Lakewood, Continued
A History of the start of civilization
+200 Years
I slid the volume back into the space on the shelf, the author’s words ringing, living even in the dry anechoic room. The library was small, and this archive smaller still, only a handful of shelves, so few books, some loose leaf, mostly hand-written. The two hundred years since the author’s death were thinly documented, until around a hundred years ago when the archivists and writers formed groups to bring the recent past back to our eyes and hearts.
I stepped out of the library into the cold clear air of midwinter. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the all-too-bright sun and white-blue sky. It wasn’t that the library was dark (quite the opposite), it was just how bright midwinter could be, the sun low to the horizon, piercing the leafless trees. Here in the northern latitudes the sun wasn’t tracking for long, but it could be dazzling. In deepwinter it would barely show itself, and I basked for a moment knowing that there would be weeks without, ahead.
The walk to my bicycle was hastened by the approach of a school and the noise and chaos that schools contained in surplus. The school was loaded with two teachers and at least a dozen siblings and a few service animals and was drawn by two tired looking draft mares. I pulled out, waving, as one teacher waved, then pointed to me and spoke to the children. Though the county was small, I was still a novelty to some, mostly children and cloistered types. My manner of dress and locomotion set me apart from the county itself. I wasn’t exactly in native uniform (mine or theirs), but one didn’t need to be highly skilled at social adaptation to understand why one would not wish to be marked as a fringe outsider, as someone so different that attention was warranted. Nor would one want to try and appear native when all those who are native know you are not; we do not wish to be duplicitous, as my teachers would say. Thus, my clothing was a calculated blend of social and cultural cues and mores, connections between my native culture and the one of this county. Due partly to this, I warranted curiosity and not animosity, and rewarded the fleeting attention with tales and eyewitness where requested, my travels having exposed me to a number of different counties, including those whose realities denied the existence of other counties, and those that denied my existence outright. I had tales of a county where their reality explained the earth planet as a flat plane surrounded at the borders by giant icy mountains. The children here loved the stories of that reality, laughing in disbelief.
My bamboo bicycle quietly clicking down the road that led to the library, I thought back to the very first encounter I’d had extracounty, and what it had done to my consciousness, the gift it had presented me. I thought back to my home county, a parentcounty of two others in the same district, which was itself in a landlocked region in the northern middle of the landmass that we continue to refer to as Nord Amrica. Mountains bordered the western edge of the whole district, and other than the three counties with distinct borders there existed a smattering, like sand strewn across a black cloth, of smaller settlements and neighborhoods, farms, and cultivations. Of each of those, I was familiar; by the time thirteen years had passed from being presented, I had been back and forth across the district and into the liminal foothills with my school, developing my map skills and my social skills. My school, like most in my district, was Open Thought, and we strove toward the better understanding of our human purpose and our natural reality through the strenuous and arduous study of people in nature, and animals in nature. My specialty was people. My siblings were animalists, primarily, as this allowed for settling in one place and a good quality of consciousness. I was a humanist. I’d found myself unable to sit still, much less settle into, and those like me were pushed toward diplomacy, trade, and negotiation. My primary language was negotiation, secondary was trade, and I was tracked into foreign service happily and with a full heart.
I spent the first few years visiting libraries in counties of nearby districts (where allowed) or houses of worship, or civic centers, when libraries were lacking. I spoke to everyone, to the great annoyance of quite a few, but I have found through the years that humans wish to impart their story, their reality, and I am, in accordance with my training, open and welcoming.
We were all brought up, after we were presented (or what we call post-endowment), to be open and fair with realities as they arrive, to not judge them but measure them, measure their abilities, document them in a naturalist language, and allow them to pass unbiased, observed and appreciated, through our conscious and subconscious minds. For the majority us, the training would continue in kind, expanding on those ideals and into ways to benefit existence. For others, the training would be martial, or elemental, and they would create or defend, construct, or destroy. We looked up to those that built and maintained the things we relied on, and the art and legend they needed to take on, the reality they needed to live in. The rest of us were bound to openness.
