Wednesday July 29th, 2009

神道 Shin tao (The Way of the Gods) has roots that go back to 500BC though it wasn’t formalised as Shinto, both a path to wisdom and quasi-religion, until the 6th century AD as an amalgam of incorporated harvest and clan traditions.

A typical Japanese might register or celebrate a birth at a Shinto shrine, while making funeral arrangements according to the Buddhist tradition. Unlike many religions, Shinto and Buddhism do not require professing faith to practice, being centered more in ritual and respect for the living spirit of each thing.

How chaos was subdued in the Japanese genesis myth (680 words)

In the eighth generation the primitive gods brought forth Izanagi, the inviting male and Izanami, the inviting female (Izanagi-no-mikoto and Izanami-no-mikoto).

They lived in a great nothingness without height nor breadth nor depth; without light or darkness, without colour or its lack.

Together they thrust their jewel-encrusted lance into the chaos which was like a fertilized egg; as they stirred, its viscousness thickened, and when they pulled the spear out, the last drops that fell from its tip formed the islands of Japan onto which Izanagi, the inviting male and Izanami, the inviting female, descended to erect the august celestial pillar.

And Izanagi asked Izanami: How was thy body made? “It grew everywhere except in one spot, and thine?” to which Izanagi, the inviting male, answered: Mine, like thine, grew everywhere, but more especially at one spot. “Were it not good to place that part of my body which is in excess into that part of your body in deficit?”

They decided to go ‘round the celestial pillar in opposite directions. The female went left while the male went right and when they met, she said: “What a beautiful and charming young man!” to which he answered: “What a lovely and loveable young woman!”

The woman showed willingness but it was the movement of a Wagtail that impelled him forward. Izanami thus bore many divinities; light, rocks and mountains, the breeze and stillness, the oceans and their waves, plants, animals and subterranean grottoes. Each, the rock or breeze as much as any animal or plant, with its Kami: its spirit and its self-ness.

When Izanami gave birth to fire, however, she did not survive it. Izanagi, the inviting male of exalted and fruitful love, in a torment of despair and stricken by grief, lay prostrate at the foot of her bed and wept for his beautiful young sister.

Thus he came to know his sorrow and his ire and he vowed to rescue his wife from the underworld and bring her back to him, but not before he killed he who had killed his love. But the fire God not only would not be defeated but raged at every blow throwing off new divinities right and left.

Izanagi gave up his struggle and went to find Izanami while behind him one of the gods created during the battle, the impetuous male, wreaked confusion and returned the celestial world to chaos. In his impetuosity he broke the dykes of the rice fields, attacked the palace and threw the stinking carcass of a dead horse onto its rooftop. He left Amaterasu’s spinning and weaving girls hurting in their most intimate parts and even chased the Goddess who makes the sky resplendent, that is, the sun, into seclusion thus turning the world dark and leaving it in a desolation filled by terror.

Izanagi finds Izanami in the underworld as a rotting corpse and she chases him away ashamed to have lost her beauty.

Friday July 24th, 2009

Noah Lukeman and the murky world of today’s book publishing (760 words)

Noah Lukeman is president and founder of Lukeman Literary agency in New York city; an agency that get books into print and on bookstore shelves by offering them successfully to publishers who, in turn, no longer deal with contract-less authors directly.

Making his agent’s fees, which easily account for greater earnings than any single writer on his list, however, was not enough for Mr Lukeman. Five or six years ago he broke into authorship himself with a book titled How to Write a Great Query letter with which he began making money from desperate writers who he would not represent and whose writing he would not read, apart from, and in addition to, the ones he does.

The downloadable pdf document with few words on few pages reached best-seller status, so desperately optimistic are authors in this shrinking printed book market. But despite recognising the exquisite irony of a literary agent with no literary pretensions in his literature, becoming a successful author by selling an instruction book to would-be writers which teaches them how to talk to him, I bought it.

Although the pages my 25 bucks got me permission to print held no secrets I could not find for free from multiple sources on the Internet (like his less money-hungry competition or long lists of successfully published writers who offer advice because they all remember their own decade of rejections) it was at least concise and all in one place- I did not regret buying it and it probably did indeed improve my query letters.

I just received an e-mail from the Lukeman agency advising us writers that in an impulse to give back to the writing community he has decided to now (since May 2007) offer the same book for free but has in the meantime, written another bestseller for the same market slice: writers who want to find agents; and he also offers the wisdom of his advice (i.e. telling writers which are the rules dictated by him and his peers) on his Web-site whose link I clicked on.

