This morning, a pre-dawn hour. With my wife asleep in my arms, I had cause to remember a class in Chinese language I audited at Cabrillo College, in Santa Cruz, California in the 1970s. The instructor was telling us about the written language. It consists of characters which are, or began as, pictures. He said that the original characters - the building blocks of the language - were 4,000 years old.

   So some combination of memory and imagination flipped my homemade kaleidoscope: ancient cave paintings in France; now come the pyramids of Egypt with thousands of slave laborers first carving massive perfect blocks of granite, hauling them overland by hand, forcing them up the pyramids' walls also by hand, levers and rollers, worked to their nameless deaths; the Bamiyan Buddhas carved into the stone of a cliff in Afghanistan in 6th century, then dynamited by the Taliban in 2001...
   As my selective memory/imagination flipped the pictures, trying to build a moving picture of human history - here comes the awful 20th century, the infantry vs machine gun slaughter fields of WWI, the endless columns of refugees, the Nazi death camps of WWII, through all history's mindless carnage the suffering of civilians... I remembered our Chinese teacher, here's the figure for "woman," and the teacher chalks it on the board, it's a picture he says, originally a drawing of a woman... and she's not stirring a pot of food, she is not hauling water, - this woman, drawn 4,000 years ago to represent womankind, is not doing history's heavy lifting, as women always have.
   She is dancing.