Still Here
~ Tuesday, October 14, 2025 ~
I have not published anything since April. I have been reading the same pages of the same notebook for six months. I am still in Honolulu. I have not booked a flight.
This is not writer’s block. I know what the notebook says. I know where it points. I have known since the spring what the next step is and where the step after that leads. The research is not the problem.
The problem is that I have now read enough of the wider literature — Bishop’s work, the sources Bishop cites, the sources those sources cite — to understand that what Pavel was following is not a historical curiosity. It is something that was hidden deliberately, by people who understood what they were hiding, and who also understood that there are people who would prefer it to stay hidden for reasons that are not scholarly.
Pavel knew this. The letter he wrote to his attorney in November 2022 — the letter that is sitting in a lawyer’s office in Prague waiting for the conditions of its delivery to be met — was written by someone who understood the stakes clearly enough to make that kind of arrangement.
I am not afraid. That is not what this is. I am trying to decide whether I am the right person for the next part of this.
Pavel thought I was. He named me specifically.
What I keep coming back to
There is a passage in Bishop Kapalini’s Those Who Held the Sign that I have read more times this year than anything else I own. The keeper families were not chosen for courage. They were chosen for permanence and for the character of their trade. People who kept obligations across generations without asking why. People who held things because they had agreed to hold them.
I agreed to nothing. Pavel assumed I would agree. He may have been right.
I will write again when I have decided.
Related
- What Pavel Was Looking For — the notebook; the Voitl research; Pavel’s method
- What Pavel Left — the notebook itself; what I did and did not publish
- Those Who Held the Sign — Bishop Kapalini on the keeper tradition