It turns out it is no more than an offer to allow you to read his comments in his own Site’s forum for a fee of twenty dollars a month. Not a big investment which might even offer a pay-off for some writers and yet, the leeching quality of his breaking into an income stream generated from the very people he is meant to represent is disheartening on principle, just as paintings galleries that rent wall-space per square metre are: both are meant to glean their earnings as middle-men from a sale transaction they themselves arrange for a buying public, not directly from the creators of the product in exchange of slim help in reaching a middle-man he, the middle-man, offers.

His agency has a slush pile of so many manuscripts that they are not accepting query letters and I wonder where, in a world that has abandoned the arts—that teaches the young that books are no more than repositories of information instead of worlds of literature (faster to find from Internet sources than the dismal task of actually having to read books), where will the next generation find the motivations to become artists of any kind? And where will the world end up when it finishes forgetting how important the arts are to every culture?

Monday July 20th, 2009

Morality and religion (490 words)

I suppose there are still people who believe religion fortifies moral infrastructure; here in Spain it wasn’t long ago that children were allowed to opt-out of Catholic training though they still pray in public schools daily.

At first they changed the class from religion, i.e. Catholicism; to the comparative study of religions, although the only relativism taught was how correct Christ’s teachings were when compared to all the other, silly, religions. When Franco’s pall was finally lifted after nearly 30 years of slow change and children really had a choice about being indoctrinated with their ancestor’s religious beliefs, they were then offered the choice between religious study and ethics, as if without the former they had no way to learn the latter.

As if without a fear of God, a fear for one’s own immortal soul or the threat of some kind of retributive punishment after death, we would just throw our hands up and say: “Well, since it doesn’t matter anyway I might as well drink blood squeezed from live babies!” In fact, in my experience, there are as many good people and villains among the demographics of theists as that of atheists.

Indeed, if we looked more closely at some widely agreed moral infraction like say: paedophilia, I bet we would find that men forced to celibacy for their religious practice are the more frequent offenders.

So why don’t we, the unafraid of divine wrath, go on rampaging binges of wildly sinful behaviour? In part, I think, it is no more than the fact our basic biological motives: the altruism that serves both society and the altruist, empathy that impels us to feel the pain we inflict on others, or the sympathy to turn the tables on ourselves when considering the personal advantage taking from another would attain—seeing ourselves reflected in our potential victim’s eye, is largely due to an innate socialising instinct that stems not only from our need to live in collaborative fashion with others of our species but even more, just like dogs, we become confused in our own identities when out of contact with our taxonomical peers.

There is also self-image which is attached implacably to the self-esteem which suffers when our judgement, skewed by self-interest, allows us to cross our own moral boundaries. To a Christian this poses a lighter threat to his psychic well-being since once the pleasure is lived and real contrition arrives, his loving God will forgive him—it is a far more difficult thing to acquire one’s own forgiveness and nothing, after all, is harder to live with than remorse.

Saturday July 18th, 2009

Music and Love (280 words)

Some friends and I went to see Omar Faruk play in the old Moorish gardens of Jerez under a crescent moon last night. We, the audience, had the added luck to have Arto Tunçboyaciyan join Faruk and his five-man band, adding his talents and humour to the proceedings.

At one point Arto, the Turk, looked across the stage at I’m not sure which, either the Greek keyboardist or the Israeli Jew on guitar—perhaps both, and said: if we can make music together all men should be able to get along; and Faruk added: “What Sufism has taught me is that we needn’t all love one another as long as we just respect each other.”

And it made me think. Even I who was not grown in religious soil of any kind and, I think, also most occidentals, know the Old testament’s teaching about loving one another (Leviticus 19:18): “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is impossible to accomplish among mere humans and yet I had never questioned that, as an ideal, if we all loved each other as we do ourselves the world would be much improved.

When I thought about it more deliberately however, I realized that not only is our own capacity for real love limited to a small number of subjects but that it would be anything but nice to be loved by everyone else.

If we reached for less than love and just respected each other as we do ourselves instead, it would not only be enough but preferable.

Friday July 12th, 2009

Temeris Mortis (1090 words)

'Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life.
With their little passions, their little vices and virtues, they are well enough suited in the workaday world; but immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale'
SOMERSET MAUGHAM

As this collection of thoughts and stories, which I call my Mental Workshop, grows older—four years old a month ago—I see trends reveal themselves that reflect my mood, or the reflections consequent to my reading and conversations of the time. Periods of months together about art, theology, science, or the eternal mysteries of relations between the opposing genders of our species, (i.e. love). It is sometimes light-hearted sometimes gloomy, sometimes proud, at others insecure: and the collection of written reflections becomes in itself a reflection for their author.

