The Isolation Chronicle: Part I, Ch. 8
Your Unremembered Past
Chapter 8
Your Unremembered Past
“[They were] still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
- from ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel García Márquez
Overwhelmed by the sight of the art and glyph covered wall, you step back and sit upon the edge of the table as you try to take it all in. With the lamp in your left hand, you pan across it from the iron chest in the left corner to the workbench on the right side of the room, which the light only dimly reaches.
In the stunning array of markings before you, the wall speaks of a time that has been obliterated from your present memory, though you understand intuitively the work of your own hand. Just how long have you been here?
(What you’ve forgotten is so much greater than what you can ever remember.)
The back wall of the Room—Back? South?—is not really a wall at all. It is like the side of a cliff, or the interior wall of a cave; the rest of the Room would appear to simply be abutting it, except that the walls on either side of this Rockface merge into the rock in a way that is neither natural nor artificially constructed. It is simply unreal, as if the rock were capable of growing and expanding like your own flesh. It would make more sense to say that the room mushroomed out from the side of the cliff like a mole on skin, or perhaps like a tumorous growth from a corrupted organ within the body.
It is rough and uneven, the Rockface, striated with layers of different colored earth from the ancient ages of the world, though in the present moment, these layers are meaningless to you because you either weren’t there or have no memory of them. A sign of your growing arrogance, you will come to think that things only matter because you remember them or know them, and what you don’t remember or don’t know may as well not exist or have ever happened.
(But they do exist. And they did happen.)
A part of you knows—has always known—the universe doesn’t exist because you do. It does not depend on you. You only think it does, because you think the Maker made you especially, having forgotten that you made the Maker into your own image and—even if you didn’t make the Maker—the Maker doesn’t—or wouldn’t—need you either. It’s not to say you are unnecessary, or a mistake, or superfluous, simply that you are mistaken. But oh you are proud and will one day see yourself as the be all and end all of all Creation. The fact is you could only ever be the be all and end all of your own Creation.
(… and perhaps the end of all life on the planet that bore you. Perhaps even the planet itself. Time will tell.)
One other thing about the Rockface, apart from the markings, startles you perhaps even more than the markings themselves. You stand up to take a closer look … but not too close.
In the center of the wall is a dark hole a cubit wide and equally high, and similarly a cubit high above the ground where you awoke. The circle you made in the dirt—fragmented now—is just below this opening, impressions of your feet and knees still discernible. It’s as if the hole were a birth canal from which you had been expelled. Standing outside of the broken circle, you recall the feeling that you previously had—of being whole, centered, and at peace—but now stepping back into it, the feeling does not return. You start to wonder if you hadn’t only imagined it. Either way, you will spend much of the rest of your existence running in ever-widening circles of action, looking for that sense of peace, which comes only in stillness. Will you ever find it again?
(Will you ever stop running for long enough to look where it actually is?)
Leaving that mystery aside, for now you examine the primitive drawings that cover the Rockface: humans with spears, bows, atlatls and axes; humans hunting; humans swimming; humans on boats; humans performing mysterious rituals; animals such as bulls, bison, horses, deer, elk, rhinos, lions, giraffes and elephants, fish, crabs, turtles and birds; a variety of symbols such as concentric circles, triskeles, spirals, lozenges and others more difficult to name; and strange creatures like great lizards or dragons—gods or monsters borne of some dark, unfathomable abyss—and beings like yourself but unaccountably beautiful, even elegant, despite the primitive hand—or hands?—that painted or carved them.
Amongst those markings, hands—Yes, dozens of hands!—cover the wall in alternating colors of red, black, yellow and white. With some, the hands themselves appear to have been covered in paint and pressed to the wall. Others appear to have paint blown around them, the hand made visible by its abscence in a splash of color. You imagine they must have had a purpose, as if the hands mark out the time—A season? A year? A life? Or like the striations in the rock, an age? Some hands appear to be missing fingers, but different hands are missing different fingers. Did they lose the fingers? To an accident? An animal attack? Some disease? Or were the missing digits purposefully bent underneath, each different iteration of missing digits a kind of sign language? What’s more, not all of the hands are the same size: Some are thick and muscular, others are slender, or more delicate. Some hand prints appear to have been made by … children.
Looking at your free right hand, you examine it again, turning it this way and that with fingers spread. Do your eyes deceive you? Or your memory? Is it the same hand you examined earlier? Has it changed in shape or size? You hold your hand up instinctively toward one of the prints—a perfect fit. What does it all mean?!
[Nothing! It’s nothing but childish nonsense.]
It is almost impossible to tell what all of the various markings mean as the pictures and symbols are so thoroughly layered over each other, too numerous to count, worn from the passage of time, and too dimly lit. In the sheer inundation of it all, you feel equal parts reverence, fascination, curiosity, frustration, judgement, and condescension, more or less in that order.
As you have been examining the Rockface, you have moved across the Room and are now next to the workbench again. You notice once again the mortar and pestle on the lower shelf, discovering that—besides the various plants—there are a number of minerals here as well: a stone of a deep, dark reddish hue, somewhat smooth to the touch; a rough stone of a bright yellow-orange; a somewhat lumpier white stone; a rough black lump that sheds it dark color as you rub it between your fingers—charcoal.
You lift up the mortar and find inside, along with the pestle, a fine white powder that has been ground by whoever was here before you. No, maybe not the person before you—maybe there have been several. You can’t be sure. Maybe there hasn’t been anyone else.
(Sure. Maybe it’s always, only been you … but you know that it hasn’t. You just don’t want to remember.)
[Childish nonsense!]
You drop the mortar and pestle on top of the workbench, suddenly and inexplicably disgusted, sending white powder up into the air like a miniature dust storm, only for it to settle wherever it settles, without a care in the world, obedient to the laws of nature.
Along the Rockface to your immediate left, an apparent sequence of equally-sized paint-blown handprints runs red, black, yellow, white, red, black, yellow, white, and so on until ending with a yellow handprint, awaiting the next white, left hand to continue the sequence, a handprint that would be the same size and shape as your own.