I don't compose. I only transmit.
— Confucius

A writing is a refugee. The act of creating a text sends a copy of its author's thoughts into permanent exile, fleeing the home world which engendered them into an unknown and unimaginable dimension of time, from whence they can never return, though in their flight they will, from time to time, touch down in other worlds, where they may inhabit, ever so briefly, another mind — like yours, dearReader — before they hurtle off again on their fugitive way.

From generations of exploration and study, we have come to know a good deal about our ancestors, by examining their left-behinds, rummaging in their middens and the ruins of their habitations, analysing their tools, their constructions, their very bones. Some left behind magnificent and moving depictions of their existence: animals they hunted, plants they cultivated, what they wore and how they decorated their bodies. From this ongoing enterprise we educe narratives about what life was like for them. We've become quite clever and insightful in conducting this kind of research and then pondering fruitfully what we discover; we know much of what our forbears accomplished, and are pretty confident we understand, in a general way at least, how they behaved towards one another in their lives.

But when we find baked clay tablets with patterened holes poked into them or a carved stone with odd shapes scratched upon its surface, we at once set about trying to decode what we believe has to be a message, one that may bear the answer to the first question any human being asks upon meeting another: how is it with you?

As that message begins to emerge, we approach the fulfillment of our deepest need: to *hear them speak*. Only then do we begin to know these absent creatures as persons: by understanding some of what they thought, we begin to apprehend not just what they saw and did, but to *feel* who they were. Our reaction to these messages can be quite emotional, and rightly so, for it is urgently important for each of us now living to discern exactly how it is with every other human being we encounter, whether in the flesh or through the traces that person deliberately left behind just so we would find it — that is, by inscribing some object with *text*.

It is the mission of any curator — of this or any archive — to bring such traces of an ancient past into the present moment of *our* lives, and to provision their transmission to the generations to come.

Rincón del Refugio
Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México
November 2019