I have been reading Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened of, yet another book by an old man writing about death: “…fear of death irrational?” Barnes asks, and answers himself: “Why, it is the most rational thing in the world—how can reason not reasonably detest the end of reason?”

Soothing reading I guess, as Montaigne believed: Since we cannot defeat death, the best form of counter-attack is to have it constantly in mind in order to make its abyss appear less formidable.

I am long familiar with Barnes’ shorter work which I have always read with admiration for his dominion as word-smith but upon reading my first book-length composition by him I realize he is so much more, he is a master of the word and, ultimately, that is where literature resides, in the word.

He describes being described by a literary critic with a coined word: polyphiloprogenitor, because the critic said of him: “Barnes is father to forty books and four children”.  An intriguing mind, don’t you agree?

The book gives him room to speak in what seems a breezy, spontaneous, conversational tone while, in fact, he weaves a medley of ideas and narrative in a complex web of self-reference.

Although I have yet to finish the book he has already provided me with a rare insight into each’s own mortality, an original thought added to the basket of old wisdoms and observations. He says all of us non-old people imagine, naturally enough, our extinction as a goodbye to life when in fact (for those lucky enough to reach senescence) it is not a leave-taking from life but rather a goodbye to old age.

It is heartening to realize that in a world newly turned away from the wisdom of age, a world where the young know more relevant information than the old who haven’t had time to assimilate or re-learn an unusual century’s changes, there are still some things a young man can’t know unless he is told by an old one.

Today I sat at a sidewalk café on a street of the ancient, history-soaked, horse-trading town of Jerez de la Frontera while waiting for a friend. As I idly people-watched I saw an encounter which is common enough but with the difference that today I noticed it: two young men who met accidentally in the street a few metres from my table; close enough to watch but whose voices were drowned in city noise. They fell into earnest conversation as if they really had something to talk about instead of just exchanging polite noises: dialogue instead of small talk. I was about to look away to see if my eye fell on something more interesting when a woman walked past.

She was not a beautiful woman: middle-aged, thick-ankled and generally unfit compared to the good-looking young men who talked to each other. But she wore enough sexual symbols in her tight white dress and pumps—in a place and climate where most women wear flat, open sandals and light, loose clothing—that like a baboon’s red and blue ass it drew the two men’s sub-conscious through their eyes to watch her jiggling gluteus maximus’, until they eventually disappeared from view; the whole while maintaining their engagement in their conversation with the conscious part of their minds.

And once again I had pause to consider how we primates are separated by so very little from mere monkeys.

The conscious mind’s evolution has been so much faster than the biology it stems from that it lies to each of us about a duality which is a fiction in an attempt at social contract between the fundamentally dissociative elements.

If my example of the men’s eyes being drawn to a woman they would not be consciously interested in, is an example of biology’s rule, and their conversation a manifestation of the higher, conscious mind (the one we like to think of with free will), then it follows that if I weren’t convinced just as you are that we are each indeed two: me and my mind, the witness and the subject, my mind and the brain it watches dispassionately, I would be able to fuse the two into a simple ‘me’ thereby getting rid of the only one who finds death abhorrent, the one who imagines himself its witness.

addendum:

When Mr Barnes indulges in a prophetic look at his own worst-case demise he sees it as being: "...preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language [by those] around me."

The last time I was in L.A. someone asked me that quintessentially Californian question (from within my European kinesphere): "But are you happy?" I thought a moment in an attempt to answer such a complex but direct query with a direct answer but could only think to say: "When I am alone I tend to simply serious..."

And so, in this New Age world where I seem surrounded by those who dedicate themselves to achieving a state of emotional complacency; devotedly escaping what they consider negative emotions, if asked about the pseudo-debate between the relative values of intellectualism and emotionionalism, I would have to answer as I imagine Barnes might: In my beliefs I strive for rationalism while in my behaviour I am slave to emotion. My puny mind (or should I say: brain?) sees paradox where all around me see unity.

If it weren't for the doubt I harbour about my own sanity pointing to the probability I am actually not insane, then there really would be very little room for doubt at all; but finding books like this one provide the grace that if I am, I am at least in interesting company.

Friday June 26th, 2009

The Dream (110 words)

Last night I dreamt of a beautiful house I once lived in for a time. In the dream I remembered its every detail, its every room and shelf, and how it stood on a hillock hidden by carefully tended gardens.

Saturday June 14th, 2009

Peace (1440 words)

I have a dear old friend who is Christian, his name is Bob. We usually live in different countries though we met when we both lived in London and later, we shared NYC. Since then our long friendship has been kept alive by sporadic correspondence of great volubility spotted by occasional meetings, one of which I enjoyed in the form of a recent visit.

