1
00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:12,720
Speaker 1: They told me never to return to that town, and

2
00:00:12,759 --> 00:00:14,839
the warning unspoilt through the road like a memory I

3
00:00:14,839 --> 00:00:18,160
could not shake. I arrived as dusk folded itself into

4
00:00:18,160 --> 00:00:20,079
the gullies, a thin coil of smoke and cold light

5
00:00:20,079 --> 00:00:21,920
that made my coat heavy in the brass pendent at

6
00:00:21,920 --> 00:00:24,600
my throat, ring faintly against my collar bone. The village

7
00:00:24,679 --> 00:00:27,120
rose from the stone like an apology, small slate roofs

8
00:00:27,160 --> 00:00:31,559
and stack wood windows. Like tired eyes, silence had already saddled, deliberate,

9
00:00:31,559 --> 00:00:34,119
and cultivated. It was not the ordinary hush of a

10
00:00:34,159 --> 00:00:36,840
place after a day's work. It had shaped a patient

11
00:00:36,880 --> 00:00:40,159
contour that kept the town from breathing freely from the ravines.

12
00:00:40,159 --> 00:00:42,320
Beneath the slate. The breeze readed notes through the air,

13
00:00:42,479 --> 00:00:45,159
then harmonic, like class run with a thumb, and it

14
00:00:45,200 --> 00:00:48,119
carried the first h of other lives. My boots kept

15
00:00:48,200 --> 00:00:50,960
rhythm on the main road. Steps more paws listen. The

16
00:00:50,960 --> 00:00:53,799
air tasted of wet stone and river spray, and the pendent,

17
00:00:53,840 --> 00:00:55,840
against much His humbed with a frequency that matched the

18
00:00:55,880 --> 00:00:59,200
gullies inder tone. The square sat nearly abandoned, a stack

19
00:00:59,240 --> 00:01:02,359
of drying herbs, a single land and guttering. People watched

20
00:01:02,359 --> 00:01:04,079
me from doorways as if I were bruised for me

21
00:01:04,120 --> 00:01:07,079
on some one else's skin. Faces were turned and guarded.

22
00:01:07,599 --> 00:01:09,920
I found it. Time and again I would draw my

23
00:01:09,959 --> 00:01:12,519
recorder from his cord wrapped cradle, fingers fumbling with the

24
00:01:12,519 --> 00:01:15,640
brass class, wanting to document the hush, the psalmn, evidence

25
00:01:15,640 --> 00:01:18,599
of whatever the ravine wanted to keep, But the lithel

26
00:01:18,599 --> 00:01:22,120
machine felt useless against something that rearranged memory itself. An

27
00:01:22,120 --> 00:01:25,079
elder watched me from across the square. Marta moved with

28
00:01:25,120 --> 00:01:27,400
the blunt certainty of a person who had spent decades

29
00:01:27,400 --> 00:01:30,840
counting losses and mocking warp remained her brave, white as

30
00:01:30,840 --> 00:01:34,079
bone coiled her nape. Her shawl was patched, smelling of

31
00:01:34,120 --> 00:01:37,319
pine risin and old smoke. She tapped her carved stick

32
00:01:37,359 --> 00:01:39,879
three times before stepping closer, and the sun cut through

33
00:01:39,879 --> 00:01:42,599
the quiet like a small bell. There was no introduction,

34
00:01:42,920 --> 00:01:45,439
no welcome, only the economy of some one measuring a

35
00:01:45,439 --> 00:01:48,719
stranger against a ledger of consequence. Her gaze stayed on

36
00:01:48,799 --> 00:01:51,239
my pendant, then in the record of slung inside my satchel.

37
00:01:51,879 --> 00:01:54,599
She let the morning know the evening tide slip past,

38
00:01:54,599 --> 00:01:57,000
before she allowed herself to hummele low protective tune under

39
00:01:57,000 --> 00:01:59,120
her breath, as if testing the edges of the world

40
00:01:59,159 --> 00:02:01,680
for cracks. I had come because roomor felt like a

41
00:02:01,760 --> 00:02:04,480
hinge in my chest. I had come because the ledger

42
00:02:04,519 --> 00:02:06,439
of other people's absences had a name on it that

43
00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:09,319
tugged at the edges of my own history. Martyr's warning

44
00:02:09,319 --> 00:02:11,080
did not sway me, but it set away into the

45
00:02:11,080 --> 00:02:14,840
bottom of my belly. The village's caution was not superstition alone.

46
00:02:15,240 --> 00:02:18,120
It had the arithmetic of survival braided into it. They

47
00:02:18,159 --> 00:02:20,360
had learned to speak of the ravine and fragments like

48
00:02:20,400 --> 00:02:22,919
a map with the central lines torn away. When she

49
00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:24,840
gestured toward the gullies, it was with a hand that

50
00:02:24,879 --> 00:02:27,879
had learned the angles of avoidance. I filed that gesture

51
00:02:27,919 --> 00:02:30,719
away with the pattern of the stones. Knight pressed its

52
00:02:30,719 --> 00:02:32,520
face to the earth. As I slipped past the last

53
00:02:32,560 --> 00:02:34,960
of the cottages and toward the ravine room, the path

54
00:02:35,080 --> 00:02:37,599
narrowed a single track. Were route and shale conspired to

55
00:02:37,639 --> 00:02:41,039
make my step possible. The ravines themselves were more than hollows.

56
00:02:41,680 --> 00:02:44,240
There were carved lungs each ledge, and fisher a die

57
00:02:44,240 --> 00:02:47,240
from for the caniona. So my fingers found the rough

58
00:02:47,240 --> 00:02:48,960
stone by habit tracing the edges of the way. I

59
00:02:49,039 --> 00:02:51,680
traced the margins of a page while thinking the ruins

60
00:02:51,719 --> 00:02:53,719
I discovered there were not new, but their damp grews

61
00:02:53,759 --> 00:02:55,879
glowed faintly with teal lichened that shouldn't he have been

62
00:02:55,919 --> 00:02:58,719
able to catch such light? The single black feather on

63
00:02:58,759 --> 00:03:01,719
a river stone lay like Anaki's, glossy perfect cradled in

64
00:03:01,759 --> 00:03:04,439
a shallow cup of moss. It was an offering a

65
00:03:04,520 --> 00:03:07,719
run into trophy. I crouched and let my pum hover

66
00:03:07,800 --> 00:03:09,840
ab of the feather without touching, because the air around

67
00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:12,120
a taste of colder than the night, and because superstition

68
00:03:12,159 --> 00:03:14,080
and science fight an immediate jewel in the chest when

69
00:03:14,080 --> 00:03:17,319
the welve rearranges itself. The pendant at my throat snagged

70
00:03:17,319 --> 00:03:19,719
on a chain brass missing a chip, and the recorder

71
00:03:19,759 --> 00:03:22,599
felt like a talisman and a blunt instrument. Both all

72
00:03:22,639 --> 00:03:25,919
those instruments meant little against the Ravine's method. The gullies

73
00:03:25,960 --> 00:03:28,080
honswored my attention with the sliver of wind that might

74
00:03:28,080 --> 00:03:30,599
have been some. It threaded through the rooms and brought

75
00:03:30,639 --> 00:03:33,199
a cadence to the stones. For abeat, I felt like

76
00:03:33,240 --> 00:03:36,360
a spectator at an instrument I did not understand. Then

77
00:03:36,439 --> 00:03:39,400
memory struck, embidden and chop. It was not a memory

78
00:03:39,400 --> 00:03:41,879
that belonged to the angles of my own life. It

79
00:03:41,919 --> 00:03:44,960
came like a photograph pressed into my mind, A child's

80
00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:47,439
lot spilling down a pack lane, hands trading lanterns in

81
00:03:47,439 --> 00:03:50,159
a market that smelled of apples in salt. A name

82
00:03:50,159 --> 00:03:52,120
that slid into my awareness as if it had always

83
00:03:52,120 --> 00:03:54,680
been part of my mouth. Names and faces I had

84
00:03:54,680 --> 00:03:57,639
not earned, rearranged the interior of me. The air seemed

85
00:03:57,639 --> 00:03:59,960
to fold in wood, and my sense of where I ended,

86
00:04:00,080 --> 00:04:03,240
and these borrowed recollections began thin to a helene. I

87
00:04:03,280 --> 00:04:05,199
felt the edges of my own pass peel back like

88
00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:08,439
buck the ravines force which other people's lies into mine

89
00:04:08,479 --> 00:04:11,680
without asking. I staggered back from the lip and knees,

90
00:04:11,719 --> 00:04:14,080
catching on the root of a wind prune pine. The

91
00:04:14,120 --> 00:04:16,839
how Monica overtoon persisted, climbing like a tighter where my

92
00:04:16,920 --> 00:04:19,160
ribs haat, and every passing note felt like a hand

93
00:04:19,160 --> 00:04:22,519
sorting through a closet of bones. The villagers warning sharpened

94
00:04:22,519 --> 00:04:25,639
into danger. The song had a logic. It collected, it

95
00:04:25,680 --> 00:04:28,439
fed on, recal it preserved itself with the echo of

96
00:04:28,480 --> 00:04:30,800
what it had borrowed. I tightened the strap of my

97
00:04:30,839 --> 00:04:33,560
satchel until my fingers burned, feeling the recorder as a

98
00:04:33,639 --> 00:04:35,839
useless sentinel, and the pendant as if it might enper

99
00:04:35,879 --> 00:04:39,560
the poll. The ravine song was not cruel. It was indifferent,

100
00:04:39,560 --> 00:04:42,079
geological in its scope, an old thing doing precisely what

101
00:04:42,240 --> 00:04:44,959
old things do you when left to themselves. When Marda

102
00:04:44,959 --> 00:04:46,639
found me at the edge after my retreat, she did

103
00:04:46,680 --> 00:04:49,279
not scold. There was simply a tone in her expression,

104
00:04:49,360 --> 00:04:52,199
like weather. Her walking stick made its measure, tapped in

105
00:04:52,199 --> 00:04:55,360
the pack dearth, counting measures none could see. She led

106
00:04:55,360 --> 00:04:57,319
me to an ancient standing stone set away from the

107
00:04:57,360 --> 00:04:59,439
lip a monolith of villages had used as a mark

108
00:04:59,480 --> 00:05:02,680
alarm before my footsteps to track this valley. The carvings

109
00:05:02,680 --> 00:05:04,800
and the stone match those at the rim. Circles within

110
00:05:04,839 --> 00:05:08,160
circles ruins that loop like a river. MARTA's hand hovered

111
00:05:08,199 --> 00:05:09,959
over the gliphs, as if not to disturb them, and

112
00:05:10,040 --> 00:05:11,720
in that gesture I read a compact of fear in

113
00:05:11,720 --> 00:05:14,959
the habit of tending. She showed me what the ravine kept.

114
00:05:15,360 --> 00:05:19,439
Rivers had tumbled small tokens into the gullies for generations, knives, lockets,

115
00:05:19,560 --> 00:05:22,240
child's tenny, wooden horse, and each seemed to be catalogged

116
00:05:22,240 --> 00:05:24,759
in the stoneless grooves, as if the canyon favored physical

117
00:05:24,759 --> 00:05:27,639
anchors for the lives it reclaim. Her hands moved with

118
00:05:27,680 --> 00:05:30,120
the economy of someone who had catalog more than sore

119
00:05:30,839 --> 00:05:33,160
a rain, a splintered spoon, a faded piece of cloth

120
00:05:33,160 --> 00:05:36,120
that might have been a child's dress. These remnants were

121
00:05:36,120 --> 00:05:38,720
not spoils meant to be returned. They were threads in

122
00:05:38,759 --> 00:05:42,079
the ravine. As chorus mart pointed toward the village, toward

123
00:05:42,079 --> 00:05:45,000
the economy of silence, holding them together. She did not

124
00:05:45,120 --> 00:05:47,519
use words to shade her meaning. The choice she set

125
00:05:47,560 --> 00:05:50,360
before me sat like a stone. Pry at the canyon's history,

126
00:05:50,399 --> 00:05:52,920
or let it keep it harvest. The night deepened toward

127
00:05:52,959 --> 00:05:54,680
a color I had no name for. When the song

128
00:05:54,720 --> 00:05:57,800
grew teeth, I walked the narrow path between gullies, each

129
00:05:57,839 --> 00:05:59,959
step measured and slow, and the world around me contract

130
00:06:00,079 --> 00:06:03,079
to textures. This lick of moss and affot the westmell

131
00:06:03,120 --> 00:06:05,360
of river stone, the way a raven feather caught the

132
00:06:05,360 --> 00:06:08,079
moonlight and turned it to oil. The Ravine's voice rose

133
00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:10,519
in layers. At first it was the sigh of when

134
00:06:10,560 --> 00:06:14,199
through joints of rock. Then harmonic overtones braided through the sigh,

135
00:06:14,399 --> 00:06:16,560
doubling and trippling, until the sund had a body that

136
00:06:16,600 --> 00:06:19,600
pressed against my stonem It spoken pitches that felt like

137
00:06:19,639 --> 00:06:23,240
memory itself. High childlike notes braided with low avalanche rumbles,

138
00:06:23,279 --> 00:06:25,959
and the combination carved a path and on muskin. I

139
00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:28,480
allowed myself to stand at the lip and listen. There

140
00:06:28,560 --> 00:06:31,199
is a dark, magnetic arrogance in understanding the thing that

141
00:06:31,240 --> 00:06:33,680
eats part of you. The pendant at my throat chill.

142
00:06:34,399 --> 00:06:36,240
When the ravine answered fully, it was as if I

143
00:06:36,240 --> 00:06:39,480
had been plunged into someone else's life. Scene streamed through

144
00:06:39,480 --> 00:06:43,360
me with impossible intimacy. A winter market's smoke, a lover's

145
00:06:43,360 --> 00:06:45,319
hand under a woolen coat, the bedside where a small

146
00:06:45,360 --> 00:06:47,759
knuckle lay bandaged, the small ritual of lighting a lamp

147
00:06:47,800 --> 00:06:50,959
at dusk. Names came like seeds, dropping into the hollow

148
00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:53,519
of my memory, and rooting. For a moment I could

149
00:06:53,560 --> 00:06:56,199
not tell which face was mine. I felt the scaffolding

150
00:06:56,199 --> 00:07:00,079
of identity wobble. There was a crisis. Without theatrix, the

151
00:07:00,120 --> 00:07:02,040
canyon did not scream to conquer, but to cure it,

152
00:07:02,600 --> 00:07:04,480
I had to struggle to hold those intrusions at bay,

153
00:07:04,519 --> 00:07:06,240
to press my fingers to the inside of my skull

154
00:07:06,319 --> 00:07:08,240
and remind myself of the shape of my own days,

155
00:07:08,959 --> 00:07:11,000
the exact slope of scarb of my brow, the timber

156
00:07:11,040 --> 00:07:14,759
of my laugh, small private calibrations that tethered me the ravines.

157
00:07:14,800 --> 00:07:17,000
Voice swelled, and I teetered at the edge of dissolution.

158
00:07:17,600 --> 00:07:20,000
The harmonic scream braided with the memory thin odor of

159
00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:21,680
wet wool, and to backer, And for a while I

160
00:07:21,680 --> 00:07:24,920
thought the canyon might rearrange me, completely, folding my life

161
00:07:24,920 --> 00:07:27,199
into its chorus and naming me among those it had kept.

162
00:07:27,800 --> 00:07:29,480
I am not sure now whether the fight to remain

163
00:07:29,560 --> 00:07:32,279
myself was stubborn as a luck. Dawn found me at

164
00:07:32,279 --> 00:07:34,319
the village edge, with the light pulling the gullies into

165
00:07:34,360 --> 00:07:38,000
long gray fingers. I smelled of river spray, an old stone,

166
00:07:38,040 --> 00:07:40,920
and my coat clung with damp. The borrowed memory stuck

167
00:07:40,920 --> 00:07:43,360
to my robes like burrs. They were shods I could

168
00:07:43,399 --> 00:07:45,839
not pluck free. Marta watched me with the shape of

169
00:07:45,879 --> 00:07:49,759
an accusation softened into duty, her warning hardened into a charge.

