Maria Tumarkin > Quotes

“Herodotus tells a story of Histiaeus, who ruled Miletus in late sixth century BC and who, needing to communicate with Aristagoras, shaved a trusted slave’s head, tattooed the message on the slave’s scalp, and waited for the hair to grow back before sending him to Aristagoras. Aristagoras, in turn, shaved the slave’s head to reveal Histiaeus’s message encouraging him to revolt against the Persians, which, apparently, Aristagoras did. Steganography is the Greek word for the art of hiding messages—as opposed to, for instance, encrypting them. In Greek the word means ‘concealed writing’. Most messages are hidden within other, larger, benign-seeming chunks of text. The existence of the secret message is a secret. We don’t know to go looking. Perhaps telling and not-telling are not what we think they are. Perhaps experience could be placed in narrative for safekeeping, hidden in it, not to be buried, or rendered unknown, but to be preserved so as to be revealed in a different kind of story.”
― Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic

“Few things are worse than being disbelieved when the darkest stuff that ever happened to you creeps out to the open. New shame on top of the old shame, rage too, so urgent it wants to suck the bone marrow out of you.”
― Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic