Atava
Early childhood memories come back in images interlacing vast wilderness and oceanic scenes with timeless temples, representations of life beyond death, and life beyond humanity.
A fundamental pervading silence to the universe manifest through the quiet creeping of the dunes and the shores into ongoing millennia. The ocean forgets, for the ocean will out live the notion of human, and of animals themselves.
Childhood was sacred, for childhood revealed or maintained the revelation of these truths, and coddled the mind in slow afternoons floating in and out of sleep and in the interval between consciousness revealing heaven itself.
The dreamtime is maintained not only within the myths of indigenous cultures but within the minds of all children, soaked in delta waves, free from the constraints of “society”, REM walking through the Earth in strollers and in a primeval and atavistic haze.
For those of us in which the amnesia of childhood did not core us of this fact, we wander these places looking into memories as if scraping at a meal that has already been eaten, at the love fallen into within a dream, the object of which has not ever existed corporeally, but is much more alive in spirit.
I fell in love in a dream as a child and haven’t been the same since. Who do you tell? Where do you place the grief? What was this, who stared into and through me, whispered the secret of endless assurance, then vanished at the dawn of a school day? Her assurance haunts me. She haunts me, she teases me with the feasibility of her existence, existence bullying insofar as it could be anywhere, but has not been.
She didn’t even have a face.
May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May time hold you in the palm of its hand.
Putting the notion to language and words cheapens the experience and fills me with a lonely sense that in evoking her (and by relation the freedom of unconstrained reality) I am only the more aware of an existential loneliness, a separation from a thing place or being that never was at all.
The obsessive mind repeats itself, compulsively retraces its steps, both in physicality and mentality, until each rich memory is husked and hulled until painted with emptiness. Each place, a ghost of a place that exists within a time. Each memory, an inexact creation of the last recollection of the memory. One wishes to only bring forth memories which are treasured when necessary and when relevant, but the obsessive mind retrieves it without respect or ritual, until it is a feelingless parody of the original.