170
00:07:50,199 --> 00:07:52,519
The cannon's ab but I could be understood, perhaps, but

171
00:07:52,560 --> 00:07:56,519
not without cost. She offered no remedy. She only held

172
00:07:56,560 --> 00:07:59,040
up the narrow and necessary choice between pressing the ravine

173
00:07:59,040 --> 00:08:01,079
and becoming part of it, a walking away and leaving,

174
00:08:01,079 --> 00:08:04,279
and told lives to continue as a canyon desire. I

175
00:08:04,399 --> 00:08:08,160
chose not to leave, not out of heroism, not entirely

176
00:08:08,199 --> 00:08:10,959
because of curiosity. There are things in my chest that

177
00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:13,759
feel precisely like a ledger and eat to correct absences.

178
00:08:14,519 --> 00:08:16,360
Part of me suspected the ravine might be a way

179
00:08:16,399 --> 00:08:18,240
to touch what had gone before in my own life,

180
00:08:18,360 --> 00:08:20,600
or way to trace a loss. Read part of me

181
00:08:20,639 --> 00:08:23,319
feared that leaving would simply seal other people's losses, adding

182
00:08:23,319 --> 00:08:26,399
my silence to a hundred other silences. So I stayed

183
00:08:26,399 --> 00:08:29,000
to measure the canyon by my own small instruments, my notebook,

184
00:08:29,040 --> 00:08:30,920
crump lines, the whir of the field of corridor, the

185
00:08:30,920 --> 00:08:33,279
brass pendant that thrown faintly when the song turned near

186
00:08:33,919 --> 00:08:38,320
mordessalm Low and protective followed me around corners the villager's watch,

187
00:08:38,399 --> 00:08:41,120
but did not come close. They had learned to protect

188
00:08:41,120 --> 00:08:44,279
themselves with distance and ritual. We made an inventory before

189
00:08:44,320 --> 00:08:46,159
I slept the runes the feather at the grooves in

190
00:08:46,200 --> 00:08:48,200
the standing stone, the ways in which the gullies took

191
00:08:48,240 --> 00:08:51,000
and kept The ledger of the ravine had no inkput

192
00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:53,360
at a teeth, I cut out what I could without

193
00:08:53,360 --> 00:08:56,200
invading the place further. Each piece I touched felt like

194
00:08:56,240 --> 00:08:59,360
a conversation with an old, indifferent mind. I kept my

195
00:08:59,399 --> 00:09:01,320
hands steady, fingers map in the ruins in the night,

196
00:09:01,360 --> 00:09:04,279
as if they might respond to touch. The recorder is light,

197
00:09:04,320 --> 00:09:07,159
blink faintly. The raven feather lay on my palm and

198
00:09:07,279 --> 00:09:09,960
was colder than an ordinary thing should be. It felt

199
00:09:09,960 --> 00:09:12,320
like a word with the edges sended off. When I

200
00:09:12,360 --> 00:09:14,639
finally let myself sleep, it was not full rest, but

201
00:09:14,639 --> 00:09:16,840
the kind of fitful does that leaves the world in fragments.

202
00:09:17,360 --> 00:09:20,759
The canyon's overturns threaded the pillar. I dreamed in currency

203
00:09:20,799 --> 00:09:23,240
that was not mine, the rhythm of a market bell,

204
00:09:23,320 --> 00:09:25,200
the way a child's shoe skuff at the threshold, the

205
00:09:25,200 --> 00:09:27,879
smell of bread and river. When I work, I found

206
00:09:27,919 --> 00:09:29,559
part of the dream tucked into waking, like a coin

207
00:09:29,600 --> 00:09:32,639
between pages. I had begun to bear the Ravine's harvest,

208
00:09:33,360 --> 00:09:35,679
memories that would not flow back the way attire does

209
00:09:36,320 --> 00:09:38,320
Martyr's eyes when she saw me were complicated in a

210
00:09:38,360 --> 00:09:40,759
way that suggested relief and caution, and something like disdain

211
00:09:40,840 --> 00:09:43,879
from my stubbornness. Standing again at the lip, I understood

212
00:09:43,879 --> 00:09:46,639
that the Canyon's claim had become personal. Its voice had

213
00:09:46,679 --> 00:09:48,879
punched a keyhole in my identity, and slept in pieces

214
00:09:48,879 --> 00:09:51,240
that did not belong to me. The question narrowed to

215
00:09:51,320 --> 00:09:54,399
a single, ugly clarity. Would A pry and force the

216
00:09:54,480 --> 00:09:57,399
Ravine into revealing its method, or would I accept that

217
00:09:57,440 --> 00:10:00,360
some places keep what they please. The choice seemed smaller

218
00:10:00,360 --> 00:10:03,200
in writing in it felt in the night. There was dread, yes,

219
00:10:03,440 --> 00:10:06,279
but also a thread of fierce resolve. If the Ravine

220
00:10:06,279 --> 00:10:09,320
remembered better than any ledger, perhaps its songs could be read.

221
00:10:09,879 --> 00:10:12,480
Perhaps what it kept could, if handled rightly, be cataloged

222
00:10:12,480 --> 00:10:16,639
and returned. That thought was audacious, unlikely, foolish, Yet it

223
00:10:16,720 --> 00:10:18,759
was the only thought that fit the stubborn hollowness in

224
00:10:18,799 --> 00:10:22,159
my chest. The village did not resume ordinary life around me.

225
00:10:22,840 --> 00:10:25,240
It held its breath like a community, watching whether a

226
00:10:25,240 --> 00:10:28,279
fever would break one way or another. Mutt continued to

227
00:10:28,279 --> 00:10:30,240
move like some one who had learned to count losses

228
00:10:30,279 --> 00:10:33,480
and keep figil. The ravens circled the gullies like punctuation

229
00:10:33,559 --> 00:10:35,919
marks in the sky, those silhouettes cutting the till falk.

230
00:10:36,600 --> 00:10:38,480
At times I touched the pendant and listened to my

231
00:10:38,480 --> 00:10:41,440
own pulse, small, stubborn, undeniably mine, and used that as

232
00:10:41,480 --> 00:10:45,000
an anchor against the canyon's chorus. My recorder, humble recorder

233
00:10:45,080 --> 00:10:47,960
traces were and distant ravens, a harmonic ripple that I

234
00:10:47,960 --> 00:10:50,759
could not commit to language. The LaSure of the Ravine

235
00:10:50,799 --> 00:10:53,440
rued itself across my nights and my mornings, And though

236
00:10:53,440 --> 00:10:55,480
the song had not ceased, the fog that threaded the

237
00:10:55,480 --> 00:10:57,840
gullies seemed changed in the way a carrod sound, as

238
00:10:57,840 --> 00:10:59,480
if each nut left a bead in the air, and

239
00:10:59,480 --> 00:11:03,000
those beads interchain. This chapter ends with the village settled

240
00:11:03,000 --> 00:11:06,080
into a brittle, uneasy resolve. I have fragments of other

241
00:11:06,080 --> 00:11:09,240
people's lives lodged in me like flint. The Ravine's voice

242
00:11:09,240 --> 00:11:11,440
has shifted from a phenomenon or predator of sorts that

243
00:11:11,480 --> 00:11:13,600
I now know intimately enough to fear and to study.

244
00:11:14,200 --> 00:11:16,279
I will keep pressing at the stone, at the ruins,

245
00:11:16,320 --> 00:11:18,360
at a feather, independent, because to leave would be to

246
00:11:18,399 --> 00:11:21,039
accept that the cannon keeps what it takes. There will

247
00:11:21,080 --> 00:11:23,960
be costs already. Some nights I wake with the name

248
00:11:23,960 --> 00:11:26,519
on my tongue that is not mine. Some mornings my

249
00:11:26,559 --> 00:11:29,919
hands remember an occupation I never had. Still, I can

250
00:11:29,919 --> 00:11:32,559
feel an odd purpose arriving with dawn. The hog has

251
00:11:32,679 --> 00:11:34,759
no left since that night, A nita has the song

252
00:11:35,320 --> 00:11:38,159
Somewhere beneath the gullies. The ravine waits, patient and indifferent,

253
00:11:38,240 --> 00:11:40,840
humming for the next voice to answer. They told me

254
00:11:40,879 --> 00:11:43,639
never to return to that town. The warning had followed

255
00:11:43,639 --> 00:11:45,960
me up the mountain and lodged itself behind my teeth,

256
00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:48,159
like a bitter seed. It did not come as a

257
00:11:48,200 --> 00:11:50,240
single shud or a posted notice, but as a dozen

258
00:11:50,240 --> 00:11:54,519
small refusals. Shutters angled against the morning, loaves left cooling,

259
00:11:54,600 --> 00:11:56,600
and a touched on stoops the way people turned their

260
00:11:56,600 --> 00:11:59,480
faces when I raise my eyes. I have traveled enough

261
00:11:59,480 --> 00:12:01,440
to treat super stition like an interesting out of act

262
00:12:01,600 --> 00:12:04,799
light in my palm, subject to inspection and gentle skepticism.

263
00:12:05,120 --> 00:12:06,879
I had not prepared, though, for the way a son

264
00:12:06,919 --> 00:12:09,039
could enter a life and rearrange the rooms within it.

265
00:12:09,720 --> 00:12:12,159
I woke before dawn, fingers pinched one by cold and

266
00:12:12,240 --> 00:12:15,320
asleep that felt thinto the consistency of tissue. The first

267
00:12:15,320 --> 00:12:17,279
thing that came was a child's memory. I had never

268
00:12:17,360 --> 00:12:19,960
owned it on one behind my ribs, like a ribbon

269
00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:22,600
cot on her nail, a shallow river broad enough to

270
00:12:22,600 --> 00:12:25,159
span two outstretched hands, a lulla by missing the air,

271
00:12:25,320 --> 00:12:27,840
and a small, warm hand slipping into mine. There was

272
00:12:27,879 --> 00:12:30,000
the smell of soap I had never used, in the soft,

273
00:12:30,120 --> 00:12:33,240
almost instinctive cadence of a thumb finding her cheek. When

274
00:12:33,240 --> 00:12:35,279
my eyes opened on the rented cart and the low

275
00:12:35,320 --> 00:12:37,039
ceiling of the room I had paid for by the week.

276
00:12:37,600 --> 00:12:39,639
For a dizzy second, I expected to find a child's

277
00:12:39,639 --> 00:12:42,320
small indentation beside me, scorched boot left by the bed.

278
00:12:42,919 --> 00:12:45,639
The memory was absurdly precise and rung in equal measure

279
00:12:45,759 --> 00:12:48,000
the vid in textures, and not only foreign, like a

280
00:12:48,039 --> 00:12:50,360
translation into a language my life should not have known.

281
00:12:50,960 --> 00:12:53,600
I sat with my decad pultite and listened for its source.

282
00:12:54,320 --> 00:12:57,919
Outside the village folded itself in small measured motions. Shut

283
00:12:57,960 --> 00:12:59,799
is clacked in the wind, a dog coughed far away,

284
00:12:59,840 --> 00:13:02,440
all called like a simple bell hammer at once. The

285
00:13:02,519 --> 00:13:04,840
borrowed memory did not fade as a dream usually would.

286
00:13:05,440 --> 00:13:07,480
They settled and stoud into the hollows of my skull,

287
00:13:07,519 --> 00:13:10,080
and began to reform. At the day, my pendant at

288
00:13:10,080 --> 00:13:12,879
my throat felt cold against my palm. Under the brass

289
00:13:12,919 --> 00:13:15,480
pressed close to the metal, there was a powdering of tealchen,

290
00:13:15,519 --> 00:13:17,519
a color I did not have in my life's inventory,

291
00:13:18,080 --> 00:13:20,200
and yet it matched everything Martina had kept wrapped in

292
00:13:20,200 --> 00:13:23,320
bell up bundles. This thing's villages kept to remember what

293
00:13:23,440 --> 00:13:25,759
the ravine had taken. I walked the village in that

294
00:13:25,840 --> 00:13:28,799
gray wash before morning, boots scuffing over cobble, still warm

295
00:13:28,840 --> 00:13:32,360
from yesterday's sun. Doors stood half closed or fermy latched.

296
00:13:33,039 --> 00:13:35,759
On several thresholds, small black feathers were pinned to the wood,

297
00:13:35,879 --> 00:13:38,559
furious stepples of darkness against the wash paint, like tiny

298
00:13:38,559 --> 00:13:41,559
flags or tasmans. They read to me as warnings folded

299
00:13:41,559 --> 00:13:44,559
into the architecture of everyday life. They read to others,

300
00:13:44,559 --> 00:13:47,320
perhaps as prayers seen with rough thread. I kept my

301
00:13:47,360 --> 00:13:50,200
head down, cloak pull tight. People moved with the careful

302
00:13:50,279 --> 00:13:52,879
choreography of those who refused to disturb the fragile balance

303
00:13:52,879 --> 00:13:55,799
of what remained. Marty received me with the watchfulness that

304
00:13:55,840 --> 00:13:58,679
had been chiseled into her posture. Before she would meet

305
00:13:58,679 --> 00:14:00,720
my face, she tapped her walking ston dick three times

306
00:14:00,759 --> 00:14:02,960
on the porch, as if the sound counted some private

307
00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:05,960
measure of permission. She smelled of smoke and pine risin.

308
00:14:06,039 --> 00:14:08,000
Her hair was braided and coiled at the nape, white

309
00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:11,200
as river stone. Her eyes were clouded but sharp, capable

310
00:14:11,200 --> 00:14:13,840
of seeing a truth that lay under polite deceptions. There

311
00:14:13,879 --> 00:14:16,240
was a fatigue about her, like fravorrope, but a stubbornness

312
00:14:16,240 --> 00:14:18,600
to one that made the set of her shoulders almost proud.

313
00:14:19,240 --> 00:14:22,480
She did not interrogate me in words. She answered in

314
00:14:22,519 --> 00:14:24,720
gestures and a low hum, a tune so soft it

315
00:14:24,799 --> 00:14:26,919
might have been the echo something older than either of us.

316
00:14:27,600 --> 00:14:29,720
On Mass's porch, I pressed my pennant into the morning

317
00:14:29,799 --> 00:14:31,919
light and watched the teal smear of lichen tract beneath

318
00:14:31,960 --> 00:14:34,720
thumb and thumbnail. A hairline grove matched a notch I

319
00:14:34,720 --> 00:14:37,240
had traced on one of Moskovs stones the night before.

320
00:14:37,919 --> 00:14:39,919
She needed no words to tell me that my pendants

321
00:14:39,919 --> 00:14:42,799
sat inside a pattern larger than my own journey. Her

322
00:14:42,799 --> 00:14:44,679
open bundle of stones lay like the ruins of a

323
00:14:44,679 --> 00:14:47,879
minute city, ruins in sized and worn chips of river

324
00:14:47,919 --> 00:14:50,279
stone fitted into grooves that had once held other things,

325
00:14:50,360 --> 00:14:53,840
fragments of mirror and bone, A small sketch, cheap, an earnest,

326
00:14:53,840 --> 00:14:56,200
honest scrap of paper showed the same spiral pattern as

327
00:14:56,200 --> 00:14:58,960
the pendant. My chest began to pound with the simple,

328
00:14:59,039 --> 00:15:02,080
the rational certainty. A path toward the ravine. The path

329
00:15:02,120 --> 00:15:04,000
to the ravine is a narrow thing, a seam of

330
00:15:04,039 --> 00:15:06,879
root and rock that skirts the village. In daylight. It

331
00:15:06,919 --> 00:15:09,120
is ordinary enough a goat track, a route for children

332
00:15:09,159 --> 00:15:11,440
to the water. But when I walked at my satchel

333
00:15:11,440 --> 00:15:13,440
held the recorder and a small notebook in which I

334
00:15:13,440 --> 00:15:15,879
tried to write the field places rather than mere facts.

