Beyond provenance

By Daniel Browning

Do objects have a history, a biography? Beyond provenance, a secret imaginary life that murmurs unspoken truths or wails in the inherited trauma of a thousand generations? In the reverberant silence you can hear the sound of us - coursing blood, expectorated spittle, unabashed flatulence, and the yawning ache of an empty belly - as we shuffle the docks, eyes downward, in the shadow of the cargo ships. Orion, Pluto, Heracles, Euripides. The hungry mile is golden.

These reliquaries of the sacred are borne upwards in the long processional march of our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters - every twisting branch and browning leaf of the eternal human tree. In the unfinished cresting arc, the rainbow of our collective story, there is only one certain truth: I must eat.