Going Through Old Notebooks Part 8: What Remains of Us

Jardin du Palais-Royal at night. Digitial oil painting, iPad and Apple pencil. c. 2025

Dear Reader,

Here is another not-quite essay adapted from a notebook entry written in early 2021, after I’d watched the Netflix film The Dig.

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One night, during the height of the pandemic, I dreamed I lost my wedding ring. I was somewhere in a city, in a foreign country, which was true in real life, too.

In the dream, there was the usual confusion of jumbled, dream-like imagery: a blue shirt with pockets, a large Brutalist building, a woman seated at a lost-and-found desk, with a lost-and-found drawer. It was a dream directed by a 1980s Terry Gilliam, like Brazil (“It’s not my fault that Buttle’s heart condition didn’t appear on Tuttle’s file!”)

My ring wasn’t in the drawer, but I was trying to describe it to this woman at the desk. I was trying to remember an inscription that was supposedly engraved along the inside, even though in reality there was no such inscription. Still, in the dream, I was trying to remember it. What could it have said? I stood there, unable to remember this inscription that did not exist, having failed, the words not arriving, and feeling the loss of it.

I had just watched the 2021 Netflix film The Dig the night before, about the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo. It got under my skin. It is a film about the intimacy of history. I felt an affinity for the way the characters related to what they found—not its grandeur, but the close, quiet reality of it.

Everything changes, and yet nothing does. We walk over the dirt. We have power or we don’t. We are born, we die, we turn towards love or away from it. Young men enlist and suit up for a war from which they will not return. A widow carries roses to a cemetery. We bury our dead in the earth.

Maybe the past is not such a foreign country after all. Maybe it is here, even now, pressed close against us, so close that we cannot see it, its breath warm on the backs of our necks.

Doing this kind of historical work, in the earth itself or just in an archive, one sometimes gets the sense that everything that has ever happened, happened yesterday; that is still happening right now. In reaching back, we meet the echo of ourselves still arriving from some distant future, from some far off place we can’t yet imagine.

In this film, the dialogue was often slightly out of sync, as though even the present was already a memory. Early on, a living man is pulled from the earth, after a hillside collapses onto him—saved. I think we are meant to see the discovered ship in this way too—as a body exhumed, but somehow still living, its gold and garnets still breathing, the gaze of a king preserved in the windows of a shattered mask. Like the unearthed ship, we are all sailing into the cosmos, even as we stand here, perfectly still.

In the film, a young boy wants to save his ailing mother—the owner of the land on which the ship has been discovered—but cannot. He puts this dilemma to the chief excavator, who offers a surprising but oddly comforting message—at least I found it comforting: his advice was that actually, we all fail, every day. All of us. That there are things we simply cannot succeed at, no matter how hard we try. To try and try and then fail and keep trying anyway is a fundamental part of the human condition.

Towards the end of the film, a young woman, who has decided to abandon her marriage, takes off her wedding rings while standing in a forest and then lets them fall through her fingers and into the ferns. By doing this, she is stepping out of the present and into the archeological record. She is giving her rings to the excavators of the future; her marriage, a puzzle she could not solve except by leaving, will be left to the archeologists.

By releasing the rings, these pieces of metal that will outlast her, she is also stepping out of the myth of the static present. Naked of permanence, she turns away from posterity and becomes as ephemeral as the dusk and the meadow turning gold in the dusk; a man and a woman embracing, their bodies as fleeting as the grass.