335
00:15:16,559 --> 00:15:19,120
My fingers kept finding stern edges and following them. The

336
00:15:19,120 --> 00:15:20,799
motion a kind of compass in a life that had

337
00:15:20,879 --> 00:15:23,440
lately spun and heathered. The wind that moved down the

338
00:15:23,440 --> 00:15:26,120
gullies carried not only air, but under current of tone,

339
00:15:26,559 --> 00:15:28,879
harmonic overtones like this a shell gives up when you

340
00:15:28,919 --> 00:15:31,960
press it to your ear, multiplied by many voices. The

341
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:33,679
sound tubbed at the back of my head until my

342
00:15:33,759 --> 00:15:35,759
vision narrowed, and the world seemed to vibrate on a

343
00:15:35,799 --> 00:15:38,879
single frequency. By dusk I had reached an ancient calf stone,

344
00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:41,559
neared a ravine, a face of rock potch by weather

345
00:15:41,639 --> 00:15:43,679
in size, with the ruins older than the village itself.

346
00:15:44,240 --> 00:15:46,919
The grooves were shallow until my fingers traced them. Then

347
00:15:46,919 --> 00:15:48,960
they flared faintly with the same teal I had seen

348
00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:51,080
on the pendant, as if something inside the stone had

349
00:15:51,080 --> 00:15:53,840
been waiting for touch. The flare was warmth and cold

350
00:15:53,879 --> 00:15:56,879
at once. It unlatched another image within me that no

351
00:15:56,919 --> 00:15:59,039
one had given a kitchen fog with steamed the each

352
00:15:59,080 --> 00:16:01,600
of a small cry, and turning with flier on her hands.

353
00:16:02,279 --> 00:16:04,440
A name not mine slept out of that image like

354
00:16:04,440 --> 00:16:08,480
a benediction. The memory came in a cinematic sweep, textures, angles,

355
00:16:08,519 --> 00:16:10,519
the precise place of boll sat on a table, and then,

356
00:16:10,559 --> 00:16:13,559
as if another instrument had joined a choir, a harmonic

357
00:16:13,600 --> 00:16:17,559
overtone blossomed from the fissure. It was not speech, not language.

358
00:16:18,159 --> 00:16:20,000
It was a lay of chorus, as patient and ancient

359
00:16:20,039 --> 00:16:22,799
as the stone. When the ravine's voice answered, it did

360
00:16:22,840 --> 00:16:25,519
so without the shape of malice. The stone seemed to

361
00:16:25,559 --> 00:16:27,840
listen as I listened, and in that mutual attention it

362
00:16:27,879 --> 00:16:31,000
rearranged the contents of my chest. The memory it laid

363
00:16:31,000 --> 00:16:33,799
before me was preserved in luminous like someone placing an

364
00:16:33,799 --> 00:16:36,519
object on a table for inspection under a lamp. The

365
00:16:36,600 --> 00:16:38,639
ravine did not steal in the petty way of thieves.

366
00:16:38,679 --> 00:16:42,000
It absorbed. It made a home of echoes, weaving lives

367
00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:44,480
into the fold of its rock, preserving fragments and side

368
00:16:44,480 --> 00:16:47,679
carved memory, as though cataloging specimens for some indifferent archive.

369
00:16:48,159 --> 00:16:50,399
The sensation was not only of losing, but of being

370
00:16:50,440 --> 00:16:53,519
curated against your will. Night in the village had a small,

371
00:16:53,720 --> 00:16:57,799
steady rhythm. Lanterns burned low, supper smoke braided into the twilight.

372
00:16:58,559 --> 00:17:02,519
Neighbors moved through rituals with thin efficiency, gesture, slack word.

373
00:17:02,519 --> 00:17:05,480
They had once been animated. They were in a choreography

374
00:17:05,480 --> 00:17:08,680
of daily life. All pauses now, Annette mend of stopping

375
00:17:08,759 --> 00:17:10,799
mid stitched to stare at the rope, as if knots

376
00:17:10,799 --> 00:17:13,440
had lost their meaning. A child setting down a toy

377
00:17:13,480 --> 00:17:15,640
and wandering to the window with hands limp at his sides.

378
00:17:16,359 --> 00:17:19,119
Marta confessed, without saying the words aloud, that some woke

379
00:17:19,160 --> 00:17:22,640
with pieces already gone, others were simply gone. She folded

380
00:17:22,640 --> 00:17:24,720
her hands over the rever stone ring on her finger,

381
00:17:24,759 --> 00:17:27,559
and its not made a small deliberate sound. My own

382
00:17:27,599 --> 00:17:31,559
chronology began to smear. Mornings and night shifted shapes. A

383
00:17:31,680 --> 00:17:34,039
memory with the timber before in life took up residence

384
00:17:34,039 --> 00:17:36,359
in my chest, the age of a father I had

385
00:17:36,400 --> 00:17:38,039
never had, the scent of a house by a stream

386
00:17:38,079 --> 00:17:41,240
where I had never lived. My recorder captured fragments of

387
00:17:41,240 --> 00:17:43,440
a lullaby that was not mine. A few hestant notes

388
00:17:43,519 --> 00:17:46,960
now in the device's static, like trapped birds. My notebook,

389
00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:49,240
when I glanced at it with shaking fingers, contained a

390
00:17:49,240 --> 00:17:51,000
single name written in my own hand, and yet not

391
00:17:51,599 --> 00:17:54,200
the guidance of my pen marriage to another history's rhythm.

392
00:17:54,440 --> 00:17:57,559
I felt the edges of myself flaking in small, indiscriminate chips.

393
00:17:58,240 --> 00:18:02,160
The village offered small protections, larger bargains. Marta gave me

394
00:18:02,240 --> 00:18:04,359
a ring of river stones, knotted on a court, each

395
00:18:04,400 --> 00:18:07,039
pebble smooth and darkened by water into an almost uniform

396
00:18:07,079 --> 00:18:09,599
set of weights. She handed it to me across the

397
00:18:09,599 --> 00:18:11,440
porch railing, as if the act of transfer could be

398
00:18:11,480 --> 00:18:14,519
measured in breaths. It feed easily over my gloved hand.

399
00:18:15,079 --> 00:18:17,519
The stone surfaces were cool and dull did not practiced,

400
00:18:17,519 --> 00:18:20,480
an almost ritual in its placement. There was hesitation in

401
00:18:20,559 --> 00:18:22,640
Mata's eyes as she let it go, a calculation that

402
00:18:22,640 --> 00:18:25,359
could have been gilt or lover both. When midnight crept

403
00:18:25,359 --> 00:18:27,759
through the gullies, I found myself walking the path back

404
00:18:27,799 --> 00:18:30,480
to the ravine. The moon was banked behind cloud, and

405
00:18:30,519 --> 00:18:33,160
the landscape took on the soft, hard outlines of dream logic.

406
00:18:33,839 --> 00:18:36,920
The harmonic tide rose from the canyon like a woven scream,

407
00:18:37,039 --> 00:18:39,319
not a single tone, by the stacking of timbers. Childlike

408
00:18:39,359 --> 00:18:42,799
whimpers braided into avalanche, low rumbles, bright overtones, la glass

409
00:18:42,799 --> 00:18:44,960
in a bell. It tougged at my name, not the

410
00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:47,119
neat syllables, but the sense of being picked into a

411
00:18:47,160 --> 00:18:49,839
place in the ledge of the ravine's course. The cliff

412
00:18:49,839 --> 00:18:52,799
faces leaned, it felt with attention at the lip. The

413
00:18:52,799 --> 00:18:55,359
air had a peculiar weight, a metallic witness that numbed

414
00:18:55,359 --> 00:18:57,359
the tip of the tongue and sharpened the edges of vision.

415
00:18:57,920 --> 00:19:00,680
Stones rolled softly below Gull's wheel in the distance, like

416
00:19:00,680 --> 00:19:04,119
punctuation marks that a harmonicle a is condensed into a

417
00:19:04,160 --> 00:19:07,359
single voice. Wearing the cadence of comfort. The ravine offered

418
00:19:07,359 --> 00:19:10,279
images and the currency of larning. A complete life spun

419
00:19:10,319 --> 00:19:13,039
for me like a polished coin, whole childhood, coherent family,

420
00:19:13,119 --> 00:19:15,359
the texture of ordinary days laid out like a feast.

421
00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:19,160
Its bargain was old as market treads. Give us your name,

422
00:19:19,200 --> 00:19:20,799
and let us make you forget the age of loss.

423
00:19:21,440 --> 00:19:24,680
I resisted resistance there felt like trying to stop a

424
00:19:24,680 --> 00:19:27,759
glacier with my bare hands. For all the stubborness stitched

425
00:19:27,759 --> 00:19:30,319
through me, I mistread the ravines in different curiosity for

426
00:19:30,359 --> 00:19:32,799
something I could at stare. The cannon took a braid

427
00:19:32,839 --> 00:19:34,880
of memory from me, even as I turned my face away.

428
00:19:35,440 --> 00:19:38,079
It took a small private thing, the conter of a

429
00:19:38,119 --> 00:19:40,279
mother's national smile, in a life I had never lived,

430
00:19:40,880 --> 00:19:42,720
the Wayhound had taught me to tie notts in what

431
00:19:42,759 --> 00:19:45,319
I felt might have been an early age. The memory

432
00:19:45,359 --> 00:19:47,359
slid away, like a rubbed pull from beneath me. I

433
00:19:47,400 --> 00:19:49,240
felt a raw absence where it had been, and an

434
00:19:49,279 --> 00:19:53,119
immediate infusion of another life, an adolescent interlude, a different home,

435
00:19:53,240 --> 00:19:56,359
different losses. My name remained and tact in my throat,

436
00:19:56,359 --> 00:19:58,599
but the inner furniture of myself had been re arranged.

437
00:19:59,359 --> 00:20:02,160
The exchange lef me raw with the new knowledge. The

438
00:20:02,279 --> 00:20:04,720
ravine's appetite could be negotiated, but only at the cost

439
00:20:04,759 --> 00:20:09,200
of interior, often irreversible alterations. The bargaining chamber was not low,

440
00:20:09,279 --> 00:20:13,279
but appetite. The canyon conserved itself on the currency of remembrance.

441
00:20:13,960 --> 00:20:15,880
When mard found me back at the village at dawn,

442
00:20:15,920 --> 00:20:17,720
she put a knotted hand on my shoulder and tied

443
00:20:17,759 --> 00:20:19,279
in the river of stone, ring, as if they not

444
00:20:19,400 --> 00:20:22,000
could hold against more than mother. The recorder in my

445
00:20:22,039 --> 00:20:25,200
satchel had captured the lullaby again louder this night. My

446
00:20:25,279 --> 00:20:28,680
notebook contained a name I did not recognize. Anger shaped

447
00:20:28,680 --> 00:20:31,319
itself in me like desperation, a desire to reclaim what

448
00:20:31,319 --> 00:20:33,279
the ravine had taken and to bar its mouth from

449
00:20:33,279 --> 00:20:35,960
further feasting. The day that followed was a litany of

450
00:20:35,960 --> 00:20:39,799
small rons and the hardening resolve. Villagers moved with new urgency,

451
00:20:39,960 --> 00:20:43,559
patching thresholds with extra cord, laying feathers in deliberate clusters.

452
00:20:43,559 --> 00:20:46,880
Seeing low protective tunes under their breaths, Marda hummed the

453
00:20:46,880 --> 00:20:49,559
protective tune II, a thin, resilient sound that sat under

454
00:20:49,559 --> 00:20:52,559
my own breath like a foundation. Her hand knotted in

455
00:20:52,599 --> 00:20:55,400
small performed tasks with the automatic competence of someone who

456
00:20:55,480 --> 00:20:58,279
had for decades kept the village fragile heart beating. I

457
00:20:58,359 --> 00:21:01,279
documented with the methodical precision that had once been my profession.

458
00:21:01,839 --> 00:21:04,920
I recorded the tonal qualities of the ravine, the save

459
00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:07,519
harmonic that rose like the slow breath of a cathedral organ,

460
00:21:07,599 --> 00:21:10,680
the quick, bright overtones that tasted of glass. I wrote

461
00:21:10,680 --> 00:21:14,200
the impressions that crowded me, the tackow grid of carved ruins,

462
00:21:14,279 --> 00:21:16,680
the ozon tang of wet stone, the careful economy in

463
00:21:16,680 --> 00:21:19,720
the way the village held itself around loss. Each entry

464
00:21:19,759 --> 00:21:22,480
it was an attempt to fix the slippery, each notation

465
00:21:22,599 --> 00:21:25,160
a kind of exorcism. The work gave me a purpose

466
00:21:25,160 --> 00:21:27,960
I had been missing. It felt better to make inkrecoes

467
00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:31,200
than to sink into helplessness. Still, every record showed the

468
00:21:31,240 --> 00:21:33,920
holes more clearly. I began to see a grammar in

469
00:21:33,920 --> 00:21:40,000
their ravines, offerings, process unfolded in completions, whole childhood's coherent family, tabocus,

470
00:21:40,039 --> 00:21:42,279
the minute texture of ordinary days. The canyon did not

471
00:21:42,319 --> 00:21:46,759
deal in fragments. Its currency was wholeness. For thos already taken,

472
00:21:46,799 --> 00:21:49,039
there was nothing left to bargain with. Their lives was

473
00:21:49,039 --> 00:21:51,720
moved into stone memory for those like me who lived

474
00:21:51,720 --> 00:21:55,440
in partial ruin the ravind dangle coherence Like bait, MARTA's warning,

475
00:21:55,599 --> 00:21:58,039
once worn and kirk, took on different meaning. It was

476
00:21:58,079 --> 00:22:01,319
strategy rather than superstition. The river stone ring she had

477
00:22:01,319 --> 00:22:04,599
given me was a small defense. Charms in heirworld rarely

478
00:22:04,599 --> 00:22:07,240
functioned as a shield, so much as they functioned as promises.

479
00:22:07,880 --> 00:22:10,680
They named a price. They marked who had been noticed

480
00:22:10,720 --> 00:22:13,799
and who remained unremarked. She tightened my not again at

481
00:22:13,839 --> 00:22:16,079
sumrise and tapped me thrace for the stickers to measure

482
00:22:16,079 --> 00:22:18,960
the decision still inside me. By dawn, I had decided

483
00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:21,119
on a course that shifted the axis of my days.

484
00:22:21,720 --> 00:22:23,519
I would return to the Ravine slip and state not

485
00:22:23,599 --> 00:22:26,240
to accept its offer, not to boughter away more of myself,

486
00:22:26,279 --> 00:22:28,799
but to learn whether its course could be stopped. There

487
00:22:28,880 --> 00:22:31,279
was a difference between saving an individual and attempting to

488
00:22:31,279 --> 00:22:33,920
stop a geological hunger that had shaped the village history.

489
00:22:34,480 --> 00:22:37,839
The village's looks carried gratitude and fear. I had become,

490
00:22:38,039 --> 00:22:39,720
whether I liked it or not, a lover in their

491
00:22:39,720 --> 00:22:43,000
fragile system of prevention. The days that followed settled into

492
00:22:43,000 --> 00:22:46,119
a schedule of probing and retreat I observed the ravine

493
00:22:46,160 --> 00:22:49,480
from very distances, recording times when the harmonic shifted, noting

494
00:22:49,480 --> 00:22:53,119
whether changes, cataloging which birds nested in which curvises, returning

495
00:22:53,119 --> 00:22:56,240
to Martyr to compare notes. Her notes were not scientific

496
00:22:56,240 --> 00:22:59,559
in the bureaucratic sense. They were ritual and memories stitched

497
00:22:59,599 --> 00:23:02,519
into sens. She would tease patents from the stitching of

498
00:23:02,559 --> 00:23:04,440
stores and hum them back in a way that allowed

499
00:23:04,440 --> 00:23:06,880
my own mind to see links I had missed. Nights

500
00:23:06,880 --> 00:23:09,759
were either short or fitful. Dreams came to me already

501
00:23:09,799 --> 00:23:13,599
embroidered with other people's anniversaries. Losses in the village continued,

502
00:23:13,640 --> 00:23:18,440
incremental and brutal. A plowhand vanished between dawn and coffee,

503
00:23:18,480 --> 00:23:20,920
His tool stood by a fence, like a brief, abandoned ritual.