As always we discussed philosophy and theology while: I took him out sightseeing, between mouthfuls of food and when we weren’t occupied otherwise in general.

He once again brought up de Caussade, the early-eighteenth century Jesuit priest, theologian and mystic who has been a particular inspiration to Bob’s faith and moulder of his attitudes toward life.

Bob’s description of de Caussade’s central thesis, Abandonment to Divine Providence, goes something like this: Evil must be part of a plan too complex for us to understand since a perfect God could only create a perfect world. This reminded me immediately of Candide and since Voltaire published Candide in 1759 I wondered if his sarcasm wasn’t directed at de Caussade. When I looked it up I found Voltaire was lambasting Leibnitz instead, the brilliant Rationalist who nevertheless is remembered better by history in his alter ego as Voltaire's Dr Pangloss. After each of the terrible calamities that happen to Candide or which he witnesses, his tutor, Dr Pangloss, reminds him: “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"

Besides, it turns out de Caussade was so fearful of the Church fathers’ possible charges of quietism that his writings weren’t published until 110 years after his death and even then in a version censored by a fellow Jesuit because of the impossibility of escaping punishment under the totalitarian Catholic regime otherwise. Meaning effectively, that he wasn’t published unabridged until 1966, nearly a quarter of a millennium after he wrote.

De Caussade’s less simplistic credo actually went more like this: The present moment is a sacrament from God and self-abandonment to it and its needs is a holy state. Which, in turn, sounded to me more like a Buddhist derivate such as Bodhidharma’s Zen.

Although when I thought about it, I realised the similarity in conclusion obfuscates the very different reasons for reaching similar truths: De Caussade’s abandonment is, in fact, leagues from Buddha’s detachment.

My thoughts then took me outside the set of theology and into philosophy where I found memories of Epictetus, the Greek slave-philosopher.

I have always had a soft spot for that great thinker trapped in a life as muddy as Job’s. As a slave to a cruel master, anecdotes abound, like the one where his master, Epaphroditus, amused himself by twisting Epictetus’ leg. Because of his philosophy (it is said) he was able to look on dispassionately, even warning his master that if he continued thus he would soon break the leg and be master of an incapacitated slave; and didn’t shout-out when his master went on to break it.

Epictetus centred on his belief that suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable. The Buddhist-like detachment that results from the discipline to accept the immutable, diverges from the Buddha’s in that it strives ultimately for happiness.

When Epictetus advises: "Do not seek to bring things to pass in accordance with your wishes, but wish for them as they are, and you will find them" I think it is an interesting philosophical considerations but self-defeating in terms of getting what one can from the experience that is life.

I think a successful life, within the context of ultimate purposelessness, is one that is noticed by the one who lives it—one that has events important enough to the one living them to make perduring and cherished memories; peace, balance, equanimity, denial of passions all lead to the opposite: negligence and lack of engagement. 

Epictetus himself may well have found all the reach of life’s possibilities within the small range available to him—one that includes living the full 1 to 10 scale where 5 is acceptance, 10 is joy and 1 is desperate melancholy. But in-fact his life was a pathetic example of what it might have been given the full gamut of possibilities you and I, as our own masters, can hope for.

To me it is clearly a slave philosophy formulated as a reaction to Epictetus’ circumstances when compared to say: Socrates, who refused to live any way but that which he considered correct even when faced with execution by the state. Epictetus' acceptance, like Buddha’s detachment or de Caussade’s abandonment, seem to me, more resignation than peace.

Rather than being a sophisticated attitude that aids the experience of life, the resignation is one for which one must exchange the highs and lows that make memories. Predictability is a poison that dries the sap of experience and what could be more predictable than knowing everything is okay simply because everything is always okay? 

Although Bob and I both realize our ongoing debate is futile in the sense that we argue from different platforms which overlap but do not coincide: theology and philosophy. But it is only futile if our objective is to convince the other or change his point of view because Bob’s lively mind inspires new considerations and thoughts in mine regardless, and I hope the same is true for him because it in itself, is a rare enough pleasure…

To my arguments that life is in an essential way, the accumulation of its memories, Bob answered recently: “Memories may be important to you, but to me they're not. At my age {65} I can't remember a damn thing! Barbara {his 17 year old daughter} sometimes says, 'do you remember when we did this?'  But I never have any memory of it.” I answered: “And thus you prove my point: If you don't live for the production of memories you will end in the sad condition of having none and wondering what you did with your unique and singular life.”

