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Tenita

by Coppice Halifax

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1.
Tenita 57:17

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UR SLATE / SECTION V - 17463.space/ur_slate_sec5.png

UR SLATE / DISTRANS TELEKOMM REPORT - 17463.space/ur.txt

2021.05 OBSERVATION REPORT: DT have been digging at the Serpent Mound for the last three weeks, with an unusually large workforce of laborers, each digging with a simple shovel, partially for fear of damaging whatever it is they hope to find by using larger machines, but more out of a lack of any other option, as all technology that uses any kind of electrical current to operate, including batteries both solar and alkaline, absolutely refuses to work anywhere within the nine-mile fence surrounding the dig site. So far, they've found a whole lot of dirt. Very old dirt, but...dirt.

The reason they have not given up yet, beyond the obvious weirdness of the electrical equipment's behavior, is because I have discovered yet another strange aspect of the Slate while sitting here, watching it and recording whatever it is that the Slate decides it wants to do. (And it does seem to have temperaments...sometimes it flows at a constant level, outputting vibrations and other trigger pulse-type sounds, and other times, it seems to evade even being thought about) While making myself some coffee on the evening of the 16th, I was startled to hear people talking, human speech, coming from the vicinity of the Slate. It took me a few minutes of close listening to realize that what was being conveyed by the Slate was not a message, but rather, the Slate was acting as a conveyor of existing information, it was amplifying and/or relaying the actual sounds of the Serpent Mound excavation through itself! I called Distrans immediately, and verified via the phone call that this was happening in realtime, as I could hear the foreman on the other end of the line in my earpiece, as well as through the Slate, with almost no latency at all.

At this moment, the search has been duly narrowed down, with the excavation looking for anything conductive, metallic, or even something that might hold resonant acoustic properties - certainly, a receiver must exist somewhere at the Serpent Mound, that then in turn sends whatever it picks up to the Slate? The only other explanation would be an even more confounding one - Is the Slate able to monitor specific locations, no matter the proximity? This opens up a whole new realm of concerns and questions, and for my own sake, I find myself wondering if I have been remiss in my actions, staying so close to the Slate for such long periods. Enthusiasm for the unknown can, and has, come at a high price throughout history. Studies of radiation, deep space and even the ocean itself have all notoriously resulted in dangerous situations and multiple deaths. It's easy to think about those moments as fables, old history, instead of the cautionary tales about the not-grasped nature of reality that they truly are.

Since it is my fifth month working on this project, I should get back to my continued textual analysis of the inscriptions on the Slate's different sides, although I must confess, these inscriptions seem hardly as interesting as everything else surrounding the Slate. I have been feeling more and more tired, as if I'm getting far less sleep, even though I have in fact been sleeping more! My motivation is slipping, and I worry that I have been too obsessively devoted to my research to manage basic self-care. I'll sketch out my ideas here now, and make myself take a break afterward...

So, the fifth section's inscription on the Ur Slate begins with "In crevices - water" and "Upon hills - air" illustrating a filling of space, perhaps naturally, perhaps deliberately, with a bit more context given in the following line "Themselves small systems that only serve as reiteration of that first movement", pointing to a generative system! For what it's worth, it feels obvious that something the size and shape of the universe couldn't have been created one brush-stroke at a time, manually, but that any efficient creative mind would set systems and automations into motion, which would then continue to make decisions that echoed the original intent. Arguably, the nature of all organic life is in and of itself a grand generative system, one that even maintains the ability to correct itself when there's been an error, adapt itself when the space containing that life changes, perhaps even remember these changes and reference them in subsequent "builds", like natural mutations or rare variants of flora and fauna designed to thrive in different places. Indeed, even if the creative space is wiped clean by a disaster or some other epochal event, the formulation of life growing, expanding, learning...all seems to persist. Life always returns, whether it looks like trees or fish or dinosaurs or bipeds. Was there a time, perhaps in the primordial Earth, when life didn't look like any of those things?

Back to the text, the next line refers to these systems: "Now aging upon the land, crumbling beneath the light" - These could be more prosaic, but if they are to be taken literally, they absolutely represent organic life, evolving from molecular origins in the churning sea and crawling to the surface, even if the elements themselves are continually harsh and weathering during this process. A biological imperative? Some type of compulsive programming put into all living things by God, with or without quotes? This line of thinking connects with the next bit of text: "Forever a part of the birth and death of remembering and forgetting, filled, emptied" - Cyclical systems then, what goes up must come down, again echoing the earlier passages that seemed to say that the entire creation was able to manifest itself by will and oscillation alone. It is interesting to me that there seems to be just as much focus on the negative as the positive here, forgetting and being empty and dying are just as present in this equation as remembering, being filled/present and alive. Each side only half of a whole, singularly important but utterly dependent, and both of them fully inevitable according to this mythological design plan.

Once again, many of these ideas recur in many different creation myths and philosophies from around the world, and throughout different eras of history, so in a meta way, their recursion is just a reflection of...their recursion. Have I mentioned I'm not sleeping enough? I've written enough here now for a full week of analysis, so I'm logging off and turning all the lights down for a while. Try not to think about anything at all and see where that gets me.

POSTSCRIPT: Wanted to point out that the recordings we've made so far of the "amplified" dig site via the Slate have not been 1:1 representations of the sound and space of that site. Rather, intermittent tones have begun to seep in, which do not manifest at the actual Serpent Mound, and while they do not yet seem to show any patterns like the prior recordings made of the Slate, my best guess is that the Slate is in fact an amplifier of some kind, and not a relay running a copy/paste system, and that somehow, these tones are a type of feedback loop? My head hurts too much to really dig deeper on it (pun fully intended) so I will revisit this later on, but I needed to log it before it slipped my mind.

credits

released May 28, 2021

Recorded at Distrans Telekomm, May 2021. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Photograph of the Ur Slate and reproduction of text courtesy of the Distrans Telekomm lending library. Used with permission. This is Milieu Music number EARTH 65, entry #65 in the Deep Earth series. milieu-music.com analogbotany.com

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