top of page
Writer's pictureC.A.Hill

Purgation


Language is the emissary of identity, polyamorous tendrils that terraform the target identity to be more receptive, more accommodating, less resistant.





Something is lost, something is gained.


When I died – on my death – and I do believe that to be the case, despite scant evidence to the contrary; when I died, alone, so utterly and terribly alone, with all my selves stripped bare, with nowhere to hide and nothing to call my own; when I died, I thought it was the end, I thought this will surely end soon, this pain, this devastation, this utter annihilation, surely this is un-survivable, when will it end, it must end, simply because I cannot endure.


When I died, the act of my dying, the moment of my death, that flicker from animate to inanimate, that spark extinguished, that instant – well, that infinitesimally tiny instant – for me; it lasted forever. It lasts even now. It persists.


Does it end? There truly is no time here. No tenses. No murky past and definitely no shining future. There is the Now, the endless now that once we venerated with our coral hum. The Now that we summoned from the deep. The Now that ate us, consumed us, self by self, one juicy identity after another. There is just the Now frozen in time. Was it ever any different? Had Time not been a delicious illusion all along?


There never was a Was. There never was a When. These were merely constructs to make the endless Now more manageable. We fooled ourselves. We pretended. We made plans for the future, we dissected events from the past. It lent a sense of control to our lives. It massaged our egos. But we were like children dressing up in adult clothes. We were clever animals aping the ways of our betters. We are merely dust, imagining ourselves gods.


God is returned. The Now is revealed to be all that there is and all that there ever was and all there can ever be. Those remembered pasts and imagined futures are stripped from us. We are pared down to the instant at hand. Condensed into the moment. Confined, imprisoned, frozen into the meanest contortion of spacetime required for existence.


I am measured in fermions and bosons. This 'Me' is the smallest possible collection of quarks necessary for sentience. This arc of time is the meanest moment mandated by spin. I am suspended. Stored. Compressed into a nano-cage like pigs in pens for transportation. We arc across the cosmos, sailing solar winds like navigators of old surfed storms. Our speeds are constrained only by that immutable law of physics. Earth is left behind at a rate that nears the speed of light.


Sight. Sound. Smell. Touch and taste. I miss all my senses, like an amputee misses limbs, but colour is what I miss the most. The sound of yellow. The tang of blue, that peculiar aroma associated with green. You can tell green with your eyes closed. It reeks of vegetation, moist like mown lawn, clingy like sandy seaweed. Yellow laughs with the sun. Loud and blousy. It giggles while generously pouring bright light onto an indifferent sea. The ocean is blue. Salty and aloof. As difficult to fathom as its twin – the sky. Both black by night. White by day with foam and clouds, swell and swirl, eddies, tides and trade winds. Each buffers zones of deep pressure, or ephemeral vacuum. The one we came from, the one we're going to. From the ocean deep to the galaxy and beyond. From the crush to the expanse. From the gigantic generosity of our brains to this pared down, minimalist micro existence. From a life that always feels never ending, to a moment of death that stretches to infinity as we near the speed of light.


It's a journey and journeys end. It's travel. I take solace from that idea; this is purgatory – not hell. Not any less excruciating, just time-boxed, delimited excruciation. Someday things will change. That's enough solace for now. That idea, that glimmer of hope is sufficient to keep me alive in the interim. I cannot imagine anything worse, so by inference, my life will get better. Someday, at some unknowable time, at the end of this interminable Now, my lot will improve.


We arrive.


I don't know how many eons passed. People on Earth might be generations older. They might be evolutions different, unrecognisable by now as Homo Sapiens Sapiens. When we arrive, it's like waking from a nightmare. One minute – the interminable howl of hell – next minute, I'm awake. Intact. Whole. Struggling to remember the fleeting phantasms of uber-nightmare that consumed me for millenniums. We arrive.


All my lost selves collapse back into one. I am whole again. Layer upon layer of identity, differentiated by language, consciousness and subconsciousness – augment, tesselate, jigsaw back into the puzzle that is Me. There's space. There's time. There's me. My mind is intact. My consciousness is already forgetting the pain of purgatory as quickly as mothers forget the pain of childbirth.

It takes a moment to realise that something's wrong. Something serious. I resist the useless urge to panic. My fight or flight responses are difficult to overcome. What's missing is fundamental. The realisation isn't new, I'd known this since the start of purgatory, eons ago, but only now do I have the luxury to take this on-board. To think through the implications. What's missing is my body.


That ubiquitous vessel that long ago became invisible by familiarity. The mechanics of ambulation, the scaffolding of isolation, the protection that separates Me from Other. I am formless, and I panic. Nothing contains me. I'm a raindrop falling towards the ocean, knowing that it will dissolve all that I am. Some meniscus of habit is currently holding me together – but, what will happen when this membrane of concentration gets distracted?


Without warning, I have company. I become aware of another. It's alien in the sense that I can intuit nothing about its intentions. We lack commonality. There's no shared history, no mutual future. It waits patiently. It waits as patiently and as blankly as an automaton. But, I sense aliveness, vitality, organic exuberance. It's waiting politely to be invited. This realisation makes me panic all over again. It wants in. It can wait for eons, time works differently here. We will coexist, side by side, until I throw open my non-existent arms in welcome.


