What Remains Of Us
Last night I dreamed I lost my wedding ring. I was somewhere in a city, in a foreign country. There was a blue shirt with empty pockets, a large building, and a woman at a desk with a lost-and-found drawer. My ring was not in the drawer. I tried to describe it to her, more or less the way it looks in real life: plain and fat and bright gold. The only difference was an inscription on the inside of the band. In reality there is no inscription, but in the dream I was trying to remember what it said. The dream ended, or shifted, and still I hadn’t found my ring. I stood there in the dream, my efforts having failed, feeling the loss of it.
I had just watched the Netflix film The Dig, about the discovery of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo, and it got under my skin. I’m not an archeologist, but I felt an affinity for the way the characters related to what they found. It is a film about the intimacy of history. Not its grandeur, but the quiet, close reality of it. Everything changes, and yet nothing does. We walk over the dirt, we have power or we don’t, we are born, we die, we turn towards love or away from it. Young men jostle and suit up and prepare for war. A widow carries roses to the cemetery. We bury our dead in the earth. The past is not a foreign country after all. It is here, pressed close against us, its breath warm on the back of our neck. Everything that has ever happened, happened yesterday, and it happened right here. In reaching back, we meet the echo of ourselves.
The Dig is filled with echoes. A man lies down in a field, in the same position as a woman lying in her bed. In some scenes, the dialogue is separated from the moment when it is spoken, so that it arrives like a transmission that is slightly out of sync. We hear words spoken while the characters’ mouths are not moving, as if even the present is already a memory. In an early scene, a living body is pulled from the earth, after a hillside has collapsed onto it. I think we’re meant to feel that the ship at Sutton Hoo is also a living body exhumed; that it is still breathing. All that gold and those garnets. The gaze of a king still present in the windows of a shattered mask. Like the unearthed ship, we are all sailing into the cosmos, even as we stand perfectly still.
The little boy in the film, called Robert—portrayed beautifully by Archie Barnes—is an adventuring young spirit dismayed that he cannot protect his mother from a worsening illness. He puts his dilemma to excavator Basil Brown (a dusty but brilliant Ralph Fiennes), who offers the surprising but oddly comforting message that actually, we all fail. Every day. That there are things we simply can’t succeed at, no matter how hard we try.
Towards the end, a young woman who has decided to abandon her marriage takes off her wedding rings while standing in a forest, and lets them fall through her fingers into the ferns. Because this is a film about archeology and the intimacy of the past, one feels strongly that by doing this she is stepping into the archeological record. She is giving her rings to the excavators of the future. Her marriage, a puzzle that she could only solve by letting go, will be left for others to project onto. By releasing them, she is also stepping out of the myth of the static present. Naked of permanence, she turns away from posterity, a gold ring found in the dirt, and becomes as ephemeral as the dusk and the grass turning gold in the dusk; a man and a woman embracing, their bodies as fleeting as the grass.