I think of Sebeok’s ‘atomic priesthood’ charged with conveying warnings across generations in the form of folklore and myth. I think of the last line of the poem pinned on the tin sheet above the sinkhole into which people had been clubbed and pushed and bayoneted up in the Slovenian beech woods. A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record . . . I have a swift, chilling sense of the Kalevala as part of a messaging system, the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard.