504
00:23:21,440 --> 00:23:23,759
Fumlis left a single candle burning in the doorway for

505
00:23:23,839 --> 00:23:26,440
three nights and then removed it, as if to deny

506
00:23:26,480 --> 00:23:29,920
the ravine attention. These ritual acts were stubborn and often insufficient.

507
00:23:30,440 --> 00:23:33,240
You could not protect everything. You could only choose what

508
00:23:33,279 --> 00:23:35,839
you would try to preserve. There were moments when I

509
00:23:35,839 --> 00:23:38,240
felt something like compassion for the ravine, as if it

510
00:23:38,240 --> 00:23:40,480
were a creature forced to feed on whatever memory drifted

511
00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:43,640
its way. It did not hunger out of malice. It preserved.

512
00:23:43,759 --> 00:23:46,559
It cataloged in the cold Way Museum's care for their collections.

513
00:23:46,599 --> 00:23:49,960
The ravine help people like exhibits beautiful and mute, the

514
00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:52,359
moral calculus of a canyon that ate and archived, where

515
00:23:52,359 --> 00:23:54,480
the preservation could be cruelty. It sat in my chest,

516
00:23:54,519 --> 00:23:57,200
heavy and coal. As the days collesced into a chapter,

517
00:23:57,359 --> 00:23:59,920
the ledger of small events tightened into a singular purpose.

518
00:24:00,720 --> 00:24:03,039
My recorder is lull by return again and again, and

519
00:24:03,160 --> 00:24:06,279
each play back underlined what the Ravines did together. I

520
00:24:06,359 --> 00:24:08,839
resolved to return, not merely as witness, but as an

521
00:24:08,839 --> 00:24:12,160
active seeker, with the task document the process, test the

522
00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:14,920
ring's limits, and try to find whether the Ravine's offering

523
00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:17,240
could be refused without surrendering the rest of one's self.

524
00:24:17,880 --> 00:24:19,599
At the edge of what I now knew, with Marty's

525
00:24:19,640 --> 00:24:22,160
cord nototed twice around my wrist and the tanzanies folded

526
00:24:22,200 --> 00:24:24,000
into my satchel, I felt a patience that was no

527
00:24:24,079 --> 00:24:28,200
longer knave. I had been given small tools, a protective ring,

528
00:24:28,319 --> 00:24:31,000
the knowledge that runs flare under touch, and the understanding

529
00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:33,839
that the canyon is indifferent in Ya, and its indifference deliberate.

530
00:24:34,400 --> 00:24:36,880
I had been given a price to pay, not necessarily named,

531
00:24:36,920 --> 00:24:38,799
but a rearrangement of life if I wanted to halt

532
00:24:38,839 --> 00:24:41,880
its appetite. The aftermath left me with new echoes in

533
00:24:41,920 --> 00:24:45,400
a harder resolve. My recorder held songs that were not mine.

534
00:24:45,839 --> 00:24:48,559
My notebook bore names I did not remember writing. The

535
00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:51,839
village moved its days a little more quietly. Marty's hum

536
00:24:51,880 --> 00:24:54,599
carried a thread of wary relief. The ravine would not

537
00:24:54,640 --> 00:24:58,279
be satisfied, It would continue to sing. I had chosen

538
00:24:58,319 --> 00:25:00,359
to return to map its grammar, to see whether the

539
00:25:00,400 --> 00:25:03,279
canyons keeping could be interrupted without consenting war to its course.

540
00:25:03,920 --> 00:25:06,119
The work before me felt monumental in a humble way,

541
00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:08,839
to stand at the mouth of geological memory and the

542
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:11,200
tent by stubborn human measures to keep a ledger of

543
00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:13,839
what had been stolen. The fog has not left since

544
00:25:13,880 --> 00:25:16,480
that night. The memory of the Canyons lay a voice

545
00:25:16,519 --> 00:25:18,359
throads through the quiet of my lodging now, like a

546
00:25:18,359 --> 00:25:21,000
barbed wire of psal. I set the recorder on the

547
00:25:21,039 --> 00:25:22,839
small table and listened to the lullaby in the thin

548
00:25:22,880 --> 00:25:25,279
eyes before dawn, transcribing notes and names as if by

549
00:25:25,279 --> 00:25:27,920
writing them down I might pin them somewhere. They told

550
00:25:27,920 --> 00:25:29,880
me never to return to that town, and for reasons

551
00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:32,519
I had adhered to it. First. The warning was the

552
00:25:32,559 --> 00:25:36,000
sort of small, precise thing that keeps itself alive, repeated

553
00:25:36,000 --> 00:25:38,160
in doorway memories, tapped out in the way people shifted

554
00:25:38,160 --> 00:25:41,279
away when I crossed the square. But habit and curiosity

555
00:25:41,400 --> 00:25:44,920
rode warnings. I had convinced myself that whatever the ravine took,

556
00:25:45,119 --> 00:25:47,960
it took quietly, a distance I had not believed the

557
00:25:48,039 --> 00:25:50,000
ravine would learn how to reach inside a man. I

558
00:25:50,079 --> 00:25:52,240
woke before the sun, cold and trembling in the rented

559
00:25:52,279 --> 00:25:54,519
attic above the tavern, with a childhood memory that did

560
00:25:54,559 --> 00:25:57,359
not belong to me lodged behind my eyes. It arrived

561
00:25:57,400 --> 00:26:00,000
like a ribbon of wind, the smell of wet stone,

562
00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:02,119
the bitter tang of mineral in my mouth, the abrupt

563
00:26:02,200 --> 00:26:05,480
vertical geometry of a calf's stairwall spiraling into an undercut ledge.

564
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:08,000
A small roon sharp as a neck coin sat in

565
00:26:08,039 --> 00:26:10,599
one corner of my vision. I could name the texture

566
00:26:10,599 --> 00:26:12,119
of the stone of my finger tips, though I had

567
00:26:12,119 --> 00:26:14,839
never touched it. I had the disquieting certainty that some

568
00:26:14,839 --> 00:26:17,279
one else's lulla by hand than the species between my ribs.

569
00:26:18,000 --> 00:26:19,759
For an hour, I lay with the memory like a

570
00:26:19,759 --> 00:26:22,079
feurn animal, curld at my throat, listening to my breath

571
00:26:22,119 --> 00:26:24,359
and the distant clatter of late night boots in the

572
00:26:24,400 --> 00:26:27,160
tavern below. When I reached for my recorder, it felt

573
00:26:27,160 --> 00:26:29,200
oddly warm in my hand, as if it had been

574
00:26:29,200 --> 00:26:31,960
holding its breath. The pendent at my throat, brass and worn,

575
00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:35,039
threaded with a curious groove, sat heavy and cold, And

576
00:26:35,119 --> 00:26:37,119
when I turned in the small lamp, the life caught

577
00:26:37,160 --> 00:26:38,960
a faint outline, and the metal up matched the room

578
00:26:39,000 --> 00:26:41,400
in my dream. When I walked into the village, the

579
00:26:41,400 --> 00:26:44,400
streets were not empty so much as evasive doors hung

580
00:26:44,440 --> 00:26:48,440
half closed, Curtains were drawn. People moved like crows dew

581
00:26:48,519 --> 00:26:51,960
round a carcass, sidelong, hush, muted. There were moments, when

582
00:26:52,000 --> 00:26:54,039
passing a house I would feel a flicker at the

583
00:26:54,119 --> 00:26:56,720
edges of my memory. An image of a woman washing

584
00:26:56,720 --> 00:26:59,440
a child in a basin of river water, the low,

585
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:02,480
soft shape of a man fixing a fishing line. Things

586
00:27:02,480 --> 00:27:04,160
that did not belong to me, but brush my mind

587
00:27:04,200 --> 00:27:06,720
as brushed with my kiss a boot. Each touch left

588
00:27:06,720 --> 00:27:09,000
me with a small new age of recognition and an urgent,

589
00:27:09,039 --> 00:27:11,519
childish crief for a life I had never left. The

590
00:27:11,559 --> 00:27:14,799
square offered me no comfort. The fountain stones were pale

591
00:27:14,839 --> 00:27:17,039
with licking, and the water moved sluggishly, as though remembering

592
00:27:17,039 --> 00:27:20,319
a current. It no longer owned children. When they did appear,

593
00:27:20,400 --> 00:27:22,160
stared at the ruvines rather than at me, as if

594
00:27:22,200 --> 00:27:25,119
the gullies themselves had taken their eyes. I felt watch

595
00:27:25,160 --> 00:27:27,640
the way munphils watched at the edge of sleep, not

596
00:27:27,720 --> 00:27:30,680
frightened so much as held under a patient scrutiny. Marta

597
00:27:30,720 --> 00:27:32,599
found me by mid afternoon in a lean of shadow,

598
00:27:32,599 --> 00:27:35,559
where foxglove had taken hold by her gait. She did

599
00:27:35,559 --> 00:27:38,920
not invite me inside. She did not have to. Her

600
00:27:38,920 --> 00:27:40,640
house opened like an old wind that had learned to

601
00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:43,160
keep its own shape. She took the pendant in her

602
00:27:43,200 --> 00:27:45,880
hand with fingers that trembled from habit, not from age,

603
00:27:45,920 --> 00:27:47,599
and trace the groove with a tap of her thumb.

604
00:27:47,640 --> 00:27:50,039
Nap carried the same rhythm she used on her walking stick.

605
00:27:50,680 --> 00:27:52,240
When she looked up, the cry and her eye was

606
00:27:52,279 --> 00:27:56,680
immediate and unfiltered. Recognition tempered into something like shame. She

607
00:27:56,759 --> 00:27:58,480
did not narrate a single new fact so much as

608
00:27:58,519 --> 00:28:01,799
allow small pieces to fall into place. The ruin, she said,

609
00:28:01,839 --> 00:28:04,200
without speaking, the word belonged to the ravenous ledger at

610
00:28:04,240 --> 00:28:07,160
the crude, stubborn marks and gullies had been wearing for generations.

611
00:28:07,559 --> 00:28:09,519
The pendant had been carved from a river stone that

612
00:28:09,559 --> 00:28:12,160
once lay like a chip tooth in a tributary. Some

613
00:28:12,240 --> 00:28:14,119
one with hands like a child's head ink that groove

614
00:28:14,160 --> 00:28:16,920
and then burned it into brass. What tap the stick

615
00:28:16,960 --> 00:28:19,359
three times and hummed an old warning Between the clicks,

616
00:28:20,079 --> 00:28:22,720
She forbid me the carved ledge. Her mouth made a

617
00:28:22,720 --> 00:28:25,440
flat line when she said it. Her hands folded around

618
00:28:25,440 --> 00:28:26,960
the ring of stones in her cord, as though they

619
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:29,400
kept time with what she would never say. There was

620
00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:31,799
fear in her face that moved past the individuals estrad

621
00:28:31,839 --> 00:28:34,440
into an institutional grief, the kind that makes towns lean

622
00:28:34,480 --> 00:28:37,680
toward preservation. If the ravine had begun to hum more often,

623
00:28:37,759 --> 00:28:39,880
she said, then the balance the village had cluncer for

624
00:28:39,960 --> 00:28:42,559
so long was fraying. The warning was not for my

625
00:28:42,599 --> 00:28:45,079
safety alone. It was for the fragile geometery. If shared

626
00:28:45,119 --> 00:28:47,519
memory that kept the streets in order, I did not

627
00:28:47,599 --> 00:28:50,000
respect her restrictions. The pent and burned at my throat

628
00:28:50,079 --> 00:28:52,680
like a small honest coals. The ruin in my dream

629
00:28:52,680 --> 00:28:55,200
had a concrete quality to it, and human minds ALOUSI

630
00:28:55,240 --> 00:28:57,960
at obeying things that bear a patten. I told myself

631
00:28:58,000 --> 00:29:01,319
I was mapping, recording, observing. I told myself that knowledge

632
00:29:01,359 --> 00:29:03,759
was a kind of anchor, and anchors over situations where

633
00:29:03,759 --> 00:29:06,599
ties tried to unmake language. At dusk, I walked the

634
00:29:06,640 --> 00:29:09,559
path that narrowed at the Ravine slip. The gullies pinned

635
00:29:09,559 --> 00:29:11,480
the sky into a jagged strip of cloud, and the

636
00:29:11,480 --> 00:29:13,440
first notes of the Ravine Song came like a tidening

637
00:29:13,480 --> 00:29:16,359
of a string behind my ears, low harmonics that took

638
00:29:16,400 --> 00:29:18,880
into my chest and left a strange, vibrating ake under

639
00:29:18,920 --> 00:29:21,759
the sternum. There, except where there had been only blank,

640
00:29:21,799 --> 00:29:24,799
I found a fresh carving. The room glowed faintly in teel,

641
00:29:24,920 --> 00:29:27,440
like algae scene in deep water. It hummed with the

642
00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:29,839
resonance that touched a public place inside me, and made

643
00:29:29,839 --> 00:29:32,279
my skin feel thin. When I laid my palm on

644
00:29:32,319 --> 00:29:34,839
the stone, the walls stuttered. It was not a voice

645
00:29:34,839 --> 00:29:36,960
so much as a shaping of memory and embroidery that

646
00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:39,279
stitched another person's last day into the padding of my

647
00:29:39,319 --> 00:29:42,359
own life. I received the memory like an inheritance. I

648
00:29:42,359 --> 00:29:45,319
had not asked for. A boy falling the sudden spruce

649
00:29:45,359 --> 00:29:47,359
end of damp wood, the small bright image of a

650
00:29:47,440 --> 00:29:50,400
lantern bobbing as ann scrambled for a ledge. It landed

651
00:29:50,440 --> 00:29:52,400
in me, intact and precise, and left behind in you

652
00:29:52,559 --> 00:29:55,359
private each that tasted of iron. There are worse things

653
00:29:55,359 --> 00:29:58,160
than loss. There is zeff that arrives under the guise

654
00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:01,640
of gift. The ravine does not take with malice. Its

655
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:05,039
indifference is the real cruelty. It folds memory into itself,

656
00:30:05,079 --> 00:30:07,039
as a river falls leaf and stick into his current.

657
00:30:07,759 --> 00:30:10,079
Once they are inside the ravine, they become part of

658
00:30:10,079 --> 00:30:12,160
its continuing him, and are carried along with no thought

659
00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:14,079
for the living people who had once called those images

660
00:30:14,119 --> 00:30:16,960
their own. I tried to draw the rune in my notebook,

661
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:19,039
to map the lines and make a scaffold of meaning.

662
00:30:19,599 --> 00:30:22,720
My hand tremble the groove of the mark assisted translation

663
00:30:22,759 --> 00:30:24,720
into a concemed to slither on the page when they're

664
00:30:24,720 --> 00:30:28,119
blinked around me. The gullies answered each other with harmonics

665
00:30:28,119 --> 00:30:29,960
that were at a phase and somewhere far down the

666
00:30:29,960 --> 00:30:32,799
slope below rumble roll like a distant drum. A woman

667
00:30:32,839 --> 00:30:35,519
in the lane froze midsweep. Her broom hung in the

668
00:30:35,559 --> 00:30:37,400
air as if a murred, and the expression on her

669
00:30:37,400 --> 00:30:39,759
face folded him wood until recognition is pooled like threat

670
00:30:39,759 --> 00:30:42,839
and dropped away. The afternoon dissolved into dusk, and the

671
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:45,920
ravine Es song gathered itself into a tide. The village

672
00:30:45,920 --> 00:30:49,640
began to rearrange names, flattened, family histories puttered out like

673
00:30:49,680 --> 00:30:52,640
sputtering candles. I could hear the sound of lives being

674
00:30:52,720 --> 00:30:55,400
unstitched as clearly as I could hear the wound. The

675
00:30:55,480 --> 00:30:58,279
level of urgency in Martyr's warning took on new dimensions.

