1096. Borromean noumenal, 3
(Armylè)
During middle school, Prume’s fast reading paced was gradually reduced. She had read hundreds of books in her life already, and far too few had really pleased her as much as she wanted to.
She was a little keen to learn Italian to really read the old book that Néphéline’s grandmother had lent to her. That fleeting ambition wouldn’t need to be pursued since the translated document would be delivered to us before, along with the repaired book.
The document had more or less one page of translation and one page of notes and explanations for every page of the original scriptures. The context was so different in space, time, culture and languages, that things wouldn’t make any sense for us without the explanations.
And on many occasions, the translator had noted his level of confidence in the translation, or rather when he wasn’t sure about it. Things he didn’t know, he did not invent and simply listed the possibilities he had been able to find, if any. That was good work.
On her side, Elyne was learning the history of the world with all the frustration possible. It was a minor topic against the ground knowledge for the future skills they would require as citizens working to maintain the city alive.
That made eras go fast, and the story of history being condensed in an all too linear simplification that annoyed Elyne greatly. The past and all our logical roots were meaningless. It had been the fate and purpose and history of humankind to bring us there, here and today. History was a completed book about a world now dead outside.
The past had no importance.
Elyne was too thirsty for answers to be satisfied with this gentle denial.
She struggled.
Beyond kingdoms, empires, republics and conglomerates, there was the living patterns of society as a meta-organism’s evolution tree. And we butchered it’s meaning and history.
The wars and plagues were mentioned with abstract numbers, not telling much of reality, neither for the people then nor for the assembly of political meta-organisms suffering them.
We really had put priority on science and engineering technologies as a society. History and historiography had regressed centuries as a form of benevolent neglect. Because we could otherwise question the choices, and then notice the lies.
And then, we might have reconsidered our isolationist politic our founding ancestors had decided in their wisdom.
Humans are emotional animals, we always accepted that part of individualism under a global pragmatic society, with a sensible political purpose.
But perhaps our political history was not as ideal as it should have, and was not sheltered a hundred percent from some normal human flaws such as pride, fear and obstinacy.
Maybe our history wasn’t as virtuous as we wanted it to be, and learning more was the first step to questioning it with some objectivity. But again, some human flaws might have unfortunately permeated into the behaviour of wider societies, even ours.
The early exploratory works for the foundation of our city had begun far earlier than our recorded history stated.
Clues about our designed oblivion were countless, even for teenagers.
But we grew to turn a blind eye on these things that didn’t impact our livelihood, and in all good measure didn’t seem important about anything anymore.
All memories remaining were slightly altered, and the holes had nothing left to be repaired, so what would be the point attempting this futile endeavour?
What pained Elyne was realising how much there was a void in our understanding and historical definition. How much there was a blind spot in the middle of our sight, and nobody seemed to care. Worse, instead of a reality we couldn’t see anymore, all we could draw, were lies... All we could build to fill the gaps of our perceptions, were imaginary bridges, to give ourselves a sense of coherent realism, but away from what would be real.
Each of my daughters in their way, were solidifying their bones of understanding what reality was, and imagination could be, and vice versa. Their understanding of their place in the world was becoming more set, and none of them were quite a natural fit with their environment just yet.
They were struggling a little to find their rightful place in this odd world were we all squirmed.
And a little better as they had grown, they understood why I kept my workshop filled with colours and paintings from my making.
I too suffered the same struggles in my time. I too often lacked the words or power to respond.
I couldn’t change a reality I did not understand, nor to reasonable extents my own self against it.
All I could have to balance the overwhelming chaos of reality, was this little space where I could turn some of its colours along with me into painted symbols, and shut everything else.
~
According to our recorded history, in the end of times came the combination of mutualistic viruses eradicating humanity.
Something out of nightmares, super viruses with the jackpot combination or glitch exploit against our typical organisms. One mode of action or effect of one was among other things was causing sterilising for the bearer.
The other one was the reaper, too easily transmissible, hard to detect in early stages, and explosive after the dormant stage was over. People had too few symptoms before they rapidly collapsed and died. It apparently would have acted as a fake neural network bypassing brain command and ordering other parts of the body to start apoptosis. Between this and virus replication, the organism would fall into shock and quickly die.
