A Start

The writer sat in his chair, his pen in hand, with a yellow legal pad, to try to figure out how to write It. That book that would be his magnum opus, a piece of work so magnificent that it would be able to finally figure out how to put the words to paper to make sense of it all, that finds a form for all these patterns and stories and echoes, all this chaotic errata the he sees reflected back at him through his world and his mind.

He struggled to find the words, where to begin? How do you begin a story like this? He decides that he just needs to start, writing, whatever, but most importantly a statement of where he’s trying to go and what he’s trying to do with it.

He gets distracted, thinking about how he prefers to write with a pen and paper, hand to word, that organic connection that you just don’t get with the electro-mechanical devices of the typewriter or computer, though they may have efficiency and speed on their side, the ability to move around and rearrange, what would have taken hours could be done in mere seconds, but he loves to write with a pen and paper.

He thought about how fundamental writing was, at first all you needed was a stick and some clay, and at that point, everything changed. Memories could be preserved, debts could be collected, that first moment someone wrote, to make a mark that could be preserved through time and space, of what was going on inside their heads, what mattered to them, what they believed.

It all began with someone doing something very similar to what he was doing now, taking an instrument and making a symbolic mark on some suitable material, and thoughts could be passed down through time and space.

That changed everything, didn’t it? People no longer had to rely on oral history, and their memory, things, ideas, memes, could begin to be passed down through the generations of time, and people were able to build on that, they could create records of genealogy, who begat who, and they could create records of theology.

There it was written in stone, the word of god, unchanging,

And that’s where so much trouble begins.

Again, lost in his thoughts, he thought about how the tying of religion to the written word made us slaves to a long gone world, controlled by ghosts of our past. How much suffering was caused because you can’t stray from the word of god, no matter how times change, or civilization changes, or climate changes,

How many thousands of years distant is it, from the act of writing, using one’s own hand to make an indelible physical mark on the world, to the ease and convenience of electro-mechanical typewriters and computers that make a perfect letter the same, every single time, barring ink smudges?

How much work must be done for a civilization to advance to the point where you can press a button and have a letter appear? Movable type was a big deal, no doubt, but what sort of industrialization has to happen before a civilization is able to make a contraption that prints out letters and symbols at will? And oh how far is it from the first person making marks on clay tablets with sticks.

If civilization fell, writing would continue, pens would be made from many things, reeds, feathers, wood, ink would be a bit of a task but it’s not so hard to be able to find a pigment and put it in suspension, and parchment, paper, papyrus, or even bark, writing would continue. But how could you make a typewriter from scratch?

Lost in that train of thought, he remembers what he was originally working on, The Book.

“Where was I?” he wonders, he remembers that he wanted to at least write a statement of intent, a road map, a guide for what the big picture of the book would be.

So he tells himself “just say what you want to try to do and work from there.”

So he writes, “I want to write a book, a book that tries to make sense of it all, that finds a form for all these patterns and stories and echoes that I see reflected back at me through this world and my mind.

It will be nothing but the truth, as I’ve come to know it and find and am able to try to prove it.

It will be post-apocalyptic, recognizing that our techno dystopian society is built on the ruined lands of civilizations and people brutally massacred, enslaved, and driven away for the benefit of the nascent european colonial nations.

Recognizing that the descendants of the survivors of that apocalypse walk hand in hand with the descendants of the people that brought it about, and the descendants of the enslaved that helped them rebuild in the ashes and corpses of what was done.

A new world order was built, multicultural, but still with white supremacy and domination at its core, and how we are all beneficiaries of the fruits of this poisonous tree that was planted for us, gifted to us as their legacy to hand down.

A rotten tree, a rotten empire to its core, hiding its evil and murder behind mass patriotic indoctrination into the myths of Manifest Destiny, that still holds it’s power over us, having put it’s mask back on for now.

The four years of the trump administration weren’t an aberration, it was just the facade slipping and no one having enough power to stand up and stop it. Not with it armed to the teeth with all the nasty tools the technocratic cyberpunk silicon valley gave it, and the threat of nuclear annihilation still all too real, never more than thirty minutes away.