My schooling was full days and evenings, every day of every season. We learned how to discern between Natural Facts and Non Sense-Facts, delving in how to find those differences linguistically and subconsciously between Natural Facts and everything that was not. We were engaged in training from pre-linguistic age about the nature of consciousness as a conduit for a reality. We were taught how humans were categorical, and loved patterns, and therefore would spontaneously arrange their perception around a pattern. That those patterns could be and were taught with the rigor and the seriousness of survival itself. We learned that those patterns formed imagined constructs we call “reality.” Some realities were cordial and vague without much in the way of rules or structure, easy to pass through. Some realities were rule dense, tight, and twisting, able to produce easy answers to the very hardest of questions, slippery and difficult to get out of. Some were fanciful and light, some were dark and violent. We learned that the world was always divided in the minds of humans: territories begat countries begat provinces and states and counties and cities and towns and neighborhoods and households and rooms and beliefs about those things. These divisions required an imagination and a recognition of cultural markings: languages, signage, fashion, art, belief systems. Some realities were compatible, and by the late era, all humans were living in a period of peace that had not been known for thousands of years. Then the Division, or the Split. I prefer the term “Division” because split is a bias toward bisection, where division has no such bias. The Division was over two hundred years ago, and the results were an avoidable series of pandemics, the avoidable collapse of civilization, industry, and agriculture, and the avoidable deaths of 7 billion people, give or take a few hundred million. The result was a planet completely unlike the one the authors I’d been reading lived in.
In our school, we were taught about near history: how our counties had developed from a desire to find tribal identity in the ocean of chaos that the late era presented. How we congealed peacefully and struck agreements with our neighborhoods, and how that linguistic and social influence had encircled the survival area that we know as a district (which some realities prefer to call a state or a province or the church or the government).
We learned history: how the many tiny tribes that formed after the Division had come to consensus about reality in some ways, agreeing on Natural Facts as immutable (though there were counties where reality disallowed Natural Facts, and those places were weird in ways that it is difficult to think through) and finding shared value in the preservation of life, and the items that helped preserve life, like agriculture and water.
We learned pre-history: how a few million people on a planet that had been recently overpopulated found courage, or belief, or instinct to survive and form into counties, or subdivided into tribal affiliations that have no meaning now.
We learned pre-Division history as a series of warnings about how rigid thinking and tribal identity were the reasons for hate, for violence, for war. We learned about religion and the underlying purpose of it: to find hygienic genetic compatibility. My school spent two years on hate and what it was, how perceptions of difference and the inability to understand that we are all one part of the same Natural World drove humans to kill, to strip-mine, to want and desire beyond their means or abilities. They strove to replace the ability to live with pollution and greed. Those two years of school were bleak, and a few of my siblings did not make it through that time.
Mostly, we learned history to help understand how to preserve our long now, to present our observations as historical but also inform the very mechanisms that created our societies, to make them better. As one of the authors of one of the primary books put it: we are now, we are the historians.
At thirteen and a half years of age, I’d passed the liminal frontier between the mountains and the next district as my training required, traveling with a cadre of same-group siblings, protected by our wits and our weapons from the predation that forests and mountains can present. We were stalked by a lone large cat which succumbed to a dose of pheromonal defense from one of our animalists, and we trekked to the Other Slope to counties that ours had established trade with decades before. Their borders were used to our kind, and it made for a softer landing than, say, travel to the Human Beings south of us. At the frontier checkpoint, we changed to extracounty clothing and subdued our markings with cloth, paint, ash, and soil to prevent too much culture shock from negating or biasing our experience with Others.
Then the first human I’d meet who was unmarked. Clothed in bulky, unrefined animal skin and previous era synthetics, they had dark glass patches over their eyes, in a frame attached to a brightly colored strap around their head. I identified myself using my language, and extended a secondary language offering, which the individual nodded to. I looked at my cadre and nodded to them hand-gesturing the number “2” to pre-load them with the correct language, and my cadre moved on out and around us, to be less looming, less threat, and to make their own contacts. All smiling, relaxed, happy to be. Then, my first conversation with extracounty humanity:
“What the holihell are you glaring at, goof?” they said. I smiled, their words sounding fluidly foreign and wonderfully strange; I understood tone but was unfamiliar with the precise terms.