676
00:30:58,960 --> 00:31:01,799
This was not a private take. The gullys were beginning

677
00:31:01,799 --> 00:31:04,440
to also what belonged to all of them. Late that night,

678
00:31:04,480 --> 00:31:07,119
I stood between two singing gullies. The narrow path rigid

679
00:31:07,200 --> 00:31:10,160
under my boots. The earth run did away that vibrated

680
00:31:10,240 --> 00:31:12,680
my teeth. I anchored myself with the things that still

681
00:31:12,720 --> 00:31:15,720
felt like mine. My recorder pressed against my rips, the

682
00:31:15,759 --> 00:31:18,279
satchel at my side with the note book, the brass

683
00:31:18,279 --> 00:31:20,319
pendant culled against the skin at the base of my throat.

684
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:24,279
The ravine leaned closer, its course poured a child's memory

685
00:31:24,279 --> 00:31:27,720
into me laffo like pebbles, small hands with river sensitized knuckles,

686
00:31:27,839 --> 00:31:30,759
tend and as sharp as a blade. Choice presented itself

687
00:31:30,759 --> 00:31:33,640
with the inevitability of tides to bind up or withered

688
00:31:33,680 --> 00:31:35,640
life into the stone, to anchor it in the ravine

689
00:31:35,680 --> 00:31:38,119
and allow the child to remain remembered inside the canyon.

690
00:31:38,559 --> 00:31:40,720
What to stubbornly force the memory back into the wind,

691
00:31:40,799 --> 00:31:43,119
and versed the price of my own disappearance into a gray,

692
00:31:43,279 --> 00:31:46,960
unremembered place. There was no rhetorical flourish to the instant.

693
00:31:47,680 --> 00:31:49,759
It was not an epic fork, but a practical one.

694
00:31:50,200 --> 00:31:53,400
Memory is currency hereer, and it must be exchanged. I

695
00:31:53,440 --> 00:31:56,039
pressed the recorder between my palms until my knuckles whitened.

696
00:31:56,680 --> 00:31:59,400
The pendants seemed to answer a metallicum that echoed the

697
00:31:59,440 --> 00:32:02,440
run's thins on. I thought of MARTA's hands and how

698
00:32:02,440 --> 00:32:04,559
she would not sleep again without checking the ledges for

699
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:07,200
new marks. I thought of faces I had seen and

700
00:32:07,319 --> 00:32:09,759
make themselves while I tried to draw the ruin. I

701
00:32:09,799 --> 00:32:12,200
thought of the child's imagined hands in the sudden, terrible

702
00:32:12,240 --> 00:32:16,039
intimacy of their last moment. The choice was not about heroism.

703
00:32:16,319 --> 00:32:18,279
It was about whether I could consign myself to become

704
00:32:18,279 --> 00:32:21,000
a place for someone else's life to rest. I gave

705
00:32:21,039 --> 00:32:23,839
the memory to the stone. There was no triumphant release,

706
00:32:23,920 --> 00:32:27,240
no noble glow. The act was simple and small and terrible.

707
00:32:27,799 --> 00:32:29,759
A pressure like an exhalation moved through me, and a

708
00:32:29,759 --> 00:32:32,160
cullies formed raw and warm along my palm, as if

709
00:32:32,160 --> 00:32:35,000
from the friction of holding a cliff face. The lullaby

710
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:37,079
a lodge behind my teeth and would not shake loose.

711
00:32:37,720 --> 00:32:39,519
In the morning, the village would have one more name

712
00:32:39,559 --> 00:32:42,759
that remembered. Some one would wake and discover an unfallible

713
00:32:42,799 --> 00:32:45,160
absence and bend to the new geometry of their life.

714
00:32:45,599 --> 00:32:47,640
I had spent a piece of myself for the absence,

715
00:32:47,799 --> 00:32:50,079
and I tasted the barter in my mouth. When I

716
00:32:50,079 --> 00:32:52,319
opened my eyes at dawn, I found the world slightly ascue.

717
00:32:52,799 --> 00:32:54,960
My hand bore the new callous, and a child's fragment

718
00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:57,400
of some clouded my throat. In an endless, private half verse,

719
00:32:58,200 --> 00:33:00,160
Marta watched me from the threshold of her house with

720
00:33:00,200 --> 00:33:02,519
a quiet, fears expression, and tied a raven feather to

721
00:33:02,559 --> 00:33:04,839
my satchel with hands that had steadied for no other thing,

722
00:33:04,880 --> 00:33:07,880
but this. She left me with an instruction. A carried

723
00:33:07,880 --> 00:33:11,039
equal part's invitation, and fret four deeper if you must,

724
00:33:11,079 --> 00:33:13,200
but remember that each step risks the slower issure of

725
00:33:13,200 --> 00:33:15,839
the man who walks it. The village moved through the

726
00:33:15,839 --> 00:33:18,160
next hours, as if waking from a stupor. A woman

727
00:33:18,160 --> 00:33:20,640
found her husband's absence like an h behind the launs.

728
00:33:21,319 --> 00:33:23,359
She handled a spoon, as if testing whether the shape

729
00:33:23,359 --> 00:33:25,880
of her life still fit her hand. People did not

730
00:33:25,960 --> 00:33:28,440
gather to speak of what had been taken. They folded

731
00:33:28,440 --> 00:33:30,920
around the new spaces, cautiously and with a silence that

732
00:33:30,960 --> 00:33:35,119
felt like complicity. Memory had become a public commodity. The

733
00:33:35,200 --> 00:33:37,720
ledger of the ravine grew wider in the days that

734
00:33:37,799 --> 00:33:41,480
followed my sleep, stitch itself with unfamiliar scenes. Some belonged

735
00:33:41,480 --> 00:33:43,640
to the same child whose larder had come large behind

736
00:33:43,680 --> 00:33:46,720
my teeth. Others were older, everything from a storm bent

737
00:33:46,759 --> 00:33:49,160
harvest to the precise way a midwif cuptain newborn's head.

738
00:33:49,759 --> 00:33:52,200
I recorded them, dutifully, laying each like a map into

739
00:33:52,200 --> 00:33:54,000
the notebook, only to find the inkward's moon in the

740
00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:57,240
places where the Rune's influence were strongest. The village learned

741
00:33:57,240 --> 00:33:59,519
to watch me watch the gullies, and the gullies learned

742
00:33:59,519 --> 00:34:02,680
to unswer with sharper interjections. I do not pretend to

743
00:34:02,680 --> 00:34:05,920
have anzos. I can only cattalog the things that have happened,

744
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:08,880
and away each one felt. The Ravine does not operate

745
00:34:08,920 --> 00:34:11,920
with motive. It operates with need. It keeps its course

746
00:34:11,960 --> 00:34:14,280
by taking its smooth memories into itself, the way water

747
00:34:14,360 --> 00:34:17,679
smooths stone. People here survive by making terms with the trade,

748
00:34:18,239 --> 00:34:20,280
varying the names they can live without, and protect in

749
00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:24,360
the ones they cannot. MARTA's caution is not superstition. It

750
00:34:24,440 --> 00:34:27,159
is a form of governance over grief. The feather she

751
00:34:27,159 --> 00:34:30,280
tied to my satchel became a small private liturgy. I

752
00:34:30,320 --> 00:34:32,119
would touch it and harm the tune she hummed, and

753
00:34:32,199 --> 00:34:34,559
for a moment the ages on my world stead. I

754
00:34:34,599 --> 00:34:37,119
found myself tracing the carv ruin in my notebook until

755
00:34:37,119 --> 00:34:39,760
the ink trembled and blurred. The more I recorded, the

756
00:34:39,800 --> 00:34:43,039
less entrusted the permanence of the record. The Ravine's ledger

757
00:34:43,119 --> 00:34:45,920
is not in constone alone. It is a living thing,

758
00:34:46,119 --> 00:34:49,400
and living things right Margins. That night, standing at the

759
00:34:49,480 --> 00:34:51,920
ravine slip. Once more, I understood the geometry of my error.

760
00:34:52,519 --> 00:34:55,920
The ledger was not full. It could not be. Each

761
00:34:55,960 --> 00:34:58,280
carve mark is a promise that the canyon will sing again,

762
00:34:58,440 --> 00:35:00,639
and the canyon keeps its promises, with out asking whether

763
00:35:00,679 --> 00:35:03,519
those at honors have consented. I truded a private grain

764
00:35:03,559 --> 00:35:06,559
of self for a public reprieve. The village slept easier

765
00:35:06,599 --> 00:35:09,280
in one small place and uneasier in another. I woke

766
00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:11,400
with music threaded in my marrow, and with a certainty

767
00:35:11,400 --> 00:35:14,239
that the ravine will call again with sharper intent. I

768
00:35:14,239 --> 00:35:16,639
have kept the reconds because I am still stubbornly curious.

769
00:35:17,360 --> 00:35:19,480
I have kept the pendant because it hums in response

770
00:35:19,480 --> 00:35:21,000
to the rune, and because a man who leaves his

771
00:35:21,039 --> 00:35:24,440
tools behind is simply erasing himself by degrees. Marty gave

772
00:35:24,440 --> 00:35:27,320
me a mat drawn in charcoal, a memory. It is

773
00:35:27,360 --> 00:35:30,360
not precise, but it is enough to continue. The bath

774
00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:34,159
forward is not heroic. It is an arithmetic of small renunciations.

775
00:35:34,840 --> 00:35:37,639
And now the story begins again. The feather in my

776
00:35:37,679 --> 00:35:40,400
satchel taps at my side like a metronym. The gullies

777
00:35:40,400 --> 00:35:43,000
fold the last vestiges of light into themselves and breathe.

778
00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:45,280
I have learned the cadence of the ravine song and

779
00:35:45,360 --> 00:35:48,440
the ledger's appetite. I have learned the exact terrible weight

780
00:35:48,480 --> 00:35:50,960
of a child's laughter in my throat. I have learned

781
00:35:50,960 --> 00:35:52,840
that some stones will keep what we have been, and

782
00:35:52,880 --> 00:35:55,039
that to listen is sometimes to consent to being a maid.

783
00:35:55,719 --> 00:35:57,639
I walk toward the next mark because I want to

784
00:35:57,679 --> 00:36:00,159
know whether exchange can be refused, what a memory can

785
00:36:00,159 --> 00:36:03,239
be anchored without being stolen. I walk because the alternatives

786
00:36:03,239 --> 00:36:05,559
are silence or ignorance, and I have never been able

787
00:36:05,599 --> 00:36:07,719
to bear the cost of the latter. This is not

788
00:36:07,800 --> 00:36:10,199
a promise that I will succeed. It is a record

789
00:36:10,199 --> 00:36:12,519
of what was given, what was received, and the small,

790
00:36:12,599 --> 00:36:15,559
ridiculous courage it takes to go on. The ravine sings,

791
00:36:15,559 --> 00:36:17,800
and I learn its music. I take notes. I make

792
00:36:17,840 --> 00:36:20,679
my small, prudent choices. I do not yet know whether

793
00:36:20,719 --> 00:36:22,719
this ledger will be closed with time, or will remain

794
00:36:22,719 --> 00:36:25,440
a lived wound in the village's face. I know only

795
00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:27,800
that each night the somb returns, that the gullies remember

796
00:36:27,840 --> 00:36:29,679
more than any one of them should, and that those

797
00:36:29,679 --> 00:36:31,960
who lessen keep the echoes like litters of foreign children.

798
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:34,400
In the hollows of their ribs. If you hear the

799
00:36:34,400 --> 00:36:36,159
psalm from blow, do not think of it as a

800
00:36:36,199 --> 00:36:39,760
summons you can answer without consequence. Remember mart ask stick

801
00:36:39,800 --> 00:36:42,880
tapping three times in the doorway. Remember the way memory

802
00:36:42,920 --> 00:36:46,159
can be coaxed about it. Remember that protection often looks

803
00:36:46,199 --> 00:36:49,239
like a small, harsh boundary. And if you remain curious,

804
00:36:49,239 --> 00:36:52,519
subscribe to follow what comes next. There will be more ruins,

805
00:36:52,639 --> 00:36:54,960
more a ledger, entriries, and a deeper ledger beneath the

806
00:36:55,039 --> 00:36:56,960
ledger that the ravine keeps in the cold dark where

807
00:36:57,000 --> 00:36:59,639
stones are oldest. They told me never to return to

808
00:36:59,639 --> 00:37:02,519
that town. The sentence had arrived before the place dayd

809
00:37:02,639 --> 00:37:04,599
carried in gossip like an old h a map of

810
00:37:04,639 --> 00:37:07,519
a mission that bent toward the ravines. I had thought

811
00:37:07,519 --> 00:37:10,360
warnings were small things, the sound of myles protecting themselves

812
00:37:10,400 --> 00:37:12,920
from what they could not repair. I had accepted them

813
00:37:12,960 --> 00:37:16,320
as neighbors. Except a bad roof necessary caution folded into

814
00:37:16,400 --> 00:37:19,039
ordinary life. The town that opened itself to me was

815
00:37:19,079 --> 00:37:21,239
smaller than I had imagined, and larger than its name.

816
00:37:21,280 --> 00:37:24,719
Allow houses crouched like animals into the slope, passed braided

817
00:37:24,760 --> 00:37:27,239
between rock and moss, and everywhere. The gullies lived in

818
00:37:27,239 --> 00:37:29,639
the architecturere folding the light so that dusk seemed to

819
00:37:29,639 --> 00:37:32,480
come twice. The first thing that stole itself from me

820
00:37:32,559 --> 00:37:34,360
was not a memory in a grand sense, but the

821
00:37:34,360 --> 00:37:37,360
texture of belonging in a child's kitchen, the exact tilt

822
00:37:37,400 --> 00:37:39,599
of a wooden chair, the faint, sticky ring on a table,

823
00:37:39,599 --> 00:37:41,920
the whisper of a lalibia. I had never known. I

824
00:37:41,960 --> 00:37:44,039
worked before dawn, with the smell of porch and wet

825
00:37:44,039 --> 00:37:47,000
wool on my tongue hands, remembering spoons. I had never held.

826
00:37:47,559 --> 00:37:49,679
The memory pressed behind my roobs like a borrowed heart,

827
00:37:49,719 --> 00:37:52,760
polite and dreadful, unowned warmth, and a name that would

828
00:37:52,800 --> 00:37:55,320
not settle when I tried to grasp it. I sat

829
00:37:55,360 --> 00:37:57,280
in my room at the end, the pendent heavy against

830
00:37:57,280 --> 00:37:59,480
my sternum, and let the morning thin until the intrusion

831
00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:02,039
became an hure I could not wash away. The village

832
00:38:02,079 --> 00:38:03,920
in was a low timber thing whose wind a side.

833
00:38:03,920 --> 00:38:06,519
When the wind found a scene. My satchel lay open

834
00:38:06,519 --> 00:38:09,039
on the bed, and notebook peeking from its mouth. I

835
00:38:09,039 --> 00:38:11,199
had drawn the mark, a small coved motif that had

836
00:38:11,280 --> 00:38:13,760
arrived with the memory on a scrap of paper by

837
00:38:13,800 --> 00:38:16,280
habit before I could decide whether I was mad or measured.

838
00:38:16,840 --> 00:38:19,039
The mark was simple, a looping river stone, a notch,

839
00:38:19,079 --> 00:38:21,639
and a small crossbar, like a child's attempt at a ruin.

