
I wish briefly to put to one side the activity of the diarist, in order to make my third proposal, which is semantic rather than sociological. This is that the way in which metaphor dominates the writing that we have so far excavated from this part of the planet is connected to the planetary ideology of organic one-ness. The example of the diarist’s community teaches us that the ‘unified living God-organism’ contained among its components not only material elements but also utterances and political acts, alongside consciousness itself: why not, I wish to ask, aspects of language, too?
There is significant suggestion in the Moorland diary that this writer at least considered semantic units as being nestled, as their own entities, in the same all-encompassing unity as the rest of the phenomenal world. In the light of this, the claim of a fundamental rift between the thing itself and the signification used to denote it that has long prevailed in a certain strain of Earthly linguistics begins to lose its coherence in relation to the writing under study.
Here is an extract from the diary, to help illustrate just what I’m getting at:
I hold Wind – it hurts with Speed and Cold but I stitch it Still and Others move around – Others I must hold still also for Speech, Swirl of What lives – Loom underfoot to sift through too – What will be said is between my Fingers - I hold on, hold Wind and Other and not too tight or It will be Nothing but fine Dust – not too loose or there will be no Stillness, no holding at all on the Moor the Cold Scar open wide and dry
These words they Snarl – I am the same as Them we rub Eyes – and Them with the Wind living apart together
And when cleaning the Wool I hold the Cold - when hacking the Crop I hold the Cold – When Bodies meet in Joy in Anger I hold the Cold - When Strands meet, when there’s no Crumble to Dust I speak
These extracts depict the diarist’s contact with the winds in the role of cold-holder, and the process of devising an utterance to present to the act-holder in response. We can glimpse here the conceptual nuance which must be conveyed by all referential language in the diarist’s culture. That is: that any word is, at its root, the same kind of thing as what it is describing; it exists in the same way. Words are parts of the living world on their own terms, equal and irreducibly unique parts of the organic whole. And at the same time, they are exactly the same as what they correspond to in the world, united through the whole. They are both infinitely closer to, and infinitely further away from, the thing(s) that they refer to than we can possibly conceptualise. To convey this apparent contradiction, those who used language in this part of the planet turned to something like metaphor. For ease, we at the LPRU have been converting the planetary form of expression into the range of metaphors we see jostling for space in our translations, but strictly speaking, this mysterious and untranslatable linguistic operation is not quite covered by that most Earthly of concepts.
In the study of semantics on Earth, we refer to ‘live’ metaphors: conscious attempts to encourage contemplation of the relationship things have to each other through a poetic collision of two ostensibly dissimilar terms (‘my life had stood a loaded gun’), and ‘dead’ metaphors: metaphors so central to the structure of our thought that they have ceased to register as combinations of different terms at all (‘time is running out’). When everything is like everything else, all terms similar and dissimilar at the same time, growing apart but expressions of a single phenomenon, neither of these semantic operations work in the slightest. And yet, in my translation of this text, I have found that the metaphor, which insists on the likeness of unlike things, the closeness that is nestled inside distance, is the familiar semantic device that most fits the diarist’s rather beautiful evocation of ‘holding’ a word alongside a thing – not too tightly, not too loosely. The word belongs to the speaker or the writer, and is at the same time absolutely, ineluctably ‘other.’ [4]
***
If the full implications of these proposals seem too intricate to grasp, it’s because they are: our conceptual apparatus simply is not sufficiently aligned with that of the diarist’s to fully articulate the specific operations of the kind of language I am gesturing towards. A better theorist than I might be able to describe ordinary, everyday meaning-making on the planet in a more illuminating fashion – or even to have a vague sense of what it would mean to communicate within such a semantic system – but in the meantime I wish to focus on an instance covered by the Moorland diary in which this system splutters, falters in the face of something new. The context of this extract will be familiar:
On the Moor, finding Speech to put in the Grasping Hand, and Winds from a New Place, Spilt Ink Winds pooling black over my Feel of Them, bristling Skin of the Moor, no Speech at first – catching, slipping, catching, slipping, and again
Then, into Here falls Hard-Edged Speech – I test its Shape, Corners, Whorls, Hollows – One Thing and Nothing Else – Less World in It – But it feels in One Hand like Wind in the Other knows It shouldn’t but does
The Life of the Space? Shoe-Box.