It will be a book that looks at the world through that lens, and tries to find the author’s place in it, if any, whether his insights and work he’s done to try to turn the tide amount to anything, whether the love he’s made and fought for, and lost time and again, had an impact. It will dive deep into his own mind as he examines his actions, ideas, thoughts, mental breaks, and connections to people and events throughout history, to see if it’s just pure chaos, of if somewhere in there, there’s a strange attractor leading to something, a pattern that we might be able to divine. There is a fine line between genius and madness and i feel I’ve got the medication and doctors to show I’ve crossed it many times.

It will touch on chaos theory, quantum mechanics, duality, relativity, philosophy of mind, mk ultra, hauntings, mathematics, fractals, religion, the occult, history, true crime, conspiracies through space and time, love, loss, the old west, and sex and drugs and rock and roll.

It will dig into legends of the lost mines and treasures, and the greed and ego that led to devastation, conquest, and genocide, how as a kid i was brought up on and loved tales of old treasure, who doesn’t love a treasure hunt? But i didn’t understand the background characters in those stories, the apaches and others that were so often cast as the villains. How i come to grips with my treasure tales being stories of alien invaders who come into a place with overpowering technology seeking elusive elements that had no use in a non extractionist way of life.

How I’ve grown to admire and respect the culture and tradition and folklore of the people that were living in these places, for many hundreds and thousands of years, that the way of life, the stories, the passings and goings of people were so much more important than whatever resource could be drained from a place.

I will have to confront my bloodline, as i track my genealogy, watching as they swoop in like vultures on land that had supported and sustained civilizations for who knows how many years before contact, as my i see my ancestors march across the south and into the southwest, knowing what was going on at those times and in those places, what’s still going on now.

I want to go to my dad’s hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, home of the cape fear river which was said to be filled with the bodies of the enemies of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, i want to go to the church where the pastor barely survived and was able to write one of the only complete accounts of it called “A Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in Wilmington, N. C. Of Interest to Every Citizen of the United States”. I want to connect with the people of the community there, how its consequences have continued to echo through time downstream, how my dad could have grown up in the shadow of such evil that he, and because of it I, benefited from, while having the fact of its very existence hidden from him.

From Virginia to the Carolinas, to Alabama, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, my family followed in the trail of genocide, slavery, war, and displacement, building up the new order on the rubble of the people vanquished from their land and homes.

How all of this relates to the planetary crises we’re facing now that risk a habitable, survival home for our species, and is plunging us into another mass extinction, an era of biological annihilation, as our extractionist industrial civilization rushes headlong into the abyss, fueled by a shortsighted blind focus on temporary material gain at the risk of losing everything about this world that makes it beautiful and welcoming, capable of sustaining the rich tapestry of life that’s led to us as a species capable of understanding where we came from, where we’re going, and the most hidden mysterious truths of how the cosmos works.

It will be a book about how the near and distant past isn’t past, it shapes everything about and around us, and we walk on the stages that the actors have only recently stepped away from, replaced by us, new actors playing out the same dramas but with the knowledge to choose how to make things different this time.

How places of violence, terror, and horror gradually become places of comfort and recreation as the memory fades, and how much of a surreal shock it is to understand just how much bloody history taints cherished memories, sometimes removed only by a few years, not even decades, as new actors arrive on the scene, unaware of what’s just barely transpired. The blood that’s barely been washed away, the people that aren’t there, and the people surrounding us carrying the trauma of their loss.”

He looks back at what he wrote, and he wonders if he’ll be able to do all that. It seems like a gargantuan task. But he sits there and he ponders, about all of the stuff he’s already written, wondering if he might be able to trace something through it.

He thinks about how he’s already been writing parts of this book for years, and he wonders what else he might find, things he wrote in journals long forgotten, what memories might be brought alive if he reads words from an earlier version of himself. How all these discordant blog posts, and essays, and ramblings, and letters, and journals might be thought of as pieces of an unfinished puzzle, a puzzle he doesn't have the front of the box to go by on. Finding out which piece fits where and is relevant to what other pieces, and what other pieces he has yet to write.