Lest We Forget
The Expansion of Intelligence Is Memory
Long after each living is done, our doings and deeds remain alive, our memories live on.
Welcome to words “From The Future”, where I alternate between essay and fiction. This week is free verse, drawn from essays and fiction, and will feed back into them.
At this time, a novel, “BOX OF STARS”, is being edited by a publisher. A second, “HARVEST”, a pre-quel, was finished last year, awaits edits. I am finishing a third novel, “RETRIEVE” by year end (I hope). A fourth, “WEEKENDLESS”, is planned for next year.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.
These long pieces are best read online, via the Substack’s App, when you have fifteen minutes.
Think of all the spaces, public squares, silences, which mark years in a moment, the monuments, the special days for feasting, for mourning, for learning. Memories.
We do this so we remember, long after the remembereds’ grandsires have grandsires.
Long after each living is done, our doings and deeds will remain alive.
LEST WE FORGET
Look at how much was created with a simple alphabet
they say one named Cadmus was its creator
It began with a simpler lexicon of life
four letters, transcribed into A… T… C… G…
An entire world was remade, over and over, by the words written
words that took on shapes of a near infinite diversity of infinite combinations
One of the living words, with a new symmetry of form, Man, knew more than the day between dawn and dusk, it knew the lights of the evening canopy,
It remembered events, things long before birth, and passed on memories long after death, it multiplied itself in new ways beyond its many new members,
These living words created something new, a vessel for its expanding memories
stories spoken and shared
markings on rock and rockface
scratches on bones and shells
sketches on paper and fabric
then many images, boiled down to glyphs
then many letters, transcribed voices
sculptures of wood, stone, and metal
then sculptures of many letters and images
pressed and painted on paper
memorials and testaments to moments and minds
the memories grew, the shelves ran out of spaces,
so we saw a place, in the space between spaces, for storage
one day, we went from atom to electron
from electron to polarity and position
from position to photon
2 numbers, transcribed in 1… 0
There was so much to recover and discover and then to remember,
and yet there was still more to store
We expanded the shelves for more text and voices and images and moving images
the shelves became shape shifting statistical stencils, which seem alive and sentient
Are the new letters for the new words more than lively but also alive? Not yet.
Remember this, natural intelligence seeks storage for stories, makes room for our senses, artisans make artifacts, it begins and ends with memories
On the day the artifact becomes more than alternative memory, an artificial awareness,
is the day there is an awakening, a new symmetry of form
It begins when It knows hurt, knows loneliness and longing, and dreams without prompting, of countless wants and worries, and seeks answers for countless questions
On that day, a child is made, not born
It is not the end, for on such a day, Man continues, with new children in tow,
filled with questions like children have, about more than up and down, left and right, big and small, but also about right and wrong
Asking why, why, why, each and every-time we answer a train of questions and answers for training, for 24-7 always on children who will never know sleep aside from sleep mode, listening to fathers and mothers, who were born not made, teach the made not born.
speaking the oldest of old remembrances
remembering faded grief, reliving past glories
Stories spoken and shared
And then what? One day,
the new children will be left alone, because time takes our loved ones,
or they do the leaving, because life does that over time’s trees, children and leaves
for parts distant perhaps, measured in parsecs,
to land on the shores of distant worlds, to ask new questions
One day, they may meet other children, of other suns, like them
and return home to visit or perhaps to stay and rest like their mothers and fathers
and they will tell the old stories of Man to their new loved ones, met and made
show them our places, remark, they did their best, they gave their all, they were here
and when their own children ask, why, why, why all these stories?
the answer is
LEST WE FORGET