In their attempt to ‘hold’ an utterance equal to these strange winds, the diarist encounters something that is not a metaphor at all: the phrase ‘shoe-box.’ The act-holder has broken with convention in asking a question and thus delimiting the kind of speech that they can be presented with, and in response (it seems), the cold-holder encounters an unfamiliar kind of language. These are words which refer to function, restricting the complexities of what something is to what it does – what it was built to do – however profoundly confusing this is given the (assumedly very big) artefact in question. This structure was a box for shoes – and, crucially, nothing else, however intricately entangled it is with the whole of being.
Of course, to share this revelation would present a rupture in itself: to describe something in this way would be to fly in the face of its oneness with, its closeness/distance to/from, all other things. But at this stage, these strange new terms existed in the diarist’s mind (and on the pages of the diary) only. It is what happened next that is truly unprecedented.
… with the Act-Holder, the full Now, outgrowth of That Time – that One reaches with Closed Speech to Me again, again – I say Something that is not ‘Shoe-box’ - I say Something too heavy too light Something not the Wind Something not Known to the Winds the Moors the Cocoon that Friends found, and knows Nothing of Those – I say Something unheld
The enormity of the utterance described here is hard to do justice to. The cold-holder, our diarist, pronounces something that they know to be utterly, inescapably incorrect.
For context we must understand that, even for an average member of the community, the system of relations between language and the world which we have been discussing made much of what we might call ‘lying’ semantically problematic. I do not want to suggest here the existence of a utopian society incapable of deception – for indeed, what hierarchy can ever come into being without some being misled by others? It is conceivable that lying of some kind was the stuff of everyday life in this culture as it is in ours. But we must keep in mind (as well as the fact that the speech of the cold-holder was not merely a part of everyday life but the most important linguistic operation in society) the meaning of communication for these people. This was a system in which every utterance was related to everything in the world (and, for that matter, to every other utterance) along the lines of absolute equality. To designate something said or written as definitively untrue – as possessing one and only one meaning in direct contradiction to reality – would have been rather like designating a metaphor a lie: a category mistake as much as anything else. Everything – whatever mischievous or sinister ulterior motives could be attached to communication – was held together by a loose web of language neither straightforwardly true nor false.
And yet all totalities define themselves against an ‘exterior’, an exception which proves the rule. In this case, we are aware of two. As we have seen, there were the ‘story/tellers’ – the terrified refugees whose very presence confounded all certainty this community thought they had about the survival of the world-as-it-was, and whom were thus relegated to a kind of non-existence. And then there was what the diarist told the act-holder about the shoe-box: a straight denial of a state of affairs that they had on absolute authority to be the case. Again: I have no doubt that in this community people misled each other all the time – people still told jokes, friends still fell out - and I do not wish to claim otherwise. But a definitive statement of function - such as that encountered on the moors to the bafflement of the cold-holder - was a break from the endless openness of everyday speech, and therefore its contradiction forms a departure, too. A new kind of fact, making possible a new kind of lie.
There is no doubt that the diarist understood the breach between this novel speech and the ‘organic unity’ as irreparable. Here is their diary entry from after that fateful consultation with their act-holder:
This Now a Snag, a Rotting – Cold Sun inside Everything – Nows crowded and Crushed Together – Moorland Bled to Death – All things Here thin Mist now, leaving – I hold Cold Sun – Hands pucker
What might it feel like to ‘know’, suddenly, that your culture’s method for understanding and constructing the living world is no longer good enough – to be certain that its conceptual system is dying, if not dead already? This, for the diarist, was a fall from a great whole to which everything belonged into partiality and separation: their simple speech a harbinger of a world where words and things could no longer be held together but instead had to be thrown violently at each other. I advise that we take a moment here to attempt to comprehend, if we can (and I do not believe that it is entirely possible), just how profound a trauma this must have been. From the evidence of the diary, blank from this point onwards, we may conclude that the diarist never fully recovered.
