MEMORIES
Something that should have
remained etched forever in my memory has become as faded as the old monochrome
photographs that record it. I was older
then. We are all born old in this
society. It wasn’t always like
this. There was a time when people
entered the world from wombs as tiny, pink, spitting infants; helpless and
screaming, enfolded in their mother’s breasts for warmth, and left this world
old, toothless, impaired, enfeebled, rather like the infants we began as and –
we hoped – with a lifetime of memories and experiences.
The Enunciation reversed
this. The realm of life, with its
uncertainties and mysteries – the very last inner frontier – had been conquered
by Man in the first year after the Shadows.
In an effort to surmount all disease and end suffering, the Nuncios had
determined that life should be patterned and predictable and everybody – every
human being – should begin life knowing what he could do and what he would
become, because he would be born as the thing he would become and his life
would not be a becoming, but an unbecoming, not a path towards decline and
death but a cycle of increased youth and vigour and salubriousness until the
time came to enter infancy and helplessness and begin one’s cycle again.
The most difficult thing is
waiting for your time, which is short for all of us. We spend fully 40 or more years as old
people, only to have a short time to live at our full potential. I also hate the memories and I prefer that
they remain faded, like the faded photographs recording them. I wish I could forget. Being 70 and weak and learning to walk. The worst thing is the memories. You look forward to youth and backwards to
old age. The photographs are a
reminder. I wish they were not still
there, among my parents’ things. The
photographs of me floating in the amiotic fluid. My strange white, scaly body. The visions I experience from that Before
Time are of moving down a tunnel and emerging into light. Many people have these visions. Some call them visions of a Past Birth, a
vestigial legacy from the Shadow Times when people were born young and grew old
and experienced trauma, and desire, and disease and hardship. It is a remnant of our mysterious animal past
and perhaps evidence of reincarnation.
The Nuncios forbid open
discussion of our native history except in a limited way to condemn or
disparage it. That was the time of the
natives and savagery, they say. We are
not longer animals, mere Machines of the Natural World. We have achieved utopia, a society free of
Natural Brutality in which every body can strive towards and achieve his or her
potential.
“Be young” is the slogan of
the Nuncios and the salutation common among all citizens. “Be young”, I tell myself, but what awaits me
when I am done being young or I am too young?
A return to white, scaly form, as in those faded photographs? The helplessness of infancy. You only have one chance to be young and must
prepare for it your whole life, they keep reminding you, yet this promised
youth is so short and fleeting before the end comes.
Nobody knows what this end is. It happens beyond our everyday experience, behind locked doors. It is called the cycle. It is claimed the infant is reborn in a new body-vessel and life begins again.
