Aug 12 / 3:15/lc

In the dream you spoke another language, you wake yourself, write it down. There is a B, an R, a V; the rest a slew of geometrics: circles, trapezoids, triangles....

You may put The Book of Stones in the exhibition. Yes. And afterwards you may ask some of the people who come to destroy them. You are thinking what you thought earlier about Obedience. And the elements of Choice. You wonder would everyone comply? Of those who complied, what would they give as their reason? That you asked them to do it? Would the destruction bother anyone? Would they admit so? Would anyone refuse?

When the stylus pulled through the stone, the S wavered, the crossed T muddied: you were with they who engraved the shapes of sound:  

In the dream the trapezoids and triangles were vowels. And nouns of a sort. This is the rough geometry you spoke

First the stones must be photographed. You can't destroy them without having some record. (Well of course you can. This is a choice).  And translated - take the words from the stones and put them down on paper.

Simply to stack and heft the pages: you can't shuffle stone. Placing each tablet on your lap: the weight of a leaf of stone, 23 pages of stone.  Is this how George Smith felt transcribing The Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's great library in Nineveh?  It took you all winter to carve these words into stone. And now on this hot summer day you are typing them - from stone - into a computer. Ludicrous (Choice). But the translation, K says - certainly that can't be in stone!

The clay books of Nineveh murmuring under the earth. The stories crack under the weight of  machinery and salesmanship. The stories broken and stolen and burned and fitted together again and again.

You don't really want to destroy them. You've seen enough of the obedience of ourselves. Bury them: with some teeth, some shards of pottery, the ashes of a fire. A hundred years from now someone you'll never know might get a kick out of it.  

When you read from the first 9 stones at the reading last November P had to give you a ride. You wrapped them carefully in towels and still one broke in half. P said, How many stones is this book going to be? Because you're going to need a forklift soon.