Looking Back
We were once frightened animals in the dark. Now, we are a great hive, drawing in all sides into a great cacophony of concentrated systematic activity, where each man is a cell in a great luminescent organism. Somewhere in between, we were people, true individual souls, bonded through mutual custom, divided by tribe and nation, striving against nature and each other rather than merely jostling for position. That struggle was life, in a visceral and corporeal sense. And it still exists in many parts of the world, though it is rapidly vanishing.
In rural Russia, Africa and India, even in parts of Asia and the Americas, there remain, tucked into pockets and sideroads, mountains and valleys, the human communities, trading, serving, obeying, following duties, running from thugs, living free or bonded, married or single, but with a knowledge that life follows a cycle, and that character is determined by how one adapts to it, whether one embraces the duties life imposes, or rejects them. In small places, where people are still poor enough to fight over possessions and insults, close enough to know each other’s families, and superstitious enough to respect a modicum of religion and common custom, honour promises and offer hospitality to strangers, where even the lowest has a reputation to manage, people are preparing for the great phase shift, and watch as their children depart for the cities and their parents retreat, bewildered, from the new reality, incapable of comprehending the scale of this new transformation which has liquidated all identity and perverted all sense of propriety, inverted every figment of traditional morality.
What God wants still governs lives, and the calendar is the rhythm of the heart, the marker of the seasons and the feasts, great pulses of energy and rest, celebration and commemoration, commiseration and continuity. The loves and hatreds of the deep-running bonds, built over lifetimes, dissolve and clash in every event, imbuing with great potency each possession, every day of the year, every remark, touch, glance and breath with the significance of every injury and insult, tender moment and lost love. Each man knows who he is from birth, and all women know what they must become. Each man has his place, and nobody has none. Goodbyes bring tears, as do returns, and birth and death are marked by crowds, as is every marriage, whether approved of or not. The anxiety of death does not curse the certainty of the immortal soul, only ever casting its destination into doubt. What we do in life echoes in eternity, because the law may be written by man, but right and wrong were written by God.
On Sentinel Island, and deep in the Amazon basin, live the last of the men of this world still living as frightened animals. No knowledge of the shape of the earth, the origin of lightning, the nature of disease, or the power of technology, the shadow of civilisation. The passage of time is marked in generations of great men, who have proven themselves in battle with beasts and neighbouring tribes, their names remembered for all their deeds, recited by each generation, their exploits known to all children. And if these memories become polished by time and deference to posterity, it does not dim their light, only enhances it, while the spirits that dance in the shadows commune with strange men with strange gifts, and the beasts and the earth and the plants and the great ineffable marble arch of heaven all whisper mysteries to the wonder of the beautifully ignorant. What happens when we die? Who knows, some say this, others say that. Perhaps it is like a dream.
In the modern world, character is not demonstrated by duty but by persona – shifting superficial images of the self, cobbled together from the mirror image shards of the swarming illusions around us, inherited in tatters from the world that preceded ours. We live in tribes defined by skills and ideas which shift and mutate from season to season, though seasons mean nothing anymore, the calendar is little more than a means of marking periods of time to allow for planning, having no significance in itself. Nor does death. For centuries now, religious dogma has been fading from significance, as God quietly downsized for his retirement, and forgot his grudges, dogma slowly melting into ecumenical relativism.
All people become like anonymous hymenoptera as the community swells to billions. Emperors and kings, heroes and villains, all become faded and forgotten in the great deluge of memory, and deeds no longer bear value in themselves, but by how many bore witness and passed remark. Yet even the most remarkable among us will be forgotten to the masses within a generation. The Ozymandiuses of the past are known to the curious, but are fading from the consciousness of the ordinary man, even in their places of birth, from the bottom of the hive upward.
Nobody shares songs or stories anymore, just disposable images, and some background noise to drive away the boredom. Family, lovers and childhood friends can be exchanged and disposed of in an afternoon, loneliness can last forever amid a crowd of millions. We can dream of the stars and even expect a chance of reaching them, but must fear strangers stealing our identities, bureaucrats and mobs sentencing us to starvation or chronic torment for the pettiest and most arbitrary of transgression against ever shifting codes which do not even aspire to the high name of morality. Yet we fear no judgment of man or God for any act committed in private or any passion we feel in our hearts.
Every pleasure is available to us, in an abundance never before imagined in the wildest fantasies of the most ambitious kings and prophets. Magic is performed every day, men fly like birds and talk to strangers on the other side of the world, and manipulate arcane symbols on silicone disks to shift mountains of steel and gold and men from one continent to the other in the blink of an eye. A house the size of a mountain can be built in a month and destroyed in a day. Death can fall on thousands from a blind general in a foreign land by the order of a temporary ruler. Every artwork ever made can be perused unto boredom at no cost.
And now and then we imagine what it must all have been like, to devote one’s life to one craft unto perfection, generation after generation, to be part of something greater than oneself that still knows your name as something other than a tax address, or to be lost in dreams and mystery and wilderness, to taste clean mountain water and run in virgin grass, to fear the dark because it might come alive and eat your heart out with dripping claws. To make a promise that binds so tight, you fear not just death but eternal torment for the mere thought of delivering with insufficient zeal. To really love, to really hate, to really fear, because all the weight of eternity and the blood and virginity of our wild ignorance bore down us like a crashing moon in a thunderstorm.
Some even take holidays there, braving the great gaps between our hives to touch the primitive with all its beauty and reddened teeth, hanging by tender umbilical cords, ready to be whisked away to the safety of our ephemeral relationships and climate-controlled cubicles. Some pursue crafts for idle enjoyment that others for centuries honed as a sacred duty, a key to survival, a title, a calling. The beasts that curdled the blood and brewed dripping dreams of disembowelment are now banal spectacles behind fences and bars and reinforced glass. The songs which broke hearts and set souls in ecstasy are pleasant background noise, the great structures which housed the breath of eternity, and took centuries to build are now little more than pretty carapaces to be admired like shells on the beach before strolling on for an ice cream.
It is hard to know what to mourn or celebrate, when so much has passed, and so much is yet to come. But sometimes, in a moment of clarity, we can feel both emotions all at once, suspended in our private organic chambers, as memories and rumours echo off the walls. And then, like all others before, we return to the stream, and pass into shadow.