I wake to the sound of the ocean. It’s almost dusk and the crowds have gone. I notice a man moving in the haze across the beach. He’s more an apparition than a man. From his arm extends a metal detector that hovers across the sand, sweeping over it in waves. From where I’m sitting, it looks like a mechanical wing.
In his other hand, he holds a small shovel that he fiddles between his fingers. He is sweating profusely, and although dark frames cover his eyes, I can see the concentration spilling out in lines about his face.
“It’s a strange thing”, I say to myself. “Looking for the lost things of others.”
But there is a difference - between the lost and the forgotten.
For a thing to be lost is for adults to reminisce around dinner tables, for children to whisper stories to each other at night; for it’s scent to linger on the noses of hounds, for a constellation to burn in the minds of the people, for it’s absence to cast a shadow in their hearts and mark the picture of their life.
A lost thing is remembered.
But there is a moment when the pain of a lost thing is either sufficiently buried or has become too heavy to be carried forth, and so the lost thing is turned to a forgotten thing. A forgotten thing is a double-lost thing. A nameless thing. Not only lost in this world, but in the world of ideas.
There are things forgotten by us.
“But not this man,” I think. “He searches for our forgotten things.”
I hear the water withdraw into the ocean. The man is hovering among the dunes. He’s looking out to sea, picking his teeth with a loose finger. The lines in his face have grown deeper, and his whiskers twitch with the breeze. His skin is stiff and dry and the color of coral. He looks to me now burdened by the weight of an impossible dream. I lower my gaze, careful not to be noticed, overcome with the feeling that I’m watching a wild animal.
His back lurches with the weight of his wing and it moves in great half circles again. He continues, roving the blue sand, his wing swooping before his feet. I notice the darkness move at the edge of the horizon. I am squinting to see him better. I feel his search has become my own.
I am waiting - waiting for his mechanical wing to sound, to wake the stillness of the napping shore. For his little shovel to go in the ground, for his arms to work with the fury of a thousand arms, for his sweat to clot the sand that is thrust into the air; for a glimmer to catch his sullen face from below, to light his sullen face from below; for the people to open their doors, to hurry with lanterns over the dunes, to gather ‘round him - men and women and children with clasped hands and wide eyes; for the man to vanish in the bowels of the earth, for a glow to emerge from the sunken earth like the light of a thousand fireflies; for a great cry to move across the crowd like the crack of a whip; for the man with the mechanical wing to come up dirty and shimmering and bright - to quell their cries with his words:
Behold, It is returned to you,
the thing you have so carelessly lost
And more carelessly - have forgotten,
You have taken the breeze on your backs
You have wet your feet at the shore,
And all this time beneath you
Has lied your most precious and sacred gift,
Forgotten in the belly of the earth.
And he stood there speaking to the crowd as if speaking to the heart of mankind.
Let us not forget again,
Should we become forgotten.
And the people understood, and they swelled with cheers and rejoiced, and the children danced although they didn’t know why, and the people’s joy was a rapture of tears that soaked the land, and the forgotten thing was raised above them, and they swore to never forget again.
And so the people remembered, and they remembered the man with the mechanical wing, the one who remembered their remembering, the one who did not forget.
Amazing! I really love this one brotha. Great work!