Present Day, May 2026
In three days the testimony becomes public. I want to say something about what it means to choose to speak after choosing silence for a very long time.
The silence was not passive. I was not absent from the world during the centuries of it. I was moving through the world, doing what was available to do: carrying manuscripts across war lines, protecting people where protection was possible, maintaining the networks through which knowledge moved from dangerous places to safer ones. The silence was a choice about form, not about engagement. I was not a spectator. I was simply not performing the specific act of public testimony.
The choice to speak now is a choice about what the present moment requires that the silence cannot provide. The testimony is the form I have found for this specific stage of the geometry: the stage that requires mapping, that requires the pattern to be named before it completes, that is more urgent than any previous stage I have been present for because the tools available to the collapsing authority are more powerful than any I have previously witnessed.
I am choosing to document. I am choosing to map. I am choosing to place the record in the world so that it exists there, available to whoever needs it, independent of what happens to the one who made the record. The testimony matters if it is heard. And if it is not heard: it exists. The geometry is mapped. May 22.