“I wish I could convey my appreciation for you choosing to speak to me,” I said. “It is my honor to now stand with you and share this moment.” They stared, open-mouthed.
“You sound…old,” they said. “Weird and old.” A smile there despite the hectoring words.
“Old? I’m not tracking.”
“Your accent, your formality. You sound like my grandmother sounded,” they said, their tone softening. I reminded them of a matriarch, which was amusing given my age, but put me at ease given the context.
“My linguistics were taught by native speakers, but we were very purposefully taught the formal tones and syntax of diplomacy and mathematics. They found that the use of slang and slangish terms led to cultural misunderstandings over very short spans of time, as the meanings shifted, and languages evolved. Formality is coded to better allow understanding,” I explained, my words not quite solid like a teacher, instead loose like a tour guide.
“My god,” they said. “You certainly were not taught economy in your words…”
The rest of our discussion was centered around finding a place for hire, to eat and stay for myself and my cadre, who themselves were engaging to various levels of success the locals at the gate. Most of these locals were tradespersons, eager to trade food and wares for other food or other wares. My own contact was a tradesperson of vegetables and fruits and was happy to trade a citrus for a packet of juniper berries and some smoked fish. I peeled the citrus and savored its sections, saving the peel in my coat pocket for fragrance and familiarity; even today I can conjure that once-foreign scent lingering in my clothes as I traveled. We then walked into town, a loose group, the distance growing over days and weeks until, six months later, I was myself traveling with an entirely native group to the Human Beings district south of us, to engage in trade and possibly life study. I had broken free, as we were told would happen, and now I had to align my training with my Self or be lost to some frontier or number of frontiers; all were equal options, and to use the term “lost” might bias one to think that going away was a bad thing; we try to pass no value judgment on engaged and learned experiences and the choices they could create. We are trained to engage ourselves and find our path.
In the subsequent ten years, I amassed a wide-ranging knowledge of languages and customs and realities from surrounding counties and districts. I helped develop trade routes on behalf of many counties, including my own. I have written a book about my efforts that is used in schools in my home county and possibly others. I have created and traded maps of regions with other realities, some that found my take on geography novel and outlandish. While I was widely known to a select group, I was not well known to very many, and my travels were a constant state of learning and accepting, and of forming and retaining relationships.
I had traveled here, to the northern latitudes, to once again experience the hardship of deepwinter, and the joy of spring thaw, and the ugly insect swarmed heat of midsummer. This was to be my second winter, after which I would follow the thaw back to my home county, to remake contacts and submit to familiarity and the silences that familiarity brings. Such a meditative time was required, by training, every two years. During that meditative time, we fully and entirely exorcise any lingering harmful influence from a foreign reality, as well as fully assimilate any helpful lingering influence, discussing daily with teachers and siblings to help stabilize and define the differences between benign, malicious, and helpful data. We also retrain and re-assimilate to engage whatever the current reality of our county and the agreed-upon changes it experiences are.
In the crisp icy air, allowed myself anticipation of my cozy hired room as I pedaled up a long hill along a crumbling path. While some counties and indeed some districts had spent effort and training in engineering of road surfaces and other building efforts, this county had biased that permeable land was better than non-permeable land, and they strove to remove paved paths and allow plants to grow and bees and insects to have a path equal to the animalia. It was one of many rules this county had, all of them based on ecology and preservation of life via microscopic and macroscopic enrichment. All citizens were animalist or agrarian, and some specialized in narrow scopes of animalia or farming, some specialized in insects, some in fish, some in fowl, but all understood that all their efforts connected and relied on one another. Their homes were built on ruins like many areas, and had a tone of earth, they were referred to as warrens or dens, as in “please come to my den and share a meal with my family.” Like some counties they held a reality of exclusive genders of men, women, and kind. The family units were patriarchal in task and matriarchal in belief. Men trained siblings (here just called “kids”) in labor and mathematical things, women trained the same kids in governing and belief, all taught language and history and specialized skills as needed. The kids were good natured, strong but pale, earnest and forgiving, and worked hard in fields during field working seasons. All were fed and cared for; this county had no casting out, no punitive buildings. Criminals were dealt with evenly, using a method of justice closely hewn to my district, but differing in the way that punishment was imposed. In this county, there had been one murder some decades before. That criminal was marked, and their journey was to teach their crime, and have it detailed back to them; each day they were brought before a school, some days children, some days curious adults, some days no one at all, and asked by a judge to explain their actions and answer all questions, for as long as it took. Paper was laboriously expensive, time consuming to create, but all the dialogs were committed to paper, and the criminal had to sign each page knowing that their crime would be taught to generations far removed from this Now. After two years, the criminal self-exiled and is presumed passed, their regret overwhelming their desire to exist. Since then, while some crime had been committed here and there, no one had been murdered.