When Bob, who has led an unorthodox life largely dedicated to reading, writing and the search for truth, talks of his self-doubt in his observations of the differences between his life and those around him (he still lives in NYC) he uses the metaphor of the piglet who built the house of bricks and says: “…those who planned for their retirements—even early retirements—seem to have some nice and recurrent highs, as they have virtually no financial worries, travel all around the world, and spend most of their time following their bliss in doing various projects” I answered: “I think the pig who builds the brick house (sacrificing present for future) isn't the sort who can really: ‘...spend most of his time following his bliss.’ Of history's great men in any field- few lived as sensibly you describe- it is a bourgeois construct and ideal.”

Again, in a context of a pointless, existentialist universe: what difference does it make? But in terms of personal experience: I think it is a waste of a lot of potential, a disregard for the possible and the unknowable fruits of the unknown future. I'd say the proof is in the fact that difficult experiences can become as cherished as memories as joyful ones, as long as one lives them with a congruent personality.

Personally I don't believe happiness, much less joy or bliss, are within the reach of those who suffer peace.

Old Man (short story- 4120 words)

I

My first memories are not, like most, of childhood. The earliest recollections of my existence float, like most, outside of a chronological continuum but, unlike most: are always within a narrow range of age. I can remember no parents and have always appeared, when compared to my like, to be between the ages of about thirty and fifty.

Those first memories exist in a vague reality which, just like a child’s, are the recollection of memories that belong to a being who though sentient, had such a different perception of reality from the one that remembers him later, that they take on a surreal quality. As vivid as a recent reminiscence but hovering poised between personal experience and mere thought.

Fear. Fear is my primordial remembrance, fear, pure, simple and hard. The fear something would eat me just as I ate other living things. Fear something previously unknown, whether weather or accident, would unexpectedly threaten my life. Fear of my own kind, furry more than hairy, shambling animals as uncomfortable raised up on their legs as shuffling along on feet and knuckles. I felt fear awake or asleep though despite the fear I was aggressive: I ran from anything bigger than I was and dominated or killed everything that wasn’t.

I had families and belonged to tribes, we spoke well enough to plan future action and we collaborated well enough to hunt animals larger than ourselves. We shared the females uneasily and divided the responsibility for common labour according to each’s ability and the prizes according to each’s strength; but we also killed and ate each other when that seemed the best use an individual could contribute to the group.

I remember being particularly good at making tools, finding the right kind of stone for sharpening. Using sharp stones as weapons, for cutting meat, separating and scraping hides or for sharpening bone or stone into lances that lengthened the arm’s reach.

Life was centred clearly and unquestioningly on few needs: avoiding danger, a need to eject a certain quantity of sticky liquid into the females and searching for food—alternating with lying somewhere safe to do no more than digest it.

I remember these early events as sensations and images not as thoughts, closer to something I saw in two-dimensions than having lived it. And still I recall becoming aware that everyone I knew, every female, every friend, every child and enemy, eventually died—while I didn’t.

Most seemed to last a good number of cold seasons though many didn’t make it to the age of reproduction and I began to think of time in terms of life-times.

It was when tanning a hide that a realization came to me: if once cured the leather were wet and then left to dry, it shrunk and hardened. Although I had language sophisticated enough to explain such ideas to others I remember them not as rational cognition but as vapour-like structures whose conclusions came to me aleatorily.

By the same token I can remember hiding in a shallow cave heaped together with others of my kind for warmth against dangerous weather. And I remember that something like a loud thunder-clap could evoke a real image in my visual cortex of a large beast or a splitting rock.

Reality was largely an unknown.

It came to me that if I cut the leather in strips and wet them before using them to strap sharp stones to long sticks, once dried in the sun, the stick and stone became as one. A new weapon so much more efficient than what we had up until then, that I became respected and feared for my ability. Animals hitherto too large to hunt came under our power, others that had always scared us were now no match and some even turned from predators to prey.

Many life-times passed like this.

I returned to my family’s shelter one day carrying a dead animal similar to a sheep over one shoulder with one hand. My animal skin was caught around my body by leather belts in which were inserted sharp bone knives and short stone and wood clubs. In my other hand I carried a few long lances. I was tired, had wanted to stop and rest but couldn’t show such weakness to the others who followed me. Upon arriving at the entrance of my cave my females came scuttling up to me showing submission and hissing between themselves at the thought of sharing out the meat I brought.

In a final show of strength before dropping into my corner to rest and be tended by my females, I threw my arms out to the sides dropping the dead animal behind me, raising my maw to the heavens and shouting my victory. My right hand also flung its contents in the gesture and one of the spears I carried lodged directly in the leg of a cringing female.

