. Return - Next to 2From uncertain momentum of position greater or equal to the energy of the abruption multiplied by time and divided by infinity. That is death. Coming back into life is again learning to understand the visible phases of the moon. There is the constant of the Sun or life and the variables of the Moon, memory and Earth’s relative positions, lived experience. Precession vaguely comprehended yet experienced daily.
I’m a Junker. I’ve been dead or dying as long as I can remember. Always with the knowledge life would end even when it has only begun. Each nascence reveals the innocent fear of the end point to life, my life; first glimpsed as terror, then superseded by an insight acquired through experience that all is not as it seems. Living with or without plan; passing over when the time comes, abruptly at times, anticipated in others; yet, every time recurring to bewilderment. Where, to when? Uncertainty in birth, death and the whole fiasco in between is existing with the naked affliction of Junker consciousness.
For me each rebirth evolves to speculating on the existence of the soul which leads to revelation. If the soul is an aggregation of charged particles, it could be the quantum fractal of a constellation of stars? Each soul a unique note vibrating throughout it’s existence as a singular constellation. And if true the soul as the universe rather than existing among a multiple universes, parallel or otherwise may well be encompassed in an endless series of universes, universe inside universe, a babushka doll of universes? If this idiom of fractals holds then why not a diapason to infinity? Pursuing this inquisition evolves to where Memory asserts a reality. I can make sense of the scrambled jigsaw puzzle that is my genome, my soul.
Apprehending what life is, each life was, I can begin to navigate outcomes. The endless sequential enclosures by the past of the present, and to know this was thus is to have the Memory. Having the Memory makes me what is called a Junker.
The first time of utilising the Memory was surviving the Terror of the Montagnard Republic during the Terror years of the French Revolution. But more about that later. Most people, when they come back remember nothing of the past before they came back. They come back as an infant and perhaps have intimations of a past in the inexplicable proclivities they put down to inheritance. Living their allotted span without any real idea from whence they came. Very few access their pasts. Those who do are the ones who come into their power. Captains of their fate. The ones that remember.
Human time is Memory and those who have it know where real power lies. To deprive people of the Memory, their memory, their history, is to maroon people in the Now, to straiten them to perpetual reaction. To the tactical rather than the strategic. People without the Memory are always the pawns in the games played by those with the Memory.
Technology seeks to maroon people in this amnesiac universe where most no longer rely on their own brains as the repository of experience but enthusiastically live in the technosphere where amnesia is compensated by online databases serving up algorithms affording the greatest comfort and ease rather than challenge. Humans become trapped in the Now on a path of behavioural devolution where survival is determined by aptness to a paradigm of stagnating socialism rather than individual agency sired through aspiration and Hope. Most, if they say I’m present mean only for minutes. Now is isolated from the long rhythmic arcs of the past. Eluding the Memory is the pastime of the majority and being thoroughly socialised is the most comfortable way of being.
Accessing the Memory can be uncomfortable. It is for me.
That said let’s begin...
1a.
... Our valley is a crater blasted into the crust of northern Australia. The impact pushed the crater walls to great height in a perfect circle, meaning whatever it was came in through the atmosphere vertically. The forest encircling the crater is an almost impenetrable barrier of giant figs, cycads, stinging trees, crocs, malaria, leeches and ticks. A very nasty tick. Ixodes holocyclus or paralysis tick, the neurotoxin of which has driven animals and humans mad. If the tick is not extracted quickly the scrub itch from the larval infestation debilitates the host before killing it. One of the many perils of the Far North.
The catastrophic event was followed by a second impact in the same crater was of an order of mathematical improbability on par with conditions for the genesis of life in the vacuum of space yet it happened. The binary event was the prompting of the Parallels project and the Ark. The pressure wave from the Tunguska like collision razed everything inside the crater but was contained by the encircling rim left by the first impact. Forest growth inside the double crater recovered incredibly quickly. The concentric rims act like the inner ward of a medieval castle. Outsiders faced with taiga like vegetation encircling the first crater wall are diverted by the second wall. In the ten years we have been here, and twenty years since the second impact, no one has accidentally wandered into our crater, and then wandered out. They are not welcomed.
Cyclones generated in the Coral Sea lose intensity this far inland, and apart from more rain and a little extra wind this sweet site is in the lee of most atmospheric disturbances. The soil here is rich, mixed as it is with the ashes of a population of counter culture dropouts that made the original crater their Eden, and grows bananas, mangoes, papaws, star apples, rambutans and macadamias that shed nuts twice a year. A carved out slice of ganja heaven except for the ticks and malaria, the stinging trees, vicious cassowaries and snakes, to many to detail, most deadly. The core of the house we live in is the vehicle we arrived in and grounded for lack of fuel. Attached is the rest of the house built of bamboo poles with rattan vine bindings, poplar shingles for walls and roof, woven fern walls separating rooms. The house is not big and relatively dry. In big storms we shelter in the grounded vehicle. For all the isolation I am contented. We arrived as a couple, now we are four. Dalena is infallible with the cross bow so we have protein. We have food, water and each other. We’re safe from the outside world for now. The bridge we’ll have to cross sooner or later is when the children will need more than us but that has is not here yet, so we’re in a happy bubble for now. Rarely do I climb beyond the rims of our double crater. The tattered cloth of a horizon sixty two kilometres away with its abandoned skyscrapers like a line of broken teeth along the Coral sea front is testament to the bombardment from the sky decades ago. The obliteration of a planet killer led to a shower of region killers. Visible as pockmarking from vantage on the second arete. Depressions in the canopy of regrowth from the plain to the coast. Oxygen flashed away under the rain of impacts leaving only CO2 to suffocate all living things. A sudden snuffing out as if of a candle. The dead mouldered while the insects thrived. The memory of what follows the collapse is dark. Only by will do I suppress that grim revery. That was then.
Now I am up a ladder repairing shingles on a wall. The vehicle the interlopers arrived in parked on the grass some metres away from the house. Its four rotors drooping under the relentless heat of the day. Dalena is with the children playing at the edge of the dam, a walled off catchment from the crater wall run off. I pause to take in the view. At the edge of the clearing a few hundred metres from the crater wall I see the red scars from the freshly dug graves in the otherwise smooth carpet of green to the edge of the forest. I killed the three men who came in the vehicle before they had the chance to complicate our lives. There was no good to be had from whatever they brought with them. Their camouflaged vehicle is operational with a fuel reservoir sufficient to take us much further inland if needed. A welcome material option for our survival. If they came more will come. We cannot stay out of reach of marauders this close to the coast. Witnessing the pandemonium after the impact informed my decision to act as soon as their vehicle touched down. I seized the opportunity without regret. I struck as they were still disembarking. In the aftermath the weapons and gear they brought confirmed I was right in acting. They were slavers
..Memories, like slaps to the face, recollections buffeting in jolting electric shocks. Captured in Sicily by Barbary pirates to toil in the fields of the Algarve, by Normans in Lombardy to sweat on a forge for a blacksmith in Palermo, raped to death by legionaries of the VIII Augusta in Germania, at Mytilene taken by Athenians to die in the silver mine at Laurium and enslaved at Nippur to work the nets on the Euphrates at Uruk. I am fatigued by recollection.
Up on the ladder in that moment I look to the past for a sign. The sign indicating the way out. Am I Ab Raham freed from indentured toil? I can cross over but only by leaving Dalena and our children. Knowing weighs heavily. Suddenly I want to sleep, to forget. To lie down in the sunlight and be with them. We have time yet to cross. Time till somebody comes to look for those I killed. Distracted I give myself a black nail with the hammer which startlingly brings me back to the Now.