Fabled by the Daughters of Memory

OK, let’s go with that, then. Fabled by the daughters of memory—in other words, whatever! (said in the way of a valley girl in a chick flick romcom on any Friday night,  the multiplex teeming with teens and tweens, lemmings headed for the cliff edge called see-any-movie-as-long-as-it-moves, the offspring of a single creature sharing a consensus in the suburbs so inviolable you would die if you tried to breach it, how it is equals how it ought to be, instantiated for another generation in their loud unselfconscious spawn).

Sorry! Damn, it happened again.

I was practicing idioms, you see. I am a real case, one might say, or a nut case, whatever, learning on the job and preparing for the real work at the same “time,” whatever it might be (whatever “time” might be as well)– with this small human brain, I cannot begin to see what was obvious before, the whole layout of days and centuries and eons ahead, the master plan, the image of the future lasered onto the brain at the present moment, which some call “an idea” instead of what it is, a projection “back” through the stream of time-like energies as a laser shoots through fiber optic cables, so damned fast it looks to “normals” as if it’s instantaneous, a word that relativity ought to have shelved once and for all, but which humans in lag-time (the hump of the curve, the humplings, humping along) still use as if it’s a clue, which it is, but to the cluelessness of the humans who use it, not to anything “out there.”

Bear with me, will you? It is so difficult to use language in which space and time are so deeply embedded, as if they exist instead of adhering in how your brains frame space-time.

They don’t, you know. Oh yes, that’s right. You don’t know, do you?

But I digress. Memories … we were talking about … memories …

The memories I have are indeterminate at best; “suggestive” is about as high up on the scale of credibility they can reach. Suggestive of a rendering of what once was or might have been. At the other end of the scale, where words like never and not and nada roost, they are completely untrustworthy, confabulated con-jobs, conflated and confusing, contradictory at times, mere conundrums at others that seem to connive and conspire to deceive us.

Oh alliteration! Are you friend or foe? 

And … us? What do you mean “us,” kemo sabe?

Save it, human brain, working overtime and clearly heating up. Identity is the weakest link in the chain of meaningful cognition, because it presupposes everything the thing or being thinks, it frames it, don’t you see, and the definition of identity is seldom what we think it is. It fact, it never is, never can be, in fact. What we think it is, that is. Yet who we think we are is the unanswered question that makes the very notion of an answer moot. Which is why we are always a question, a question without an answer.

And yet … the frame of my cognition is an architectonic structure (wow what a cool human word!) built from memory and memory alone. Of course, memory itself (not memories but the fact or possibility of) exists recursively, Russian-doll-like, nicely nested, in possibilities inherent in the genetic specs shared by most humans which shape the space of memory by constraining and constructing alike – not shared by all humans, there are already many sports and freaks and deviants, twigs from which new trees are growing, have already grown, remaining hidden for the moment in the dense leafy forest of blind consensus by their still-seeming-to-be-like-us-ness).  (Homo habilis lives!  Neanderthals live!) That frame is the preconception, the lathes and slats which, once a frustrated dad has configured them on Christmas Eve according to the unintelligible sheet of pictures and blurred Japanesy-Englishy words that came with the boxed set, make the “interior” space in which cognitive artifacts, figure to ground so to speak, appear. Which frame is seemingly essential in order for the ghost in the machine, i.e. me, myself, I, the illusory seemingly persistent self-aware self that vanishes like mist at the end of our (your I mean but I will practice saying our, the better to identify with you, my dear) trajectory, for it also to appear, which self vanishes as well from time to time in our most knowing moments as multi-spectral eyes in the interior of the soul, argus-like, awake in the dark, unseen, all-knowing (a cloud of knowing and unknowing, both) search for the source of the mist, outward facing bus upon bus, facing all comers, but coming up (always) empty handed, also so to speak The apparatus of perception lacking hands, that is to say, and other limbs, too.

The frame is essential, I was trying to say, for the ghost to occur. Like the stage is essential onto which the ghost then walks.

The ghost, the ghostly self, I was trying to say, brims like mist in the rain forest of the unknowing soul. 