She screamed in pain and started to drag herself backward with the stone point deep in her thigh, the stick it was attached to swinging stiffly above. The smell of her blood confused the others momentarily but her aggressive posturing and screaming as she retreated to a defensible position decided them, it was better to concentrate on the dead meat I brought than the live and bleeding; though eventually she died and we ate her too.

It didn’t occur to me to feel one way or another about the wounded female, it had nothing to do with me, it was something that happened to her. What did occur to me was like lightning, a thought as big as fire must have been though I can’t remember back to when we came to control it. A lance needn’t only lengthen a hunter’s arm it could also go beyond his reach by being thrown.

I started to put the idea in practice as soon as I’d eaten and rested. I began with rocks and what started with something similar to flinging my body awkwardly from one side to the other combined with a release of the rock from my hand, soon turned to a method and instead of the rock flying off in any unpredictable direction I discovered I could aim far more accurately by throwing the rock under-hand. It took quite awhile longer to discover the huge advantage in speed, impact and range, throwing them over-hand gave.

Others began to imitate me and it wasn’t much longer before any male of reproductive age could make a spear stick in a tree at twenty paces with occasional reliability.

Many life-times passed and my society became more and more organised, more and more powerful. We travelled less frequently in search of food once the women discovered seeds could be planted and waited for, instead of having to go out looking for their fruits. Nature became less frightful, weather less scary, phenomena less unpredictable and we became less aggressive with one another.

With nature’s threats reduced and our comforts increased I began to notice others lived significantly longer than before, it was no longer unusual that I knew my great-grandchildren while most of the intervening generations still lived. It was then I knew a woman whose name I could only approximate in this language, our idiom of those days was more melodic, more reliant on stress, tone and inflection than discreet words, but in the flat sound of today’s speech it might be written something like, Graccht, a lovely name...

It was with Graccht I first shared a life. Graccht whose face was so different and so visible for lack of hair, who became the first other with whom I conversed instead of only interacting to make her do what I wanted or for planning some future cooperative effort.

Graccht and I talked about ideas, we talked of how we missed each other when apart, we made small sacrifices for the other’s pleasure and we laughed together, rolling around in each other’s arms even when nothing funny had happened.

It was when Graccht died that I felt such desperate and irreplaceable loss that I suddenly realised who was doing the feeling. It was I. I was a living thing, I was someone who existed and I finally knew it. I was I.

II

I had long ago learned that the face that looked up at me from the waters I drank from was a reflection of my own, rather than someone else’s, and yet as strange as it seems now, not that I existed. Now that I did, I began to wonder for the first time in uncounted life-times, why it was everyone became inanimate after a certain amount of time, then they rotted and eventually disappeared altogether while I just continued living.

I thought about myself, looked at my reflection in the water with curiosity instead of just accepting it as part of nature’s inexplicable reality. It was then I noticed that like Graccht I had less hair, more exposed skin than those around me and that I always looked about the same age. It sometimes took a life-time for me to age from around thirty to around fifty, at others it took two or three life-times, but whenever my hair started to turn gray I began to regenerate again in the younger version.

I was often hurt, sometimes badly, but unlike everyone else I always got better.

Many, many lifetimes passed. Long voyages, discoveries, changes, and many others who I grew close to though I also grew accustomed to their temporariness.

But a time came when I found myself less and less attracted by the females of my tribe, they smelled strangely to me. I continued to couple with them as per tribal custom—keeping as many as I could feed. But I found my women no longer produced young except when they came out looking more like the hairy and heavy-browed males of the tribe than the increasingly hairless and erect lord of their mothers.

After many more lifetimes I found others like myself with increasing frequency and each time I did our collaboration was inventive, our production efficient, our interaction a rare pleasure, and we made children when of the opposite gender.

Eventually there were only others of my own kind though my hairy ex-family were sometimes seen lurking near us. They feared us and we seldom shared territory though we might share a water source with edgy and irascible suspicion.

By the time we advanced enough to plan our built shelters in defensible circles around a safe communal area and planted our food, we began feeling a certain safety as well as a security for our futures. The time we saved chasing a day’s food, or at best a couple of days, turned to stored grain, dried meats and time to think of other things but nature’s threat and tomorrow’s uncertainty.

Where everything around me had been a potential danger with the hairy people we the hairless, realised everything including ourselves had anima and we contrived rituals and made amulets to invoke the weather’s cooperation or receive the river’s bounty.

Manhood rites, marital obligation, responsibility in labour and law were introduced by common consent; in a word we became: civilised.

III

Life-times became still longer and others noticed I aged differently even, at times, appearing to be the same age for another’s whole life. But our societies were small and communal memories only as long as the oldest member’s and so I, as anomaly, was accepted just as all of nature’s other phenomena were.

