“As it happens, the etymology of the word true takes us back to the old English word for ‘tree’: a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.”
The past should be knowable because it is finished, yet it is always shrouded, never completely accessible. Therefore one requires a pin.
A pin is zero volume, unmoving, the point around which rotation occurs. It is not itself subject to the passage of time.
Is the pin the pen? The photograph? A ceremony? An obelisk?
The trouble is this: Given the axes, all the pins are spinning.
Houses
A house can be a pin, but a fat one. (Witness the I-house.)
More urgently, houses gather, enclose, invite, cover, sort, imply, layer, divide, inflect. They lay claim to ground but provide a volume with many faces, inside and out, a container of containers of containers.
In a house is a ground floor, then a bedroom, then a dresser, then a top drawer, then a shoebox, then a small jewelry box full of pins.
Analogs
Whereas pins are ghosts attaching themselves to objects, houses are fleshly things in which ideas repose.
Beating the Bounds
Hundreds if not thousands of sightlines, each pointing in two of infinite directions.
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