Dear Ishi:

Nobody wants my brain. Even if my driver’s license were to indicate my willingness to have my body parts distributed, decidedly, nobody wants my brain. There are days, when it hurts, that even I do not want my brain. It may be, however, that the FBI might want my computer. Special Collections seems to want my books and all their related detritus. And connected to that, we’ll foist this family archive of letters and photographs and wartime materials on them. I asked Homer why he thought my family saved this stuff, and he responded with the historian’s view that they knew what was happening to them was significant and wrong, that justice might not happen in their lifetimes. What they saved shows that this is true, but we children thought that they were nostalgic packrats. Now we are old and nostalgic ourselves and comb through this business like we invented it. We pass PDFs and HTMLs over e-mail, google this and that—amateur historians, trying to compensate for the fact that as kids we were too distracted by the idea of this past to be actually immersed in it. Shame on us. Now they are all dead, and we didn’t save their brains either.

But let’s be fair. To live like Walter Benjamin’s angel, swept into the future while staring into the past, is pretty horrific. I salute you and Homer for being willing to do so. But what to net in this storm of wreckage and debris? There is what has been salvaged, and there is what attracts our attention. You remind me that the museum gets organized and reorganized. Each of us covets a glass case of curiosities arranged particularly. When we are dead, what meaning will it have? When I’m dead, I suspect everything in my glass case can be burned and replaced by a USB flash drive. Who cares about my brain?

But Homer’s work demonstrates the tedious precision of tracing the forensics of history, to uncover a question stone by stone. To have access to those stones at all; his eyes glow with wonder. You interpret Ishi to be the Yahi word for man, but I also translate from the Japanese meaning stone. Stone by stone. Forgive me; it is taboo to speak of the dead. But they are my dead, and I fear the reasons for which they saved these letters and how here I must necessarily fail. And yet, I ask for your indulgence, to attempt to overturn at least one stone.