The Waking Hours of Night

A Rumination On Living Memory

"For every sin but the killing of Time there is forgiveness."
-Sufi Aphorism

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought"
-W. Shakespeare


We sat in silence in the grove, saying nothing. We watched the sway of the branches flickering in the moonlight, moved by a slight breeze. The clouds could be seen sliding over the surface of the darkening sky on their way elsewhere. The calls and cries were all around us, here in the midst of life. He stood up. "I must go back" "Why?" Everything we have experienced up to this place began there, I have to go back to find what we missed" "You will find nothing there" "You know this?, and what of this place, another camp and the camp after this?"

The fireflies danced near the ground, unaware of either life nor death as we paused in our debate, a debate that all of us had at one time or another. To dream or to pursue this anomaly, one of memory, scents, tastes, and touch..whereas we had no other basis to navigate by except this..our memory of sensations,and hence, here we were again, hemmed in with no means to transcend being rooted here in them like two hapless kites tied to our respective anchors., locked firmly into the ground.

We heard the twigs snap, the leaves rustle and these sounds were rapidly approaching us. "They wont give up, and neither will you,"
The stream at our feet glistened and slid past the bank, rushing on it's way down a slope. "We are as dead as dead could be in the circumference of a circle...in their madness..they will pursue you to the ends of the earth...they want what we want" We fell into the trunks of the trees, dense and suffocating while they bustled past us

"Did you hear that?" "Did you get a picture of those orbs?"

"What is that?" A small glittering gold ring was clutched in the palm of his hand. "It is something I kept but I do not know how I managed it, but I wanted to keep it..they kept it on my finger" We watched as a young lady slowly turned as she came to a halt as her companions excitedly moved on. "Look at her" She looked so young.
"I am looking and she at us "
"She hears us"

I simply folded up in resignation and leaned against the tombstone and sighed. " What do you think she wants?" He muffled a laugh." She wants to know we are alive"
"Yes and there's a problem with that..We are not alive"
He too gave up and sat down beside me. "Yes alive and well and dead!" We shared a good chuckle "Should I scare some sense into her?" She looked so innocent. "Why bother?" "Well we have secrets you know?" "Oh stop it, she has more compelling secrets than we, there's nothing left to conceal."
"I wish I had a good secret"
Another chortle.


That night they came and went as moths.Their flashlights danced past the weeds and the fallen iron gate once again. "I really should go back and dream.."he wistfully said, to no one in particular. "What will you dream of?"
" Life..my life"
"Was it a good one or a bad one?"
"The only regret I have is when it was neither one..." His resulting silence was broken by an approach. "look at her she's coming toward us."

The two of us stood up out of habit. She stood only a few feet away from us.staring intently past us. We both felt her timidity superseded by an act of will.She held a small box in her outstretched hand. "Dont be afraid" she bravely advised."I want to help you.".. My companion in a burst of weary sarcasm, blurted out.."well, that's a good one." She suddenly looked familiar. "Isn't she the one that passes next year?" We were brusquely pushed aside by violent arrival of her twin, "Omigod..you know I had a premonition.."
"She's your ghost?"
"Yes.."

She brushed the image of her face with her fingertips Nothing, no response.

My companion was once again showing his weariness and began bouncing up and down on his angles.."So..your one of them..?"
"What?" "Oh come on..you follow your ghost about..shouting in her ear,,pushing things around to get her attention..we all go through that phase my dear"

Who intercedes with whom in a parabola, and to which ghost do we assign the honor of bestowing preeminence? To us, in the waking hours of night, it matters not. The past present and future brush past one another like faint breezes in a nocturnal dream.
The faint sensation of instinct unaccounted for, the vague, free floating sensation of being watched, the ball that rolls along of it's own accord pushed by the child you once were, the slamming of the unattended door as you ruminated in some deep regret,...the machinations of a ghost that is as close to you as your jugular vein.
Perhaps ghosts do not have the option of what Lewis Smedes wrote “Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.” Perhaps eternity cuts both ways. Is this the demarcation line between choice and it's end game, to be a prisoner of one's predilections? The other variant of this is to have one's navigation through life erased suddenly, to be found prematurely buried by circumstance,to be seemingly the victim of random chaos. The anger and rage of outrageous slings and arrows has no expiration date outside of healing one's memory of being cut loose from the flow of circumstance, like a ball locked into it's number on a roulette wheel. Perhaps as the proponent of eternal recurrence once said, this is "all too human."



