Abstract

If you think you can know the body of history by simply reading it as a discrete entity, an independent body that can be walked around, wholly mapped, wholly disciplined, then you will never feel its breath. If you are here and the body is there, then you cannot think about the way in which that body continues its own minute motions, has its own momentum. Heart rate slowing, blood vessels pushing, pushing, pushing, against a loss of fluid and those labouring lungs flooded with the hope of final rest. How will these small changes tell their emerging stories? Neither long enough nor lived enough to be generational, these transformations cannot be told as history. They are the folds of the past from which new words emerge.