Ring Nine — The Pole

02035

What you love is the pole you carry.

The story comes from the old ethnographies of the Arrernte people of central Australia, retold by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade: a people who moved on foot across a dry country carried a pole — cut once, according to the story, from a living gum tree. At each new camp it was driven upright into the ground, and the ground around it became the middle of the world. The place did not make the center. The pole made the center, and the center made the place.

It is told that one band broke theirs, and did not cut another, and lay down on the ground to die — unmoored in every direction at once. Anthropologists have contested the account for decades, as they should; the book hedged it, and so does this page. But the reason the story will not die is that everyone who hears it recognizes it. Everyone has watched someone lose their pole. Everyone has been the band, at least once, lying down.

Cultures on every continent kept a version of the carried center — the world-tree, the axis, the tent-pole of the sky. The desert city where this book was born built its 02026 year around exactly that idea. A person is a portable axis. The carrying is the practice.

Next September, the last ring. The book will tell you how it ends.

What is the pole you carry — and when did you last raise it on purpose?

Knock once next September

This page will never ask you for anything.
No account. No list. It only gives.

— Ian ✦