is the slow digestion of one narrative by another,
and another ad infinitum until all the ephemera
in language and memory, what gives it character,
breaks down, into a form so compressed it is petrified.
The vocation of historians, theologians and philosophers
-the few who choose what they get to do
on behalf of the many who don't- is to reverse the process.
Disinter the tangled mass of the past in ways
that make it fresh, readable by the future.
The human narrative is the shortest, most self referential,
arid and destructive in the history of the planet.
It is now said that the dinosaurs made themselves,
extinct by the greenhouses gases in their flatulence.
Like those deadly gases history can only repeat itself.
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