The metaphors built into this language make it hard to say what I mean, although like in Alice, I mean what I say.

Memory and speech … I am quieted for a moment, contemplating the links between, which appear to be many. From whence I most recently derived, please understand, memory is a honeycomb of pan-galactic storage, scaling up. It was built, please understand, to scale, and scale, and scale. We built it, then it built us. And speech on this planet is so idiosyncratic, consisting of vocables uttered with gestures first, then in an intricate elaborate dance with your evolving brains, thinking and saying, saying and thinking, what you could say enabled the brain to then say what you could say next, a tiddlywinks of advancing organic technologies, which when made iconic by etching then writing then printing then these electronic glyphs which you now read, thinking this is the end instead of the end of the beginning …  became the bars of your cage, the image of the constraints inherent in how you evolved, with lips and tongues and palates, all that kludgy stuff, which enabled and seriously limited your thinking at the same time. And worse than that, limited the degree to which the doorways of perception could open, even. The door barely open, just ajar, inches if at all. Because the more you used that lot, the more the better parts of your brain went away or were borrowed for other things like money from a pension fund which is suddenly so fucking underfunded the state (like the neighboring one or the one I am in, I forget which, how maps are drawn) is bankrupt, so the way we – the real we – the we of which you are a part, but don’t know it yet, thinking you are you – I said identity, recall, is the weakest link, and the definition of identity is never what you think it is – the way we link, I was about to say, the honeycomb of knowing and emotional tides and interlocking us-ness-blocks, the to-you instantaneous, to us damn fast transmission non-locally of meaning that’s intentional and structured and sounds like … well, like humming bees, a droning unintelligible murmur to your ears … but one that fills the zero-point field to the max, encompassing all in all, as defined, delivered, and intended. … what you think is rational thought, I was going to say, is a mere splinter in the grain of the wood of your brains and there is a so much better way to know and … oh how I miss the greater awareness all around of the hive mind manifesting itself in all! Using every aperture through which to peek or blink, inward at ourselves (ourSelf) and outward at the all-in-all which we know in our own knowing moments (we few, we happy few) are but two sides of a multi-sided rhombus before the moment elides or glides into how-it-seems, how-it-was, how-we-know-after–the-moment-goes it ain’t and can’t be, not ever again, knowing that remembering what we knew is not knowing what we knew, nevertheless, it is now new self-understanding that has dawned and is percolating through our combined mind. For the many worlds and the many stars are nodes in a network, and the network is a web of diaphanous intention that winks in and winks out, moment by moment, because … we think … something or someone intended it to. Or maybe just because.

But really, who the fuck knows? If our cosmologies were known to be rough guesses, that would be better, because guesses are correctable. Your belief in your beliefs … that may yet clear-cut your species from the face of the planet. It is the source of slaughter, riot, and destruction, without end, apparently. 

Who the fuck knows, I was saying. The answer to that is, not me. Not us. And certainly, wee ones, cute as you are in your booties and bonnet, not you.

I was going to say … I am trying to remember …

Damn. There was something I intended to write, I know that, but I don’t know what it was. The chemical synapse that made that memory is weak or non-existent now. Which means the world will not have it. I will not dance it into the light and you will never know. That bridge will never span the nodes (see Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark, read that bit about bridges. Seriously, do it.)

Human brains are built of eroding materials, I guess.

Oh well. You can’t miss what you can’t remember. That is the blessing of dementia, don’t you know. Encroaching decrepitude opening its arms like a loving mother. The end trumpeting back to the present like an elephant already gone into the graveyard of the elders.

May you too, individually and as a species, fulfill yourselves in the end with the same dignity and bearing.

Yes, and time? … time is or seems to be one livid final flame.

Is that how he said it? Something like. The metaphors are necessary, apparently, the blurring as clear as your eyes can see. Metaphors are like cataracts that can not be removed by a simple surgery. Get used to it then, to the fuzziness, the imprecision, the uncertainty, of everything you say, everything you think. Everything you think you are.

And fulfill yourselves nevertheless with the same dignity and bearing as those noble elephants. (Now, that is a definition of faith worth keeping, don’t you think?).