Why? Of course, it is the question that must be posed, and yet one which is impossible to answer without further evidence: why did the diarist not simply tell the act-holder the truth, that the object was a shoe-box? It would have been an unfamiliar form of expression, a closed answer for a closed question, and thus would have prompted confusion, perhaps suspicion. But not a sense of having cut loose language from the rest of the existing world, of having cleaved apart a living and essential organism. One cannot help feeling that such a response would have been significantly less calamitous for the psychological state of the diarist, less provocative of profound and terrible guilt. There must have been a reason.
We are now rapidly approaching the realm of fiction ourselves, a dangerous place for a scholar to be. And yet, I feel I would be doing myself, my readers, and not least the diarist, a grave disservice if I did not at least attempt an explanation for this most strange of choices.
My tentative theory is derived from an ongoing translation by the LPRU Textual Studies team, the full findings from which will be published in due course. The piece in question is one of a series of letters which were discovered in a vat far from the moors to the East, on a high mountain plateau. The epistles are accounts of extensive travelling undertaken by their author in perhaps the most fatally devastating period of the Decline, with populations undergoing decimation and the social and ecological networks of the planet in full-fledged collapse. Translation has been harrowing, to say the least. At first, it seemed clear to us that we would find no meaningful inter-textual links in these fragments, given how much time appears to have passed between the writing of the other folios in our care and this one, and the profound change that occurred in that interval. But in amongst the vivid depictions of eschatological cults, desperate violence, and constant flows of migration across the planet, we find a fleeting reference to a community living in structures of a shape and size that the writer finds mysteriously difficult to relate to their correspondent. One thing this letter-writer is able to describe is the rather surprising and incongruous practice of communal storytelling amongst the residents of this strange settlement, this safe haven at the end of everything.
***
I have already set out my suspicion that the designation of the Decline-migrants camped on the moors as ‘story/tellers’ had more to do with the ideological vulnerabilities of the diarist’s community than any genuine disposition of those travellers to narrative performance. It is also the case that at no point in this diary does its writer express any compassion or sympathy of any kind for the dispossessed amassing at the fringes of their settlement. Nor did they register, either privately or (we must assume) publicly, any dissent whatsoever to the decree forcibly withholding the necessities of life from these crowds, a decree that definitively could not have been issued without their involvement, could not have continued without their silence. So I am fully aware of the inconsistencies of suggesting some causation between the events described in the diary and the settlement encountered in the later letters. But I cannot help but recall the diarist describing the mysterious structure as ‘fit for life to swill within’ (big enough to inhabit, we might perhaps paraphrase). I am put in mind, too, of the act-holder’s pledge to faithfully recreate the original context of the structure, and find myself dwelling on the notion that, in presenting a false version of this history, the cold-holder could easily have brought about the construction of tens, perhaps hundreds of replicates – an entire village of them, enough for a lasting wellspring of life.
Set within the growing academic oeuvre of the LPRU, I would like this piece to be earmarked by reference to its rigour, its combined treatment of sociological, semantic, and ideological themes, and its introduction to the Unit of an extraordinarily rich single piece of evidence. I do not want this closing flight into speculation to define the study of the Moorland diary, a pursuit to which researchers in my department have given several years of long nights, interminable interpretive debates, and painstaking translation. And yet, the urge to imagine what we cannot fully substantiate is irrepressible. Specifically, in this case, it is the calling to interpret a self-destructive act, a dishonest act, a chaotic act as simultaneously something loving. I must conclude by stating that, in the words of Emily Dickinson, we researchers in situations such as these must accept that we ‘dwell in possibility’, along with everyone else.