Rongorongo

Watching TV one night I realized I had gained complete understanding of the undeciphered glyphs of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. There was a show about them on PBS and when they pictured the mysterious carved things that looked like driftwood I knew what they meant. As casually as you are reading or hearing these words now, I saw those symbols and knew within me what they signified. I decided to look up pictures of the other tablets on Wikipedia, and sure enough I could read them too, which got me clicking the related articles tab for “undeciphered texts” and I found I could understand them all. Some universal grammar inside me had been cracked open, letting in something meant to be gained. I didn’t know what to do, who to call. A friend? A professor? My mom? The police? I looked at the ceiling. What else do we contain? What other harbored capabilities are sunk inside us at birth, that might one day come shaken loose? I would like to be shaken loose, I thought. I would like to know some things, like how to sail, and how not to be afraid of dogs, or the thing that makes people like jazz so much. Could I come to know what the world felt like before we knew what the stars really were, or the feeling of devotion for some forgotten harvest god? I doodled some of the shapes, the ones that I knew to mean “begin the year,” which I supposed meant January, and the one that means “anew,” and wondered what I will do with this, my truly foreign language that no one at all can speak. 

Published in Ancient Technology News, issue 2, 2024.