Archeology

Warjaguar

We’re searching for the past of 4600 years ago and we’re in Caral, Peru, the oldest city on the American continent. As usual in the case of Peru, we find no weapons, fortresses or trenches. A peaceful city?

With a slight turn phonetically, we end up in Kahla, Thuringia and in the present day. Here, in the subterranean enclave constructed with the forced labor of concentration camps inmates, the first jet fighter Messerschmitt 262 was built. And in Kahla too, they’re trying to reconstruct the living and working conditions based on the legacy of what was left behind

Caral and Kahla, the field of archeologists is that broad in space and time

We honor them.

Archeology

The child is asked

what he wants to be

the child is clever

and because at that moment he’s playing in the sand box

and carefully moving important little piles of sand

from one place to the other

and looking for wonderful

secret objects from the past meanwhile humming

he says in a dreamy voice

gazing into his little shovel like a mirror

I want to be a past-finder

The head of the child gets patted.

What might archeologists far into the future

find someday in that time, maybe even searching

right here on the site of this sand box

to be yet unknown for a few lifetimes still

But certain for sure is the search

for an archaic otherness

one of humankind’s few yearnings

that doesn’t end up destroying

the things it finds

Always searching for others

one finds oneself

The heads of those

who find a little wonderful mysterious something

or secret aired

perhaps a childhood shovel

discovered from the distant past

should be patted

Self even on the age-old search for the self

finds a brand new other