840
00:38:22,199 --> 00:38:23,719
It had come with a fragment of a name in

841
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:26,519
the taste of smoke. I folded the paper and found

842
00:38:26,519 --> 00:38:29,639
the road to Marty's cottage. Marta stood where she always stood,

843
00:38:29,679 --> 00:38:32,440
in her doorway. Three taps from her stick already counted

844
00:38:32,480 --> 00:38:34,920
in my head. She wore the village weather in the

845
00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:36,880
angle of her shoulders, a show patch like a map

846
00:38:36,920 --> 00:38:39,800
of losses. Her eyes were the pale stone of glasure,

847
00:38:39,840 --> 00:38:41,800
water and cloud, and they closed like a gate. When

848
00:38:41,800 --> 00:38:44,320
I showed her the mark, she did not ask who

849
00:38:44,320 --> 00:38:46,679
I was or where I had slept. There are things

850
00:38:46,760 --> 00:38:49,320
she keeps in the shape of practice, recognition as ritual.

851
00:38:50,199 --> 00:38:51,920
She traced the scratch and the scrap with a finger

852
00:38:51,960 --> 00:38:54,800
that knew the language of scars. Her hands trembled as

853
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:57,599
if remembering a slope of years. I felt a small,

854
00:38:57,639 --> 00:39:01,400
almost private satisfaction when her mouth tightened. Confirmation is a

855
00:39:01,440 --> 00:39:04,639
tool as much as a sentence. She revealed, simply and

856
00:39:04,719 --> 00:39:07,000
without flourish, that the motive belonged to a household that

857
00:39:07,039 --> 00:39:09,800
had been taken many seasons ago, that the Ravine had

858
00:39:09,840 --> 00:39:11,679
run a string through their days and left only the

859
00:39:11,719 --> 00:39:15,159
knowledge of absence. She did not speak of hearers or curses.

860
00:39:15,320 --> 00:39:18,280
She spoke of selection. The Ravine is picky, she seemed

861
00:39:18,280 --> 00:39:20,840
to say, in the silence between her breaths, choosing fragments

862
00:39:20,840 --> 00:39:23,800
like a thief who prefers curd and fabrics. Her warning

863
00:39:23,880 --> 00:39:26,000
landed like a stone in my chest. The village had

864
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:28,239
made a pack with caution, and those packs of teeth.

865
00:39:28,679 --> 00:39:30,320
I walked to the lip that evening, with the pendant

866
00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:33,000
warm at my throat, the weight of the burrowed memory

867
00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:35,599
making the world's way at dust. The Ravine is a

868
00:39:35,639 --> 00:39:38,119
mouth painted teal and slate, the stones like teeth stained

869
00:39:38,119 --> 00:39:40,920
with lichen. The ancient stone face up with the Ravine's

870
00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:43,320
lip hung over the dark, its features half carved by

871
00:39:43,360 --> 00:39:45,840
hands I could not name. Upon its cheek, the ruins

872
00:39:45,840 --> 00:39:48,400
were threaded across the rock like a scar. When I

873
00:39:48,400 --> 00:39:50,599
set the pendant against the stone, the mark matched in

874
00:39:50,599 --> 00:39:54,079
a way that felt less coincidence than appointment. The pendant firumed,

875
00:39:54,159 --> 00:39:56,519
and with it a lullaby came clearer, a child's syllables

876
00:39:56,559 --> 00:39:59,800
braided into the wind. The realization arrived not as thunder,

877
00:39:59,840 --> 00:40:03,199
but a careful, terrible thought. The Ravine does not merely

878
00:40:03,239 --> 00:40:06,119
take the loose playthings of memory. It catalogs, it writes,

879
00:40:06,880 --> 00:40:09,079
It arranges names and moments into a chorus that feeds

880
00:40:09,119 --> 00:40:11,599
his voice. The pendant was a key as much as

881
00:40:11,599 --> 00:40:14,079
a mirror. It belonged to the same grammar that the

882
00:40:14,079 --> 00:40:17,599
stone used. My curiosity folded into threat. Where once I

883
00:40:17,639 --> 00:40:20,920
had intended to observe, now I felt observed, chosen. The

884
00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:23,599
path between gullies is narrow and untrusting, as kin ofverth

885
00:40:23,639 --> 00:40:26,880
stretched over the emptiness. The village avoids the wrote when

886
00:40:26,920 --> 00:40:30,000
the song is high, when Harmonico returns, coal on the

887
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:31,480
cliffs and make the hairs at the nape of the

888
00:40:31,519 --> 00:40:34,480
neck stand up like bristling weeds. One night, as the

889
00:40:34,519 --> 00:40:37,920
wind breided itself through the crevices, the ravine answer It

890
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:40,800
did not call with one simple voice, if formed a

891
00:40:40,840 --> 00:40:43,199
chorus that shifted and divided, The sound both child like,

892
00:40:43,239 --> 00:40:46,760
an avalanching, a harmonic scream that slept into bone. Villagers

893
00:40:46,800 --> 00:40:49,920
working that path became quieter, their faces hollowing like candle wax.

894
00:40:50,559 --> 00:40:52,840
They blinked as af losing film from behind their eyes.

895
00:40:53,599 --> 00:40:56,599
I saw it happen a woman I had watched Mendonnette earlier,

896
00:40:56,599 --> 00:40:58,800
the day's lowered midstep and locked to the world as

897
00:40:58,800 --> 00:41:02,360
if it had been furnished within no unfamiliar props. Marta

898
00:41:02,480 --> 00:41:04,239
who had told me the rules, admitted to me in

899
00:41:04,239 --> 00:41:06,039
the small Lives that she had once tried to hold

900
00:41:06,079 --> 00:41:08,480
some one back from the sun. Her admission was a

901
00:41:08,519 --> 00:41:12,679
confession without ritual. She had failed. The failure sat between

902
00:41:12,719 --> 00:41:15,719
us like a remembered injury. Watching the hollowing was like

903
00:41:15,760 --> 00:41:19,480
watching language evaporate, first the adjectives, then the verbs, until

904
00:41:19,480 --> 00:41:21,760
only breath remained, and the person carried a distance where

905
00:41:21,760 --> 00:41:24,360
a life should be. At midnight, the ravine becomes a

906
00:41:24,400 --> 00:41:27,079
machine of gravity and sound. I stood at the lip

907
00:41:27,079 --> 00:41:29,079
and felt it pull like a tide of remembered things,

908
00:41:29,719 --> 00:41:31,800
the bor of life, the child's kitchen, the lilla beat.

909
00:41:31,800 --> 00:41:33,719
The name rose up between my ribs with a clouty

910
00:41:33,760 --> 00:41:36,400
that made my hand shake. It did not arrive as

911
00:41:36,440 --> 00:41:39,039
a narrative, but as a living film. The touch of

912
00:41:39,039 --> 00:41:41,719
a small hand, a Reuben slipping, or window frame press

913
00:41:41,800 --> 00:41:44,920
white with winter, the pressure was not merely sensory. It

914
00:41:44,960 --> 00:41:48,679
was telic. The Ravenov was completion at a cost. When

915
00:41:48,719 --> 00:41:51,679
it reaches it is not content with scraps. It pulls

916
00:41:51,679 --> 00:41:54,480
whole thirds through you. I reached toward the fissure with

917
00:41:54,480 --> 00:41:56,440
the reckless intent of a man who prefers action to

918
00:41:56,480 --> 00:42:00,000
being moved. My fingers brushed the cold rock. The song

919
00:42:00,079 --> 00:42:02,079
ng answered with a hamonic that made my teeth hum.

920
00:42:02,400 --> 00:42:05,519
The bore of life expanded, not subsiding, but demanding space

921
00:42:05,599 --> 00:42:07,800
or presence that tried to replace the architecture of my

922
00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:11,079
own past. In those seconds, I understood the salvaging logic

923
00:42:11,159 --> 00:42:14,000
of the place. The ravine weaves memory into itself and

924
00:42:14,079 --> 00:42:16,679
keeps the pattern alive by growing new names into the course.

925
00:42:17,320 --> 00:42:19,519
The question in that dark was brutal in its intimacy

926
00:42:20,119 --> 00:42:21,920
to hold on to what is left of one's self,

927
00:42:22,079 --> 00:42:24,119
or to give way and become a vessel for something

928
00:42:24,119 --> 00:42:27,079
older than stranger. Surrender felt like in a redger that

929
00:42:27,119 --> 00:42:30,400
would be merciful to those already hollowed. A clean removal.

930
00:42:31,039 --> 00:42:33,320
Clinging felt like a thin stubb and flame against a

931
00:42:33,360 --> 00:42:36,480
swallowing knight, but vendant pulse against my sternum in time

932
00:42:36,519 --> 00:42:39,679
with the sum. It was both anchor and antenna. I

933
00:42:39,719 --> 00:42:42,039
thought of martyrs, ring, of river stoanes, of her low,

934
00:42:42,119 --> 00:42:45,000
protective hum tune when she was anxious. I thought of

935
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:48,440
the village's low faces, their memory thin eyes. I thought,

936
00:42:48,519 --> 00:42:50,760
sharply and close, of the name that did not belong

937
00:42:50,800 --> 00:42:52,079
to me, and how it fit me like an ill

938
00:42:52,119 --> 00:42:54,599
cut garment for a moment, the choice was a shape

939
00:42:54,599 --> 00:42:57,239
in my method I could not swallow. I stumbled back

940
00:42:57,239 --> 00:42:58,679
from the lip with the taste of some one else's

941
00:42:58,679 --> 00:43:00,679
grief hung at my teeth. It was as if the

942
00:43:00,760 --> 00:43:02,639
ravine had bit off a piece of history to test

943
00:43:02,679 --> 00:43:05,079
a jaw. The showd it left me with were small,

944
00:43:05,119 --> 00:43:07,119
but true. Her grief that belonged to a lost mother

945
00:43:07,199 --> 00:43:08,960
or child. I saw her fitted to a life that

946
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:10,719
had not been lived by me, and that now settled

947
00:43:10,719 --> 00:43:13,079
as if it might fuse Martin met me in the

948
00:43:13,119 --> 00:43:15,119
square with a charm she had worked with hands older

949
00:43:15,119 --> 00:43:18,000
than common fear. She folded it around my scarf with

950
00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:19,960
a precision that felt like a prayer, and explained in

951
00:43:20,079 --> 00:43:22,199
gestures and a slow nod that the charm would not

952
00:43:22,320 --> 00:43:25,000
save me, but might delay the reach. A delay is

953
00:43:25,039 --> 00:43:27,119
a victory in a place like this, and the village

954
00:43:27,159 --> 00:43:30,039
makes its victories narrow and careful. In the predned, the

955
00:43:30,119 --> 00:43:32,639
village breathed in a hush that felt like waiting. The

956
00:43:32,719 --> 00:43:34,920
charm fit in my palm like a promise half formed.

957
00:43:35,559 --> 00:43:38,679
The memory shard nestled against the pendant and throbbed. I

958
00:43:38,719 --> 00:43:40,800
wrote the small details into my note book as if

959
00:43:40,840 --> 00:43:42,920
the act of writing were herself a thread of resistance.

960
00:43:43,559 --> 00:43:45,480
The kittence of a lullaby, the way I certain tree

961
00:43:45,559 --> 00:43:47,719
leaned against the cold wind, the precise angle of a

962
00:43:47,800 --> 00:43:51,320
child's laugh. Recording felt like a tusman. Because the ravine

963
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:54,480
seems to feed on unrecorded things. If memory has wait

964
00:43:54,519 --> 00:43:56,920
and gives it ballast, there is a kind of thin

965
00:43:57,000 --> 00:43:59,159
victory in the way the village arranges itself against the

966
00:43:59,239 --> 00:44:03,039
ravine's appetite. They tie threads, they niche arms, and they

967
00:44:03,039 --> 00:44:05,639
make lists of what matters enough to remember. But there

968
00:44:05,679 --> 00:44:08,159
is also a cunningness to the ravine. It can imprint

969
00:44:08,159 --> 00:44:10,719
pieces of lives without swallowing them whole. A shard of sorrow,

970
00:44:10,760 --> 00:44:13,800
a ring of laughter, a face ass tilt. Those fragments

971
00:44:13,840 --> 00:44:15,639
lie in the edges of people, like shards of shell,

972
00:44:15,719 --> 00:44:18,639
sharp and constant. When dawn eased up over the gullies.

973
00:44:18,639 --> 00:44:20,559
I sat at my window and pat with a new purpose.

974
00:44:21,239 --> 00:44:23,480
I had arrived as a curiosity and would not leave

975
00:44:23,519 --> 00:44:26,280
us one. The borrowed sorrow had settled into my bones

976
00:44:26,280 --> 00:44:28,880
and become inquiry. I traced the run on a page

977
00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:32,119
until the inkwarth in fingers following old grooves, as if listening.

978
00:44:32,719 --> 00:44:35,679
The pendant warmed with the slow certainty of weather. My

979
00:44:35,760 --> 00:44:39,519
recorder lay in my satchel cord rapped impatient. I felt

980
00:44:39,559 --> 00:44:41,639
less like a visitor and more like a witness who

981
00:44:41,639 --> 00:44:45,039
had volunteered for a dangerous faith that patterns could be traced,

982
00:44:45,119 --> 00:44:47,280
that names could be returned, were that at least the

983
00:44:47,360 --> 00:44:50,400
architecture of theft might be understood. The song had changed

984
00:44:50,400 --> 00:44:53,000
me an immeasurable way. I moved through the village with

985
00:44:53,159 --> 00:44:56,199
my senses tuned to fishers. I listened to how ravens

986
00:44:56,199 --> 00:44:57,960
folded over the roofs, to how the wind found small

987
00:44:57,960 --> 00:44:59,800
pockets in which to harm, to the ancient stones that

988
00:44:59,800 --> 00:45:03,000
its seemed to remember their own hands. I watched motatapo

989
00:45:03,039 --> 00:45:05,559
stick three times. When the song rose, and I adopted

990
00:45:05,559 --> 00:45:08,559
a habit, as if ritual might be contagious. My notebook

991
00:45:08,559 --> 00:45:11,039
filled with small facts that had not been mine eyes before,

992
00:45:11,599 --> 00:45:13,880
a child's favorite spoon. The scent of pine resin when

993
00:45:13,880 --> 00:45:15,639
the wind came from the north, the particular way the

994
00:45:15,719 --> 00:45:18,519
riverstone felt underfoot that the old ford. There is an

995
00:45:18,519 --> 00:45:21,199
appetite in curiosity that can resemble hope, and I let

996
00:45:21,199 --> 00:45:23,239
it carry me. I vowed not merely to survive the

997
00:45:23,360 --> 00:45:26,280
Ravine's taste, but to trace its method where it preferred

998
00:45:26,280 --> 00:45:28,840
to pluck whose lives it favored. What the pendant meant

999
00:45:28,840 --> 00:45:31,760
in the language of rock, I told myself that memory

1000
00:45:31,840 --> 00:45:34,360
might be returned, or at least offered assemblance of restitution.

1001
00:45:34,960 --> 00:45:36,800
I set the recorder to the stone lip and waded

1002
00:45:36,800 --> 00:45:39,280
through the small airs, while the village slept like a

1003
00:45:39,320 --> 00:45:42,119
hell breath. The ravine answered and sang, it is not

1004
00:45:42,159 --> 00:45:44,760
a knee voice. It is a chorus that can be

1005
00:45:44,760 --> 00:45:47,599
beautiful and blood owning. In the same measure, it offered

1006
00:45:47,679 --> 00:45:50,800
up fragments as demonstration, a child's hand reaching for a

1007
00:45:50,840 --> 00:45:52,639
ribbon that I could see as if through some one

1008
00:45:52,679 --> 00:45:55,719
else's size. The name like a bell. The recorder picked

1009
00:45:55,760 --> 00:45:58,239
up a harmonic overtones that made the tape warble in places,

1010
00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:01,360
a sound like glass strock under word. I kept recording

1011
00:46:01,400 --> 00:46:04,280
because the act of capturing felt like assembling evidence against fate.

1012
00:46:04,960 --> 00:46:08,320
There is no clean inport to the village resistance. Martistar

1013
00:46:08,440 --> 00:46:10,360
may yet hold at the ages, but the Ravine has

1014
00:46:10,360 --> 00:46:13,320
patience measured in eparchs. My decision to stay, to make

1015
00:46:13,360 --> 00:46:15,880
my curiosity into pursuit, shifted the geometry of my days.