The sterile people would have easily spread the deadly kind unknowingly, and eventually in one generation of warfare, the world would have been brutally emptied by these two viruses. They had a little longer to live, on hiatus as they would be allowed to spread the plague longer and further. But eventually they all did.
And the two kept a shifting balance between each other, in a mutualistic team work, the two of them sharing the hosts and each other’s vectors. Either it was one virus with a peculiar mode of action, or a combination of two with the right ratio for maximum propagation. Humanity would not have been ready to face this plague, except for our isolationist city.
People would die in their sleep by the millions, using the state of altered consciousness from slumber to act and interact with the pseudo neural activity. This was like a tsunami of people no longer awakening all over the hostile countries.
And not so long after, our city in construction shut its doors behind. We would need to wait millions of years for the last viral spores to die before returning outside, if there was still any point left by then.
And so according to our books, humanity ended.
A few pseudo scientists and pseudo historian built their thesis and theories over what these viruses could have been, where they could have stemmed from, and how they functioned. The human spirit is eager to rationalise at posteriori what is happening. And in our hollow, we made this story our history gradually.
It’s always possible to argue about nonsensical hypotheses that hold from pure conjecture, so some people kept arguing like religious philosophers over details that mattered to them, and kept us away from reality.
This was natural politics, borderline to religious emergence sadly.
There was no god, and there was no virus. There never had been. Not these ones at least. But locked behind our walls in our security, we kept debating over the functioning parameters of things that didn’t exist as if socially we had not progressed one bit against antiquity.
Ironically, the year of the end, zero or one, was actually aligned with what really caused an apocalyptic change outside. But most of us would never know that...
What’s the difference between story and history? Reality and scientific logic based on evidences. In the absence of anything, the scientific honesty would have been to state openly that we don’t know. But human instinct is to build something, anything, to keep the darkness of the unknown and admitted weakness away.
Our transcendental technology as a meta-organism is rather above that. But we the people as emotional humans, we failed at improving our education to the levels where we would all rise collectively above that.
We might have had the best education in the world history in functional objectives, we failed in the aspects of social philosophy.
Maybe because we had inherited a country built on a past it couldn’t live honestly with. Perhaps because our understanding of reality was no longer a compatible objective need. I was still blind, but Elyne was in pain in her intuition.
When she asked it, everyone in the classroom looked at her with bewilderment.
- What did you say?
E - That reality is a concept that only makes sense for current time and each of us subjectively?
- Interesting... I don’t know where you read that, but this is history, not philosophy.
E - But I mean, how can we know what happened centuries ago?
- From testimonies, from archaeological studies. Everything has been compiled already and is available to us now.
E - Even in foreign languages... How can we be sure what has been written is true? That there’s no mistake? No wrong choices anywhere?
- This is the work of historians to clarify all that, criticizing the sources and seeing them against other ones.
E - And if the historians invented something? Like books we read?
- This is why archaeological studies also needed to bring solid proofs. History was nut about reading books but correlating elements of the past together.
E - But even if it’s all in good science, sometimes mistakes can be done. And we can always invent a connection or an explanation when we have none. And if...
- Alright that’s enough Elyne. We’ll discuss that another time. Don’t worry, you will understand soon enough that our history was not invented by authors, but has been lived really.
Elyne sat, downtrodden. She never really would get a satisfying answer, because unless she became herself an historian and focused on a topic specifically, she would never be able to grab that solidity of past reality.
She was beginning to accept reluctantly the fluidity of reality.
Our perception of reality is a construct from our brain sieving and correlating all the perceptions our body is giving, and similarly, our understanding of history is a synthetized construct of countless past elements, with subjective narratives to give coherence to the fate of the people and political entities...
But we can never really know.
It always hurts the first time... And everything you observe at a microscopic level seems uncorrelated to the wider one generally, except for the greatest heroes and butchers whose names were recorded in history. We like them because they allow us to have simpler narratives to explain history.
Even if it never was just about them and everything around also mattered.
Elyne will continue to struggle with something that felt all too familiar to me. I really sympathised with her teenage angst, when you begin to forcefully accept you will have to adapt yourself to your environment as you are powerless to shift your environment to match your desires.
It’s the painful road to adulthood when the shells don’t match you inside. Courage my dear...
~
