The Monument

As I look back on it now, we laboured to move through space the way we had moved since the start of what we imagined to be the last leg of our journey — we moved as we moved every other day, informed surely by all of our experience preceding that present, but increasingly burdened by the steady fatigue that came with the sheer effort involved in making our path up to any given point — a path that could only be considered so after the fact — as we made each step through the unknown, at once rendering it — somehow and mysteriously still even to us — known — a path that left in our wake a successive string of breakthroughs that only we — simply because of our solitary position ahead of them — could have made.

But even in this making, we grew increasingly uneasy even as we also became docile and accustomed to stories of adulation — stories that inserted testimony into our facts from figures who could never have been with us through the passage but who nonetheless held the ear of the many who had by this time been baited to wait breathlessly on words of that voyage — words that never exposed the simple accident of the vast majority of our movements — movements that had become resplendent with gleaming praise for our bravery, brilliance and impossibly-contradictory humble bravado.

How could we survive this onslaught — I remember we wondered among our selves — an onslaught that we increasingly saw at the time to be more threatening than any material danger to our presence in that here and that now. How could we retain the authentic humility and honesty that grounded us in the matters that punctuated the possibility of each next step along what had by then become a historical way?

But these were impossible questions, questions taken out of our hands by experts who without our consent had seized the chance to write our history, regardless reality — experts in what must have been.

Having reached the end of what had been made to be for us an uncomfortably-monumental path, at first we protested and appealed to our first-person presence throughout. We were coached — at first with resistance but then gradually with complicity — to see that what was for us only work and occasional adventure was now inscribed as much more than it could ever have been at that time—for it to be just as they said — and we —supported by they—were now only its animators.

Idle in my age and with the benefit of time, now safe in the lush garden I had cultivated as refuge behind the house I had taken as my home with the treasure given by believers of those experts — I have to admit that, however grand that irreal history had become for so many — including us — none of it seems like such a big deal now.

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