My district, we averaged a murder about every twenty years. Murderers were marked and engaged in a lifelong meditation with several plant-derived toxins administered in carefully designed doses. Eventually the murderer would either slip into the infinite or self-exile.
In this county, then, a people lived who were removed from the kinds of fear that were a daily reality in the far south, where realities were twisted into biases that precluded human life, where life existed as a challenge to reality, as a way of standing up to some invisible force and proving worth, or the like. The people in this county had lean times and fat times, had tragedy and triumph, but carried it all with level grace and clear determination to continue to be, to continue to Do Good. Their houses of worship, pain and unornamented, were simply places to meet and discuss the minutia of this path toward Doing Good. I had enjoyed many a long end of week in their company, and many a short workday in their fields, gaining their reality.
My den, a small hutch that was adapted from a pre-Division house of worship, was adobe and wood, airtight and, I thought, almost arrogant in the ingenious simple engineering that created it. Pre-Division laborers were at times capable of producing haughty affronts to the laws of physics, it seemed, though actually this magic was an advanced mastering of materials and tools that no longer could be produced. When I had left my room that morning, I’d left a small fire to die out in the gigantic stone and wood hearth that dominated the corner of the tiny space opposite the door. When I arrived back, the room was still warm, still cozy despite the many hours that had passed with no fire. The coals still hot, the slight haze of pinon smoke perfumed the space in a comforting and welcoming way that I knew I would miss.
(Understand that while I frame these scenes in the present day, they are in fact reacting and echoing in the Long Now, and not part of the summoned content of our reality as it exists here, to me or to you wherever or whenever you are. I would hope that a human reading this would have enough of a common praxis and grammar that this is reasonable; it is with Natural Fact that I tell you that while I am, right at this moment, in the room described, I am not “actually there” in the language of time-bearing organisms; the scene exists in my timeline during my recent past, but I cannot guess what your timeline calls Now, or if you have a concept of the Long Now, and my writing might never define that in a way that you find satisfactory. For that, I apologize, and ask that you consider a library and a teacher).
The room had one other door leading to a bathroom, with a composting toilet and a small bathing area. Water was plentiful here, and bathing was unregulated. Things were different in other realities. In parts of the Human Being’s district south of here, water was scarce, and bathing was different, but so were most practices. The Human Beings could probably imagine this space but would fill it with their own realities and biases and see detail that I could not while under this influence. It is important to note, the influence of my extant reality was welcome and encouraged while I lived extracounty. Acceptance of these realities was important and could save my life and others if skills or dire data were found within.
I stoked the fire, a puny one in the massive fireplace, adding small chunks of aged juniper and pinon, and removed most of the outerwear I had on. The fashion here was clean, well-made, exceptionally tailored; the clothing worn for work and training was the same as worn for anything and had to be functional and long lived. Though my Bias of Influence was strong, I could see their methods for tanning, weaving, and construction of clothing all things that I would fold into my ongoing prime, and I could see a future where I met with my peers and elders and conveyed the beauty of these designs, that we might fold them into our practices.