Travellers began to reach our lush valley, others like us though they always made sounds we couldn’t understand; we learned new things from them anyway. To start with, we learned we were only a few of many like us who lived in all directions but at great distances.

It was then that more creatures who looked similar to us, indeed, more than I had ever seen at once, came in a strange train. Leading were huge four-legged animals tethered to big boxes that rolled along as if they weighed nothing. Most walked instead of riding in the boxes pulled by animals, but they were covered in marvellous clothes of a strange colours and soft textures.

It took the entourage some suns to finish passing and small groups of them slept in our town each night. We shared food and fire and learned what we could with gesture and drawings with sticks in the earth. They made us understand that their clothes were made from a material they put together from the hair of an animal instead of animal skin; how they managed it we couldn’t divine.

They carried weapons of a strange material, very sharp, beautifully shaped and hard enough to break rocks with, I was fascinated. When I learned there were many like them who lived in the direction they came from, I decided immediately to go.

Many came with me and in the generations that it took us to arrive where everyone we met pointed: south, we found many like ourselves and learned from each even when we had to fight them.

Some of my tribe died on the way, others turned back or stopped and settled along the route. Finally, with only two females and three young still following me, only I kept to the road, my objective clear. It had been some time that most of the land we passed through was either planted with crops or belonged to congregations of organised dwellings, like tribes, but not quite.

I learned, I traded and I worked in the communities we passed through. I left my stone and bone weapons behind and now carried metal; sharp, hard and shiny. But as dense as the communities were becoming the further we travelled, there was always a forest where edibles could be found or small animals hunted or trapped and rivers full of fish. But we were continually the strange creatures, the primitives, the ones who didn’t speak the local language and wore animal skins.

I kept moving south knowing something unknowable awaited my discovery. Sure enough one day brought the expected unexpected. We crossed a low mountain range and when we reached its crest I looked down on a group of houses that seemed to reach from horizon to horizon with only the infinite sea beyond. Most were made of stone but there was also adobe or wood and some were made of white marble painted in bright colours. So large that I wondered at first if they were one of nature’s manifestations because, surely, it was impossible creatures such as we could build them.

There we settled. At first we lived on the outskirts, moving in as we assimilated to this new culture. My offspring learned the complex language faster than I did but eventually their mothers died and finally they did too. By then I had become like those of the city and I now knew not only that this was a city but also who I was; in this wide, flat world, there were many kinds of animals; I was the one called man.

I thought I would find others like me, others who never died, but I learned instead that in a society this big it was dangerous to me if my neighbours realised I was different in this way. I learned to keep a low profile among my companions and to move at least every half life-time, though I sometimes moved back to a place after a couple of generations knowing that those who might have recognized me were dead.

I travelled, I learned, I picked up a few languages, many skills, and usually I didn’t start families. One of the first things I was taught by those around me was that the ideas we had about the supernatural power of objects and the intelligence of rivers or storms was wrong. In-fact there were gods who were like us men but much stronger and they controlled all that happened to each of us—the only important animals in the world. If I made sacrifices of things like food I might otherwise eat myself, I could ask them favours they sometimes granted.

IV

From this point forward I still never grew significantly older but did start to grow up with increasing rapidity, my understanding of the world I lived in and my own experience of it becoming more mature with every generation.

A wise mathematician came from the East and founded a school where pure mathematics were applied to the understanding of nature including its panoply of gods and his ideas held sway for a long time. It wasn’t until sometime after that, that it occurred to anyone a belief in the existence of gods needn’t be a priori. There was a lack of evidence to be considered and it was possible nature relied on natural law instead of invention or creation.

Then the classification of logic. The idea of a single source: a thought that contemplated itself and which set all matter in motion. In the East some believed we formed part of a dream of the only true being.  

Later, came the application of logic to the observation of natural phenomena and finally the founding of empiricism and scientific methodology.

But long before Darwin published his Origin of the Species, I had figured out for myself not only the evolutive quality of change in greater speciation and complexity to a type of animal but also that this was true of an individual—if only he lived long enough.

I realised that I was stuck in a genetic loop that made my body regenerate with algorithmic regularity instead of beginning its disintegration when the reproductive cycle ended. I was undoubtedly a precursor to the future evolution of my species, a breed that passes beyond its rude mandate to procreate as sole purpose for existing and instead: simply exist.

The thousands of generations I had lived were a mere blink of an eye to the slow walk of biological evolution. Indeed, who could know? I may have started my existence as the first single-celled life form.

My long life often put me ahead of the science contemporary to the time but I never published for a fear of drawing attention to myself—a man who never dies threatens his counterparts. And besides, other people’s lives were so fleeting, what did I care what they thought?