The moon began to recede invisibly into the sky as we watched the young lady walk away as her companion hurriedly drifted past us, following her doggedly like a lost sheep as the faint light of dawn approached us. For us,it was time to sleep once again. Time to dream of life once again. As surely as the wheeling of night into day in a circle circumscribed by the amphibious nature of memory, whether it is ours or anothers, is welded at the hip to the larger dreams of this world or another more pervasive, invisible one, or both through a conjunction in the waking hours of night. Wheels within wheels. The dead enjoin the living as the living petition the dead.Whether it is the memory of a leaf or that of the gull navigating the sky or we their observers, we create this body of work, a tale told to the dead to the living and the living to the dead. Do we live in a recollection that is living, a process? It was James Barrie who said “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”


The persistence of memory in which we dwell in living systems, which fosters precognition, the recording of electronic voice phenomenon, genetic memory, the sympathetic deductive ability of psychic mediums, as well as my capability to write this post and yours to read it all are based on the transcription of the visual into patterned recognition, a waveform of repeating patterns which flows the the mediums of sound, vision and yes, even biochemical transcriptions of energy in the mind, and so we pose the question again of the chicken or the egg, which in of itself is a tale of causality wherein none may apply. The external manifestations of memory make a transit from the invisible to the visible and also from the visible to the invisible as we are the isthmus between the two that in some sense reminds me of the entanglement of a mobius strip which we navigate in a stream of semiotic fascinations.



In my writing on the UFO phenomenon, I have strongly suggested that this process can be superimposed upon. Unfortunately the transcription of a non human equivalence adds up to the metaphysical equivalences of misspellings, literal mis-associations and human identifications by semiotics that result in much, or perhaps all of a cogent game of image associations is lost in translation. If we were able to project the inner associative qualities of the words we utilize as a carrier medium for thought, perhaps one not familiar with this capability, would see these as quite literal and existential manifestations in human terms wherein ours, the non human variant based on the persistence of memories, associations and content are simply unique to us as they are to them. Shall the twain meet? Then again, do any two individuals envision themselves let alone their relationship to the external, historical world through their memory,in the same manner?


One memory superimposed on the other wherein they become entangled or perhaps a singular thread of superimposition's as it is in our natural world of the primrose, the gull, the tree and you and I has created our environment, that is perhaps not demarcated between the ephemeral and visceral as our senses suggest..it is perhaps not the nature of the lens, but the aggregate compendium of the whole within the planetary sphere, a ephemeral, genetic enfoldment that steers our fates as a common destiny..a planetary memory as a living one, which observes itself through a infinitely varied series of states and stations.


The memory of the past in the present creating a future again can be applied to cultural memory into which life as a continuation of the larger principle of memory is woven into the fabric of daily life as it vanishes before our eyes in a form of global dementia where the aforementioned process of superimposition has a decidedly human source in cultural imperialism, wherein memory fades, the uniqueness and fragility of individuation becomes a common commodity reduced to it's lowest common denominator, a universalism of simple terms, reductionism and the induced amnesia of automatons..we seem to be confronting what could be termed a recognition of the consequences of blithely ignoring Rumi's sage advice; "If thou wilt be observant and vigilant, thou wilt see at every moment the response to thy action. Be observant if thou wouldst have a pure heart, for something is born to thee in consequence of every action." The lap top I write these words upon is one, but then the consequences of what allows me this medium cuts in less obvious ways until the sum total of them leads to a two fold rebellion, one against nature itself and that of a growing crowd that recognizes the dwindling menu of choices placed before them. Who selects the memory of future consequences, global corporations or the individual? Perhaps the ghosts of Malthus and Thoreau look upon this scene and come to some informal agreement with Rumi.


The thread between lost civilizations, the burning of the Library at Alexandria, the cuneiform and the internet is perhaps a form of push and pull to establish whose memory persists..who writes our history in order to produce a future that conforms with aims outside of the human scale of communities, converting them into a mill of glittering dung hills, whose purpose cannot be recalled in hindsight. An intention of amnesia that trades productivity for reflection, insight for empirical gimmicks. The center never holds in the narrative of histories. In this the memory recalls the parable of Chernobyl.


The dialog between the living and the dead continues in the perpetual motion of wheels and rotations within the cyclical variants of history, both the inner personal and global externals and in this there is a rare recognition, that perhaps between the two there is yet a more vast compendium of non human memory in which we are but one trans-personal paragraph in an infinitely creative process, a fractal lens in which we contain the whole of creation and yet cannot constitute it's circumference, alone, existential and isolated from it's nature and our own which are two sides of a shimmering mirror..


Ghosts can take many forms and in this we return as our protagonists from the grave of reposed memory to the world of dreams founded on the persistence of living memory whether it be accidental or decidedly intentional.The living system of memory is contributing in the shuttling of a limitless loom, weaving a vast tapestry of shared inheritance in this continuum of dreams that originates in perhaps a future past, a human community yet to be recalled, or for that matter, forgotten.