Once the fire was hot, I extended a cooking surface and started a kettle. My tea today, a plant that was cultivated by the Human Beings and well-traded regionally, was fragrant, and steeping it would bring me many, many beautifully clashing recalls in this simple and clean room. As soon as the scent of the tea lit the air, the combination of it and the scent of the pinon immediately transported me, in an all-consuming way that I welcomed with a thrill like standing on the edge of a tall building.
I was taken, in my Long Now, to that time when I had met, for the first time, Stands With Reeds and their family that they called Eight Horse Tribe, including the intimidating and explosively tempered She Who Has Red Paint, and the clever and funny Horse Tail Dancer. I stayed with them for some months as they slowly traveled south east, to a place where a river ran. The river sunk into a deep and beautiful canyon that provided shelter from the heat at the surface; it was passably cool on the canyon floor and shimmering hot at the surface.
Here was a cliff dwelling, an apartment building of sorts formed in the way that a mud dauber wasp or a swallow (but one with an advanced engineering degree and an interest in stone masonry) would have created in some far-flung reality. In this reality the dwelling was from Human Beings of eons ago, their voices and languages and signs swept away by the scouring of time and the presence of people before the Division, people who captured and subdued the Human Beings with death and slavery. These earliest Human Beings had created the dwelling, and my friends and their families and fellow tribes had rebuilt and recovered it.
The walls would get some sun during the day, which would radiate as a comforting warmth in the cool desert night. Family units of two tribes lived among each other in that dwelling, utilizing shared spaces and gaining a high fidelity of communication with each other. Hand gestures, shrugs, physical body language punctuated the plain-spoken language they employed. They did not distinguish in their memory between spoken and subtle language. They conjured tales from bare words and a wealth of physicality. It was like watching someone with unimaginable skill conjure a machine to life, then set it aside and do it again, and again, and again. I was rapt, speechless for much of my time there as I absorbed and was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of their reality, of their language. The difference in millimeters between an eyebrow arch and a raised eyebrow could change the meaning of a thing entirely, could change negotiations, could further hone understanding. It was boggling.
Their reality extended from the time before time, when Human Beings wandered the planet in search of food and water, a time before machines, before agriculture, eons before the collapse. To understand the scope of their Now was to fully engage my training and my very Self to the extents of my understanding and capability. When Stands With Reeds spoke poetry, they spoke from a place established by an eon of communication; they stood on a mountain of language, of experience and history and belief that had one continuous reality. When they spoke of history, they spoke of all things. When they danced and sang, they danced their history, they sang with the voices of their ancestors.
They gave us the Long Now at the formation a couple of hundred years ago. This is how fundamental the Human Beings are to my existence, to all our continued existences.
I am not lacking for emotional context, and I have a lot of love in my life, though it is primarily philia and pragma. My siblings and I share some, my teachers and I share a different some. Stands With Reeds awoke in me a kind of love that ached, like a growing tooth or a long-healed broken bone. An itch that was satisfying to scratch. A romantic love that filled my head and chest every morning that I awoke with them, a love that carried me gently to sleep every night. Knowing that I had the choice to stay, I began to dialog myself in the future, to engage fully my therapy and data, which would help me decide my course.
As it happened, my course was decided by capricious Nature, and Stands With Reeds joined the infinite, divested of their physical form, during a hike along a cliff edge. I was not present, and the following period of mourning was physically and emotionally devastating for myself and her siblings. I created a song for them. I danced with them about it. I sang and cried and laughed about it. I longed for their being and found little comfort in my Now. It was a bleak period, deliciously focused and painfully heavy. I was invited, after three months, to stay with the tribe as they readied to move further south, but I had already biased, and chose an early break (much to everyone’s understanding and sympathy). I slowly traveled back home with a pair of Human Beings, siblings of Stands With Reeds, as company, and we enjoyed our travel together, and my chest ached in new ways when we parted at the district gate.
When I sit in this warm room with its perfumed fire and sip from the verdant and earthy tea, I am reminded at full volume and with no remorse of that reality. I wear it like a shawl, I laugh and cry with it, I taste and smell and consume it as it consumes me. I dance it to life, I sing it to me, I eat with it, I sleep with it, my subconscious evoking it into dreams. This all happens, and I welcome it all.