A Cosmic Carol

The thing about being born in the forgetting times, those who are old enough to remember the long cycle say, is that it’s very difficult to remember that you’ve been born in the forgetting times.  It’s very natural to imagine that your world, your outlook, your memory are all just as they ought to be… persistent in their timeless form, regardless of how strange things might seem.  But of course, that’s not the whole story.  Not by a longshot. 

Allow me to introduce to you the heroine of your story.  You know her, don’t you? 

Or you did.  Long ago.  When her hair grew long, and the waters on her face flowed sweet and clean, radiant in their power. Their torrents re-shaping mountains since time immemorial. The sweet birth of dewdrops on the leaves of virgin forests.  

A thousand elegant languages born in the ecology of an under-growth so vast and unfurled that its echo was heard in the very first navel of the very first named being to ever stand upon her face.  The rich roiling laughter of her soil.  The deepest sigh of her breath in every scent revealed in songs so sweet you could hear almost hear them in the cresting radiance of dawn’s light.

That was long before axe, and the saw, and the motor.  Before the machines we taught to count, or the million lights learned to carry our voices around the world.  Long before the rain of styrofoam takeout cups, crushed under the heels of a thousand thousand mothers and a thousand thousand fathers, shuffling broken under the weight of the leaden yellow sky.  Through the smoke and the grease and the ruptured horseshoe of the CRISPRed genome.  Before the brain chip learned us to forget how the moon is supposed to be howled at. Before a trillion zeros and just as many ones, offering liberation through their potent power to upend the structure of domination and conquest, dissolved before our eyes into the two-step, lock and key, block and chain, of a dialectic lumbering numb towards the same place it was always heading, but with more terrible power than ever. 

And somewhere in that towering, shuddering weight of all her beauty revealed, and all its coherence forgotten, she stumbled.  Startled.  Overwhelmed in the face of it all.  Forgetting.  Just a little bit.   And she curled ever so slightly inwards.   Her radiant glow pulling taut across her shoulders.  The first thread of an armour plating.   In the face of the bigness of her majesty, and the bigness of the terror of how it could all be so profoundly unremembered.  And in that stuttered step, that lacunae of feeling, she lost something.

Something significant.  Something she’d vowed not to lose.  And a seed was born in the Anima Mundi’s heart of her very own forgetting.  Woven from the tapestry, from whence all forgetting comes, its tattered thread wound deep to her core.  And it grew.  It grew and it grew, over days, and months and years. 

And maybe that was all a long time ago too… Even though it feels so familiar. 
Feels like this moment. How long does forgetting last?

Whatever the timeline and whatever the scope, whenever it happened it always happens like this again and again. With this day, when the earth gathers to her belly the few faint threads of light streaming our way, and the sun crowns its head from the galactic centre on the solstice.  Our heroine finds herself wrapped in the synthetic warmth of her forgetting, wandering amidst the echo of her heart.