1016
00:46:16,559 --> 00:46:18,599
I do not know if rescue is possible, where the

1017
00:46:18,639 --> 00:46:20,760
lost memories can be coaxed back into the bodies that

1018
00:46:20,840 --> 00:46:23,239
birthed them, or whether the Ravin's hunger is a necessary

1019
00:46:23,280 --> 00:46:25,920
economy of place. I only know that the shod I

1020
00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:28,159
carry ages with an unfamiliar grief that woakes me at

1021
00:46:28,239 --> 00:46:31,159
night and keeps me moving by day. I recorded everything

1022
00:46:31,199 --> 00:46:33,840
I could, the way the moon carved teel into the gullies,

1023
00:46:33,880 --> 00:46:35,960
the creak of Martyr's cottage in winter, the low rumbles

1024
00:46:35,960 --> 00:46:38,280
that settled into the village's foundation. When a Ravine san,

1025
00:46:38,880 --> 00:46:41,079
I am apt to pattern of songs and silences, of

1026
00:46:41,119 --> 00:46:42,840
weeks when the voice was thin, in others when it

1027
00:46:42,840 --> 00:46:45,639
grew fat with history. My notes are an inventory, a

1028
00:46:45,719 --> 00:46:48,880
ledger I maintain against erasure. The Ravine listens back in

1029
00:46:48,920 --> 00:46:51,679
its own way, rippling stones when I name its rhythm

1030
00:46:51,679 --> 00:46:54,639
and answering with the harmonic that rearranges my sleep in

1031
00:46:54,719 --> 00:46:57,199
the end. Decisions in a place like this are lestdramatic

1032
00:46:57,199 --> 00:47:00,039
than one imagines. They are small choices etched into lawn nights,

1033
00:47:00,679 --> 00:47:03,039
to investigate at the risk of becoming part of the chorus,

1034
00:47:03,159 --> 00:47:05,400
or to leave and carry the knowledge. Like contraband, I

1035
00:47:05,519 --> 00:47:07,920
chose to stay and to trace the psalm. The village

1036
00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:09,960
accepted me as a kind of lever, someone useful in

1037
00:47:09,960 --> 00:47:12,719
a narrow, dangerous way. I do not know whether the

1038
00:47:12,760 --> 00:47:15,719
pendant will become my undoing or my key. I only

1039
00:47:15,760 --> 00:47:17,440
know that the river stone I found, that the ravine

1040
00:47:17,480 --> 00:47:19,480
lip poles are feather pressed into a hollow, and when

1041
00:47:19,480 --> 00:47:22,119
I close my eyes, the feather trembles with sound. I

1042
00:47:22,159 --> 00:47:24,400
open my notebook now and write, not to save myself,

1043
00:47:24,440 --> 00:47:26,639
but to make a clear inventory for whoever comes after

1044
00:47:27,280 --> 00:47:30,480
the sound of the ravine is layered. Impatient ruins answered

1045
00:47:30,519 --> 00:47:32,440
my pendant, as if we had always belonged to the

1046
00:47:32,440 --> 00:47:35,800
same grammar. Mart As charms by time, but not confidence.

1047
00:47:36,480 --> 00:47:39,199
The song will come again. My purpose is to follow

1048
00:47:39,280 --> 00:47:41,199
its pattern until it can be charted, or until the

1049
00:47:41,239 --> 00:47:44,039
chart becomes another thing. The ravine can sing back. The

1050
00:47:44,119 --> 00:47:46,800
ogg hasen he left since that night, But pat my

1051
00:47:46,880 --> 00:47:49,079
satchel with recorder and an h that is no longer

1052
00:47:49,119 --> 00:47:51,599
only mine. I move down the narrow a path with

1053
00:47:51,639 --> 00:47:54,119
a kind of faith forged from fear and resolve. Intend

1054
00:47:54,159 --> 00:47:56,159
on learning if memory can be returned or must be

1055
00:47:56,199 --> 00:48:00,360
defended by sacrifice. Subscribe to follow the next chapter, Chapter five,

1056
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:03,159
the fifth Psalm. They told me never to return to

1057
00:48:03,199 --> 00:48:05,159
the town, and for a while I believed the warning

1058
00:48:05,239 --> 00:48:08,239
is a shield, a tidy superstition to keep strangers away,

1059
00:48:08,280 --> 00:48:11,519
and the ravine as appetite small. That belief lasted until

1060
00:48:11,559 --> 00:48:13,679
thus came folding blue, until over the lip, and the

1061
00:48:13,719 --> 00:48:16,400
first harmonic thread threaded itself through the ribs of the world.

1062
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:18,760
The note was not a sound I could place. It

1063
00:48:18,800 --> 00:48:20,840
lived between bone and breath, a cord that tuggered on

1064
00:48:20,920 --> 00:48:23,599
something I had never owned. I woke with the child's

1065
00:48:23,599 --> 00:48:26,199
hands in my mind, small palms that smelled of riverstone

1066
00:48:26,320 --> 00:48:28,559
and the cold wall of another winter, and the certainty

1067
00:48:28,599 --> 00:48:30,360
that those hands had once belonged to some one I

1068
00:48:30,360 --> 00:48:32,480
had been. I had arrived at the village with a

1069
00:48:32,480 --> 00:48:35,159
cork heavy from travel and a satchel containing a recorder

1070
00:48:35,159 --> 00:48:38,559
in note books. The pendant at my throat, brass dulled

1071
00:48:38,559 --> 00:48:40,719
by rowe dust, was a small unknown that I fiddled

1072
00:48:40,719 --> 00:48:43,400
with when sleep would not return. My fingers have a

1073
00:48:43,400 --> 00:48:46,880
habit of tracing edges of stone when taught thickens. That night,

1074
00:48:46,960 --> 00:48:49,159
they traced the pendant until the metal grew warm beneath

1075
00:48:49,199 --> 00:48:51,199
the skin, and the memory of those hands strummed like

1076
00:48:51,199 --> 00:48:54,119
a distant bell. The villagers moved like muted things in

1077
00:48:54,159 --> 00:48:57,960
the periphery of light. Small houses hunched against the gullies, chimneys,

1078
00:48:57,960 --> 00:49:01,119
coughing smoke into a sky smashed by falk. MARTA's hut

1079
00:49:01,119 --> 00:49:03,480
sat at the edge where the village surrendered to vertical rock.

1080
00:49:04,159 --> 00:49:06,320
She had always been a figure of warning in my notes,

1081
00:49:06,400 --> 00:49:08,840
a brittle, watchful presence, with the ring of river stones

1082
00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:11,039
and a boonamulet verted with a raven feather that crossed

1083
00:49:11,079 --> 00:49:13,880
the pale front of Healeig shoals. When I arrived at

1084
00:49:13,880 --> 00:49:16,039
her door, there was no speaking at first, only the

1085
00:49:16,039 --> 00:49:18,119
sound of the ravine tuning, as if the cliffs themselves

1086
00:49:18,119 --> 00:49:21,199
were adjusting breathing. She tapped her stick three times before

1087
00:49:21,239 --> 00:49:24,400
any thought of conversation could begin. At rhythm settle me

1088
00:49:24,440 --> 00:49:28,000
into the careful cadence required near place memories. MARTA's warning

1089
00:49:28,039 --> 00:49:30,800
was not a sentence, but a shape, an old practice

1090
00:49:30,800 --> 00:49:33,920
motion that folded small things away. She has always carred

1091
00:49:33,920 --> 00:49:36,480
the village memory like a wound. I saw it in

1092
00:49:36,480 --> 00:49:38,159
the burn mark on her cheek and the way her

1093
00:49:38,159 --> 00:49:41,199
pale blue eyes clouded. When the ravine hummed. She opened

1094
00:49:41,199 --> 00:49:42,920
the path for me with a look that Beau forbade,

1095
00:49:42,960 --> 00:49:45,960
and invited the song. She said without words, I could

1096
00:49:46,000 --> 00:49:49,159
keep rearranges what it finds, it takes, and stitches what

1097
00:49:49,199 --> 00:49:52,039
it takes into the canyon's course. In a hush between

1098
00:49:52,039 --> 00:49:54,760
her taps, I understood the scale of the bargain, not

1099
00:49:54,920 --> 00:49:57,360
by ritual, but by geometry. The ravine had been collecting

1100
00:49:57,400 --> 00:49:59,639
lives for a long time, a slow cattle, logging by

1101
00:49:59,679 --> 00:50:02,719
vibration and stone. I returned to the ravine's lip at

1102
00:50:02,760 --> 00:50:05,280
night we called against masternum. The wind out on the

1103
00:50:05,360 --> 00:50:07,639
ridge carried distant ravens in a fog that move like

1104
00:50:07,679 --> 00:50:10,599
water over glass. Close to the edge, I found fresh

1105
00:50:10,599 --> 00:50:12,719
for their nests, and a newing of river stones arranged

1106
00:50:12,760 --> 00:50:15,800
like a cord, each pebble placed with an obsessive geological care.

1107
00:50:16,400 --> 00:50:18,800
The stones gleamed faintly in teel lichen laid out an

1108
00:50:18,800 --> 00:50:21,880
ax that suggested tuning rather than ornament. On the ground,

1109
00:50:21,920 --> 00:50:24,039
the moss was pressed flat where something heavy had rested.

1110
00:50:24,679 --> 00:50:27,440
A faint harmonic rumble bolt through the soles of my boots.

1111
00:50:27,440 --> 00:50:29,719
The ravine, listening to itself, were testing the air to

1112
00:50:29,760 --> 00:50:32,800
see what it might claim next. My recorder was strapped

1113
00:50:32,800 --> 00:50:34,880
and useless in my hand. Its called rap bulk, like

1114
00:50:34,880 --> 00:50:37,440
a relic in a place that remembered by touch, I

1115
00:50:37,519 --> 00:50:39,559
listened with my eyes closed, a habit that I think

1116
00:50:39,559 --> 00:50:42,159
of as a means of hearing. More precisely, a borrowed

1117
00:50:42,199 --> 00:50:45,360
memory slipped in like water under ice. It arrived not

1118
00:50:45,440 --> 00:50:48,440
as a vision, but as an inheritance. A woman falling

1119
00:50:48,440 --> 00:50:51,440
into singing darkness, the sharp white sound of her coat

1120
00:50:51,440 --> 00:50:54,760
against stone, a village that folded her absence into rich

1121
00:50:54,760 --> 00:50:57,480
shoals of candle and hush. I felt her final breath

1122
00:50:57,519 --> 00:50:59,039
as if it were my own, an intake that was

1123
00:50:59,079 --> 00:51:01,679
sheeted the interior archet icture of me. The canyon had

1124
00:51:01,719 --> 00:51:04,440
been hunger before a new hunger was possible. Their ow

1125
00:51:04,519 --> 00:51:06,719
runes carved into one of the ancient stone faces near

1126
00:51:06,760 --> 00:51:08,920
the rim old marks, like the slow script of weather

1127
00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:11,880
and water. I held my fingers to those carvings because

1128
00:51:11,880 --> 00:51:14,639
there is a method. Some part of me trusts touch

1129
00:51:14,679 --> 00:51:17,679
the inscription to anchor what might otherwise slip. Each line

1130
00:51:17,679 --> 00:51:20,119
of vish girths radiated till from within fractures like vain

1131
00:51:20,159 --> 00:51:23,199
stored light. As the borrowed memory grew, pieces of my

1132
00:51:23,239 --> 00:51:26,320
own past began to dull. Names I thought steady faded

1133
00:51:26,320 --> 00:51:29,760
at the edges. Small domestic things, the curve of a spoon,

1134
00:51:29,880 --> 00:51:31,880
a hotel ledger in a town I had never visited,

1135
00:51:32,000 --> 00:51:34,760
softened until I could not reach them cleanly. The more

1136
00:51:34,880 --> 00:51:37,000
of that woman I held, the less of myself remained

1137
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:39,880
available for retrieval. My life began to rode like a

1138
00:51:39,880 --> 00:51:42,480
cliff scoot by tide. I set their recordered by the

1139
00:51:42,519 --> 00:51:44,480
ruined face, and drew patterns and the dust with a finger,

1140
00:51:44,519 --> 00:51:47,400
as if mapping a coast line. The ritual felt desperate,

1141
00:51:47,400 --> 00:51:51,239
impossibly foolish, making traces to prove a presence. Their ravine

1142
00:51:51,320 --> 00:51:54,000
eschorus moved through me and re arrange my sense of chronology,

1143
00:51:54,639 --> 00:51:57,440
even the way the wind carried the raven shifted. Their

1144
00:51:57,440 --> 00:52:00,280
cries thridded into the harmonic overturn no longer see separate,

1145
00:52:00,320 --> 00:52:03,119
but part of a living fabric. The village had adapted

1146
00:52:03,119 --> 00:52:06,199
to the canyon's habit. People moved in small circuits around

1147
00:52:06,199 --> 00:52:08,440
what had been taken an architecture of avoid in shaping.

1148
00:52:08,440 --> 00:52:11,159
The wishingles overlapped and pass bent away from certain ledges.

1149
00:52:11,719 --> 00:52:15,199
All festivals had become memorials without names. Night deepened and

1150
00:52:15,199 --> 00:52:18,320
the harmonic thrid pulled more insistently. I noticed, with the

1151
00:52:18,320 --> 00:52:21,440
growing alarm that lacked proper spectacle, small things disappearing from

1152
00:52:21,440 --> 00:52:24,400
around me. I thought of my mother's handwriting, the smell

1153
00:52:24,440 --> 00:52:26,079
of the tobacco that used to cling to my cloak,

1154
00:52:26,119 --> 00:52:28,159
the exact shape of the scar alarm, my left eyebear.

1155
00:52:28,760 --> 00:52:32,559
Each fragmentslid like sound thorifist. I tried to anchor by naming,

1156
00:52:32,599 --> 00:52:35,239
by writing quickly in my note book, fingers stuttering across

1157
00:52:35,280 --> 00:52:38,280
paper as the line of ining trembled. The ink looked ordinary,

1158
00:52:38,400 --> 00:52:40,159
but the strokes I made came from a mind being

1159
00:52:40,199 --> 00:52:43,519
borrowed from. When I read back, some sentences were pent

1160
00:52:43,559 --> 00:52:46,360
in the hand. I did not recognize the ravine was

1161
00:52:46,360 --> 00:52:48,840
not only taking memories, it was arranging them into a

1162
00:52:48,880 --> 00:52:51,639
course that had its own syntax and taste. The full

1163
00:52:51,679 --> 00:52:53,840
board memory came with a kind of clarity that is

1164
00:52:53,840 --> 00:52:56,639
both a mercy and the theft. I stood near the

1165
00:52:56,679 --> 00:52:59,119
ruin carved faced as the canyon sign, and watched with

1166
00:52:59,159 --> 00:53:01,559
my mind a village to a woman's absence into ritual.

1167
00:53:02,199 --> 00:53:04,360
I remembered her, her name, and the texture of her

1168
00:53:04,360 --> 00:53:07,519
hands folded precisely, And I also felt the village strange compassion.

1169
00:53:08,039 --> 00:53:09,840
They had physically shaped their days to hold what the

1170
00:53:09,960 --> 00:53:13,679
ravine claimed. By morning, offerings of river stones and feathers

1171
00:53:13,679 --> 00:53:16,159
were left on ledges, small waters pressed into crevices like

1172
00:53:16,199 --> 00:53:19,000
aids to memory. The cannon kept itself by taking the

1173
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:21,840
pattern of living things and replaying them as course. It

1174
00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:24,159
preserved pieces of what it swallowed, but always in a

1175
00:53:24,199 --> 00:53:26,920
voice that belonged to stone. At some point before dawn,

1176
00:53:26,960 --> 00:53:29,280
I felt my own edges begin to soften in earnest.

