Artifacts

Like an archaeologist who specializes in a particular region of the world, I seem to dig up similar artifacts over and again. There’s something soothing about familiar territory. I’m not so afraid anymore that I might drop or chip something, and these days I catalogue what fragments come my way with a kind of professional ease. Sometimes I think there will be a major find – an outstanding piece somehow missed by earlier excavations – but I’m beginning to think that any keys to civilization (my survival, that is) are already with me and it’s only a matter of illuminating the collection a little differently. It’s turning out that the science of digging up the objects is not what’s most important to me anymore; it’s about the interpretation. The art of display. That’s what I’m seeking here, a way to look at my finds objectively, to see the fragments as a collection.