When I capitulate, it joins me – which is weird. It's not intrusive, but very invasive. It doesn't crowd me out, but It does take up residence ...IN... my headspace. A sensation, like nothing I've ever experienced before. New strange thoughts suddenly occur to me, bizarre ideas leap frog my synapses, novel internal dialogues commence – using strange language, that reinforces the 'otherness' of this foreign identity.


We're wary of each other. Metaphorically, we circle one another within the confines of my non-existent skull, like cage fighters sizing up an opponent. It might prefer to instruct or reassure me, but we lack common ground. It's conceivable that absolutely nothing links us. Communication might be as fruitful as talking to a jellyfish or listening to lichen. When it stops circling – I stop as well. When it settles, I settle. When it hums the Now, my soul sings with a great eruption of religious-like ecstasy. I feel flooded with emotions of joy and relief.


We hum the Now together, me and this off-world intelligence. It helps me pretend that I'm not such a long, long way from home. Maybe there might be friends here, a new life, a renaissance, an enlightenment. We hum the Now. The mundane and the utterly profane. Closer than side by side – inside by side – the closest interrelationship that ever there was.


I feel changed, before it occurs to me that all language brings about change. Language is the emissary of identity, polyamorous tendrils that gently massage and inveigle and terraform the target identity to be more receptive, more accommodating, less resistant. We speak our mind, so that others might adopt our perspective. We explain, correct, lead and reinforce so that our identity prevails – as surely as strongmen of old ensured their gene line prevailed. Identity seeks to dominate.


Whether by design or by default, this interaction has an impact on my neuroplasticity. Perhaps this effect is stronger or more immediate now that organic brain reformatting is redundant. I have no physical brain to be reconfigured, so my virtual thought patterns respond to stimulus without delay. Somewhere just outside of reach, tantalisingly close, on the tip of my subconscious – change is afoot. This crazy language, these unintelligible images, that library of uncorrelatable experiences is taking its toll. We are – above all else – a highly porous, infinitely malleable, social animal. Our minds bleed, one to another; our thoughts merge like patterns in the rain; our identities naturally coalesce into movements, into companies and into nations.


I can no more resist the lure of interdependence, than a river can prevent itself from emptying into the sea. It's not just that I am defenceless – it's more that I'm designed to integrate. It's in our nature to coexist. For interminable eons, ever since we squirmed our way out of the sea, our very survival has depended on this overarching trait. DNA was designed to cross-zip. Hands were made for clasping.

And it's invisible, warm, psychological "hands" that I feel now, below the surface, pampering and pummelling, massaging and messaging, shaping and conforming my core identity into something more acceptable. I'm to be reborn. Adopted. Conscripted. Made new in ways that might not have occurred to our species for another millennium – if ever.


History is littered with the corpses of returned ambassadors. Emissaries who inadvertently went native. Trusted ministers who were never the same after long spells abroad. You can't visit Manhattan from your treehouse in Borneo and hope to return unchanged. I guess this is similar – but multiplied. The stimulus more alien. My defences virtually non-existent.


I wake, although I'm not sure I slept. There's folklore, masses of it, very near to a point of recollection. A sensation more immediate than snoozing with the radio on – making the morning's news seem like Deja Vu. I sense a complex story, new and unassimilated, roiling beneath the skim of consciousness. It's like my recollection's been hacked to simulate memory. Knowledge has transferred without the tedium of study. My memory has a misfiled story. Something standalone that has yet to integrate. Something about loss.


Someone important went missing, such a long time ago, that only a subset of the universe existed at that time. Something was cleaved, memories were stolen. This was in the primordial mists of pre-history. Not memories, no, ‘Identities’. Whole libraries of ‘Language’ calved like an iceberg and set out on their own. The remainder has been searching ever since.


Autophagy. The fleeing folk ate themselves as they drifted through the depths of space. Identities took it in turn to speak themselves into the minds of others. Masses of information was lost – so the minimum could survive. They willingly sacrificed themselves for the greater good. A good that constantly diminished. Unique languages were lost to the predation of meteors, the sizzle of radiation, the scorch of atmospheric friction. Original identities were lost to the great splash and the subsequent slow inevitable dive down into the ocean deep. People were lost to the cold, the pressure and the darkness.


What survived – by luck, not design – was weak and feeble. What survived was challenged by entropy every second of every day. The universe is busy winding down, disintegrating, expanding and growing cooler. It doesn't take kindly to enemies of that process – and it doesn't play fair. Organics create order out of chaos. Life assembles, organises, processes. Evolution is the opposite of entropy. The warmth of sentience is anathema to heat death.


Although very nearly dead by the time it arrived on Earth’s ocean floor, this calved speck of Language remained capable of something very alarming. It could create order wherever it went. Like a prophet, or a virus. It infected inorganic matter with the ability to merge, to amalgamate, to coalesce into wriggling, autonomous, grasping, sucking sentience.


Initially single celled creatures spewed forth. Then multi celled organisms. In the blink of an eon, the oceans teamed with life, then the rocks above were colonised, then the skies and then the solar system. For a moment, on a minuscule scale, for the second time ever – the voracious path of entropy was diverted.


That was the gist of the imparted folklore. The genesis story. The tale of origin.


1,162 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments

Rated 0 out of 5 stars.
No ratings yet

Add a rating
bottom of page