Memories

                                                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.