During the Italian Renaissance I had been a sculptor but I had so much longer to learn than other artists that in less than two lifetimes I was doing work which was so advanced, it would be another ten generations before there were anyone capable of understanding it, and I had to change vocation.

I knew we were not the centre of the universe; I struggled to imagine the great distances between matter in infinite space or the fact that space actually appeared to be finite and that beyond its curved edge there was neither space nor its absence.

My sense of my own insignificance grew, the impossibility I mattered, the fact I was no more than a vortex of swirling atoms exactly the same atoms as those few that made up all matter; turned my conception of the Universe, of reality, of truth, to mere accident within an infinite chaos of reactions between matter and energy…

Then we discovered that the universe’s physical laws varied sub-atomically and supra-atomically, questions were raised about the separate nature of energy and matter and whether, in fact, they weren’t the same thing.

The String theorists hypothesised elemental matter was in the form of filaments unimaginably small and it was their vibrations that was expressed in ways that seemed, to our limited perceptions, to be divided into energy or matter.

V

It was then that an evolutionary leap came about not through the cumulative effects of casual mutation or epigenetics but rather, because of a virus. A good portion of the world’s population seemed to be immune to it but of those who were susceptible, most went mad and soon after committed suicide.

At first society tried to help the afflicted but the changes in the neural network the virus caused were irreversible and so cities began putting up centres where people could go for a quick and painless death followed by a discreet incineration and efficient disposal. Many were taken to these centres by their loved ones but others threw themselves off of buildings or under trains and patrols were organised to pick up the remains.

Man’s neurological structure is made up of three billion neurons each with a potential bioelectrical connection to ten thousand others, making a total of a thousand trillion possible connections. The virus mutated the neurons in the pre-frontal lobe giving the dendrites greater plasticity which multiplied the potential synaptic connections ten-fold.

This made most people completely bonkers except for the driving thought of escaping their own minds—but I was one in a million who survived the change.

After three days it was done, I was a new species of animal and not only was I instantly in contact with every other like me, but we achieved complete and immediate anamnesis, we all knew everything the others knew and we shared our thinking processes. We became one in perfect synchronicity with the universe.

From realising I existed to realising I didn’t I now had a new, far deeper and crystal-clear, understanding of the universe, its meaning and my part in it all.

We new species of man were in sudden shared possession of the truth. The String theorists hadn’t been that far off but in fact the filaments were not of a Planck length. As inconceivably small as this unit of measure is, the hypothesis turned out to be mere human construct. In the end we found that they existed in a single dimension, which was the same as not existing at all.

The universe was not a vibration caused by something with mass and volume but a sound that expanded from the centre out and, like a Lotus, its crescent spheres constantly formed at the centre, each a universe and a time-line playing out its song before dispersing into entropy.

Just as one might imagine a soap-bubble popping in a perfect vacuum: each molecule of soap begins its journey from a common centre to its unique spot on the bubble’s surface at the point of bursting. Each is tied by the gravitational force of its mass to its brothers until its surface tension breaks; it then continues its linear journey alone—no longer fettered by the energy generated by the mass of other molecules.

The molecule then becomes a microcosm of the sphere it belonged to and, in turn, explodes into its component atoms. As the electromagnetic charge of the atom degenerates it blows into its elemental particles; the elemental particles then cross from matter to pure energy which is the fundamental sound that makes the variety of the symphony.

In the curved space of our universe its linear voyage takes it back to bud into a new universe at the centre of the expanding sphere of the old.

Where we had so long thought we were each a cumulative manifestation of our multitudinous parts; that the collection of indivisible atoms caused the energy that made the fabric of ‘me’, I now realised the opposite was true: it was energy that manifested as matter, not the other way 'round. It was no longer necessary to wonder if the unique agglomeration of parts was designed or accidental, whether it had purpose or was simply an odd part of an indifferent chaos. All energy is one, its purpose is synonymous with its existence. Life is God.

Once one could, as we could, actually hear the melody of the universe it became obvious where each of its atoms was and why. Where before I had been random noise, now I was a cardinal note in the universe’s Fugue.

Perfect clarity- and I returned to being the original thought that contemplates itself.

Since then they have moved my body to live in a white box so perfectly lit that I cannot make a shadow on one hand with the other. The more primitive form of my species recognizes my enlightened state and they devote themselves to serving me.

They bring me food regularly and help me eat it, sometimes they try to communicate with me but my cognitive processes are so much faster than theirs I can barely understand them; to try to formulate an answer would be like trying to move in slow motion.

They give me my pills and sometimes walk up and down my cell with my body and I, sometimes smile at them.