1177
00:53:29,920 --> 00:53:32,760
The hills are cunning in their patients. The ravine does

1178
00:53:32,760 --> 00:53:36,280
not accelerate with panic. It is a slow mathematics of attrition.

1179
00:53:36,920 --> 00:53:39,599
I found myself tracing rooms in the dust with frantic circles,

1180
00:53:39,599 --> 00:53:42,559
pressing nails into grooves until my finger tips burned. I

1181
00:53:42,559 --> 00:53:44,719
could feel the old groups of younger years, yielding like

1182
00:53:44,800 --> 00:53:49,440
doin ice, memories contented among themselves. A childhood memory at

1183
00:53:49,480 --> 00:53:52,440
the edge of rical a bored dinner that was not mine,

1184
00:53:52,920 --> 00:53:54,639
the precise creak of a door from a town I

1185
00:53:54,679 --> 00:53:57,119
had only ever passed through at dusk. The act of

1186
00:53:57,159 --> 00:53:59,639
tracing stone became an attempt to graft myself back into

1187
00:53:59,639 --> 00:54:03,360
a coneology. I recognized it was physical ritual of naming

1188
00:54:03,440 --> 00:54:06,159
and pressure. I would press until the memory fit again

1189
00:54:06,199 --> 00:54:08,199
into its place, like a withered key in a lock.

1190
00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:10,679
The choice that would mark the center of the night

1191
00:54:10,719 --> 00:54:13,599
presented itself not as spectacle, but as an arithmetic of desire.

1192
00:54:14,280 --> 00:54:16,760
Two gullies sang opposite one another at a corridor sun

1193
00:54:16,800 --> 00:54:19,599
that folded s baste. The canyon's chorus pressed into the

1194
00:54:19,639 --> 00:54:22,840
narrow path between them, like breath into a flute. Running

1195
00:54:22,840 --> 00:54:25,239
felt like denying the ravine the chance to finish its sentence.

1196
00:54:26,039 --> 00:54:29,519
Answering felt like joining at and whisking obliteration. The herod

1197
00:54:29,559 --> 00:54:32,480
on my arms lifted with the electricity of possibility. I

1198
00:54:32,480 --> 00:54:34,920
had come here as a witness, a methodical outsider with

1199
00:54:34,960 --> 00:54:37,159
recorder and oe and a cold pendant at my throat,

1200
00:54:37,679 --> 00:54:41,159
But witness had become participation. The Canyon wanted to include

1201
00:54:41,159 --> 00:54:43,440
me in its archive, and in the gray hour before daylight,

1202
00:54:43,519 --> 00:54:46,519
I chose to answer. Walking that narrow path was an

1203
00:54:46,519 --> 00:54:48,480
ACTI wal that felt both like opening a door and

1204
00:54:48,519 --> 00:54:51,280
stepping into a machine. The two walls of stone leaned

1205
00:54:51,280 --> 00:54:53,599
in as if to listen, and the harmonic overtones braided

1206
00:54:53,599 --> 00:54:56,800
around my ropes. Marda peered at the rim a shadow

1207
00:54:56,800 --> 00:54:59,320
in the pre dawn. She did not stop me with speech,

1208
00:54:59,559 --> 00:55:00,880
but with the c and have looked that care is

1209
00:55:00,880 --> 00:55:03,800
a lifetime of attempts. Her palm rested briefly, and the

1210
00:55:03,840 --> 00:55:05,920
river stones at her hip, as if to steady something.

1211
00:55:06,519 --> 00:55:09,599
That gesture was an admission and an instruction. The Rovine

1212
00:55:09,599 --> 00:55:14,480
will take, but it may ask for exchange. I stepped forward, deliberately, answering.

1213
00:55:14,480 --> 00:55:16,920
The song was not a lyric I had learned. It

1214
00:55:16,960 --> 00:55:18,880
was an inclination of breath, for shaping of throat and

1215
00:55:18,960 --> 00:55:21,760
chest to meet the Ravine's pitch. The Canyon answered with

1216
00:55:21,800 --> 00:55:24,159
a chorus that included the crack of lawn settled rock,

1217
00:55:24,199 --> 00:55:26,400
and the high trembling keening of small old lives woven

1218
00:55:26,440 --> 00:55:29,880
into its voice. It was a harmonic scream, part childlike pitch,

1219
00:55:30,079 --> 00:55:33,199
part avalanche. The sensation was a pressure moving through me

1220
00:55:33,239 --> 00:55:36,039
that re arranged the furniture of memory. Some part of

1221
00:55:36,079 --> 00:55:38,679
me surrendered to sensation with the quietness that felt like sleep,

1222
00:55:38,719 --> 00:55:40,880
And in the quiet the ravine pressed its course unto me.

1223
00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:43,480
I felt the village names fold round and familiar features

1224
00:55:43,480 --> 00:55:45,320
of my past, until I could no longer tell which

1225
00:55:45,360 --> 00:55:47,239
memories it belonged to me, and which had been borrowed

1226
00:55:47,239 --> 00:55:50,000
and returned in alted form. When the answering faded, I

1227
00:55:50,039 --> 00:55:51,800
collapsed at the lip of the ravine with the slow

1228
00:55:51,840 --> 00:55:54,960
certainty of someone who has been re arranged. Morning came,

1229
00:55:55,000 --> 00:55:57,679
with the stillness of damp cloth. The village of soluwhits

1230
00:55:57,679 --> 00:56:00,679
a long. The outskirts had a new diffidence. Some faces

1231
00:56:00,719 --> 00:56:03,360
were softened, others sharpened, as if the canyon as selection

1232
00:56:03,440 --> 00:56:06,559
process left patterns of absence where solidity had been. I

1233
00:56:06,599 --> 00:56:09,519
could not say which of my memories had been wholly mine. Afterwards,

1234
00:56:10,119 --> 00:56:12,760
there were fragments at child's hands, the smell of riverstone,

1235
00:56:12,760 --> 00:56:14,599
the weight of a coat that was not mine, pressed

1236
00:56:14,639 --> 00:56:17,679
into a chest like foreign coins. Martya's eyes held more

1237
00:56:17,719 --> 00:56:19,840
than regret. They held a resignation. I could feel knitting

1238
00:56:19,840 --> 00:56:22,400
itself into my skin. I found in my pocket a

1239
00:56:22,400 --> 00:56:25,239
single block feather laid on a river stone. Its barbs

1240
00:56:25,239 --> 00:56:27,159
were slick with haze, as if the feather had drawn

1241
00:56:27,199 --> 00:56:29,840
moisture from the fog itself. When I lifted it, the

1242
00:56:29,880 --> 00:56:32,400
feather felt both like a prize and a tally. The

1243
00:56:32,440 --> 00:56:34,480
pendant at my froot hum faintly undered the pressure of

1244
00:56:34,480 --> 00:56:37,039
the morning. The ravine had accepted a part of me.

1245
00:56:37,599 --> 00:56:40,679
Perhaps it had left a fragment as an exchange. I

1246
00:56:40,719 --> 00:56:42,559
tucked the feather into a small fold of my cloak

1247
00:56:42,559 --> 00:56:44,760
and felt, to my surprise, a closeness to the canyon

1248
00:56:44,760 --> 00:56:47,719
that was not comfortable, but inevitable. It bowed me a

1249
00:56:47,760 --> 00:56:50,000
subtle tether that registered as a small tightening at the

1250
00:56:50,039 --> 00:56:52,639
beasts of the throat. In the days that followed, I

1251
00:56:52,679 --> 00:56:55,159
traced the airlines of what remained and what had been altered.

1252
00:56:55,920 --> 00:56:58,320
I wrote long pages with my recorder running, and listened

1253
00:56:58,320 --> 00:56:59,880
back to the sound of a voice that carried some

1254
00:57:00,079 --> 00:57:02,800
light echo whence drained. My writing was a ledger of

1255
00:57:02,800 --> 00:57:05,800
small losses and odd gains, a memory of a town

1256
00:57:05,840 --> 00:57:08,159
market where the names of stalls had shifted. A face

1257
00:57:08,199 --> 00:57:10,760
I recognized but could not place in any town or season,

1258
00:57:11,280 --> 00:57:13,480
the exact pattern of a knitting finish that belonged to

1259
00:57:13,559 --> 00:57:17,159
some boored grandmother. The village continued its quiet economis around

1260
00:57:17,199 --> 00:57:20,440
the ravine, offerings on ledges' doors, left slightly ajar in

1261
00:57:20,440 --> 00:57:22,480
the late evening, the collective turning of the head when

1262
00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:25,679
the canyon's overturn slipped into living rooms. There are ways

1263
00:57:25,719 --> 00:57:28,519
to measure what is left. I measure myself by the

1264
00:57:28,599 --> 00:57:32,280
persistence of habitual things, my habit of listening with closed eyes,

1265
00:57:32,440 --> 00:57:34,639
the way my fingers trace stone, the brass pendant, and

1266
00:57:34,760 --> 00:57:37,079
the cord wrap recorder. These are anchors, and for now

1267
00:57:37,119 --> 00:57:39,920
they hold. But the feather remains pressed into my cloak,

1268
00:57:40,039 --> 00:57:42,519
like a summons. It is both a claim and a question.

1269
00:57:43,239 --> 00:57:45,239
The ravines, of course, is not punitive in a way

1270
00:57:45,280 --> 00:57:48,239
a person can be punitive. It is indifferent, an ancient

1271
00:57:48,360 --> 00:57:50,920
driven by a need to preserve itself through memory. It

1272
00:57:51,000 --> 00:57:53,559
preserves by folding lives into its song, and those lives

1273
00:57:53,639 --> 00:57:56,400
keep it from being only a geological silence. I do

1274
00:57:56,559 --> 00:57:58,639
not have a map for undoing. Where the canyon keeps

1275
00:57:59,400 --> 00:58:03,000
the village rituals are halting and local stone rings, feather

1276
00:58:03,079 --> 00:58:05,559
offerings a hum of protection when the wind shapes itself

1277
00:58:05,559 --> 00:58:08,519
a certain way. Martam moves among these practices with the

1278
00:58:08,599 --> 00:58:11,719
kind of resigned SkELL that comes from long acquaintance. I

1279
00:58:11,800 --> 00:58:14,639
see enter the cost of knowledge, a life measured in

1280
00:58:14,639 --> 00:58:17,679
the soft absences where names once lived. For my part,

1281
00:58:17,719 --> 00:58:19,360
I have taken an oath that is more private than

1282
00:58:19,400 --> 00:58:22,119
any binding. I keep the feather in the pendant, and

1283
00:58:22,239 --> 00:58:24,440
I write the ledger of what I have learned. The

1284
00:58:24,559 --> 00:58:27,639
act of recording feels like a small defiance. If the

1285
00:58:27,719 --> 00:58:30,079
roofing composes a course from stolen lives, then the ledger

1286
00:58:30,079 --> 00:58:33,360
of names would it preserves Naming cannot replace what was taken,

1287
00:58:33,519 --> 00:58:36,599
but it sets a boundary against forgetting entirely. The fog

1288
00:58:36,679 --> 00:58:39,159
has not left since at night. It rolls and pulls

1289
00:58:39,159 --> 00:58:41,679
at the ravine's lip, as if rehearsing, gathering breath to

1290
00:58:41,760 --> 00:58:44,719
sin again. There are mornings when the village seems whole,

1291
00:58:44,760 --> 00:58:46,719
In others when the silhouette at the edge thin, as

1292
00:58:46,760 --> 00:58:48,840
if someone has simply left the chair empty and taught

1293
00:58:48,880 --> 00:58:51,960
the eyes to liver round absence. I continue to listen,

1294
00:58:52,079 --> 00:58:54,480
because that is what I am, A quiet, investigative present

1295
00:58:54,519 --> 00:58:56,880
trace in the history of taking the pendant at my

1296
00:58:56,960 --> 00:58:58,840
throat warms in the same place as it always did

1297
00:58:58,880 --> 00:59:01,840
when memory shifts and the recorders it's ready in my satchel.

1298
00:59:02,519 --> 00:59:05,039
I am bound now both by a feather and my curiosity.

1299
00:59:05,639 --> 00:59:07,000
A question of whether to in g you what the

1300
00:59:07,039 --> 00:59:09,280
canyon keeps troubles me with the same steady pressure as

1301
00:59:09,320 --> 00:59:12,960
the Ravine's song and ewing might be impossible. Preserving what

1302
00:59:13,079 --> 00:59:16,480
it preserves might be complicity. Either choice changes the ledger,

1303
00:59:16,719 --> 00:59:19,400
and now the story begins again. The ledger I keep

1304
00:59:19,480 --> 00:59:21,679
is not a list of need enters. It is a

1305
00:59:21,719 --> 00:59:25,519
record of erosion, small details, the faint burn on Mordess's cheek,

1306
00:59:25,559 --> 00:59:27,559
a pattern of a raven swing lifted at dusk, the

1307
00:59:27,639 --> 00:59:30,679
exact alignment of river stones, the former chord. I write

1308
00:59:30,719 --> 00:59:33,400
in case names can serve as ballast. I write in

1309
00:59:33,480 --> 00:59:35,719
case the act of reading aloud, the human voice answer

1310
00:59:35,840 --> 00:59:37,960
in the stone, can return some portion of what has

1311
00:59:38,000 --> 00:59:40,920
been set aside. There is a persistent ache into places

1312
00:59:40,960 --> 00:59:43,480
where my history thinned, and sometimes at night, when the

1313
00:59:43,519 --> 00:59:46,719
harmonic thread curls through the village, I imagine the Ravine

1314
00:59:46,719 --> 00:59:49,559
as an old oc ivist, arranging its holdings with careful indifference.

1315
00:59:50,239 --> 00:59:52,599
It keeps. Therefore it is I keep a record. In turn,

1316
00:59:53,239 --> 00:59:55,400
it feels like an inadequate counterweight, but it is the

1317
00:59:55,480 --> 00:59:57,760
only instrument I have that moves against the current of forgetting.

1318
00:59:58,320 --> 01:00:00,320
There will be more songs the canyon does not rest.

1319
01:00:01,079 --> 01:00:04,239
Each one will arrive with a small architecture, removal and exchange,

1320
01:00:04,280 --> 01:00:06,679
and each will press me into choices I do not reheuse.

1321
01:00:07,400 --> 01:00:09,079
For now. I move for the village with the slow

1322
01:00:09,119 --> 01:00:12,159
attention of someone learning to live with a wound, careful

1323
01:00:12,159 --> 01:00:15,159
about agis, respectful of the way's collective bows around absence,

1324
01:00:15,440 --> 01:00:17,760
and keeping my fingers pressed against the ruines whenever doubt

1325
01:00:17,840 --> 01:00:20,360
threatens to wash me away. I do not know if

1326
01:00:20,400 --> 01:00:22,400
I will ever reclaim everything that was mine before the

1327
01:00:22,440 --> 01:00:25,159
canyon began its slow gathering. I do know that there

1328
01:00:25,199 --> 01:00:28,280
are measures I can take to anchor and stone, to name,

1329
01:00:28,360 --> 01:00:30,480
to offer small altars, to carry a feather as a reminder.

1330
01:00:30,519 --> 01:00:33,280
In Italy, it told me never to return to that town.

1331
01:00:33,920 --> 01:00:36,639
The warning remains true as governance, but fALS as a promise.

1332
01:00:37,320 --> 01:00:39,760
The ravine called I answered, and an answering I both

1333
01:00:39,800 --> 01:00:42,679
lost and learned. The latter, I maintain is open and

1334
01:00:42,800 --> 01:00:45,320
uneven in its pages. I hope to keep a trace

1335
01:00:45,360 --> 01:00:47,440
of the lives the canyon preserves in the parts of myself.

1336
01:00:47,480 --> 01:00:50,239
A tests. I am bound in the end to the

1337
01:00:50,320 --> 01:00:53,039
question whether the price is surrender or preservation, and to

1338
01:00:53,119 --> 01:00:54,840
the knowledge that the ravine will sing again