Pearlman
PART I
The blow struck; a quota of people saw in coming.
Débris is everywhere, crumpled, buckled, rusted, torn – panic-stricken hordes
scurry through it and around it in desperate attempts to ensure their survival;
there seem to be no other cool heads around. Desperate crowds may turn on each
other in panic, become warring factions. Maybe I’m the only detached, clear-headed
person in a maelstrom of panic. In spite of all the evidence, I retain a shred
of optimism about conditions of reflective peace returning, and project the
focus of my stability into the middle future, however hypothetical that might
be.
I am
determined to reconstruct the truth, the totality, to synthesise internal
experience and the perspective of external observation, gut reaction and
analytical cool, always keeping my supplementary eyes in focus. I have to
synthesise multiple perspective. If I achieve this balance, I shall have proved
myself to be an agent of reconstruction, as well as an authentic time traveller,
concretised my own fiction. This will be a difficult task, as now tim, and
life, turned multilinear. I proved immune to vaccination by oblivion, which
left me in much positive pain. If I have to give my life in this attempt, I am
confident that some cool customer will retrieve my diary and my laptop from the
rubble.
***
Being involved in a road accident is always traumatic.
The collision and rupture of dynamic artifice – flames terrifying in heat and
light, stench of burning leather, rubber and all – flashes a microcosm of a
global holocaust, a brief ‘clip’ of what is to come. I witnessed others, and
had several narrow escapes. But finally, at the peak of a self-confident ‘high’
I crashed into someone – with a flashier car than mine; that person was badly injured;
it was certainly my fault – I had been speeding, cutting corners in order to
get somewhere quickly, which of course I didn’t reach – probably wouldn’t have
passed the breathalyser anyway – a personal emergency caused by an SOS message
on my mobile in the middle of a massive raving party. As per the Highway Code, hat
bloke should have sounded his horn when he was coming out of the side road, and
my mirror, admittedly, was a bit wonky. To my surprise, I was acquitted after
an intensive grilling, on grounds of being under abnormal stress; but the agony
of that experience made me want to flee to the ends of the earth, to past
history – get to the essence of the greater pain to put the lesser one in
perspective. Some people are impulsive and spontaneous, whilst others are intrinsically
lethargic – only aroused and motivated by disasters; humanity is being taught a
massive lesson. So the pincers were closing on me: I was faced with the alternatives
of settling down in a rut or taking a decisive step to escape enervating entrapment.
***
Chile, or Chilli in the language of its indigenous peoples,
means ‘where the world ends’. This seems to be the only country in the world
named after Armageddon – the Great Underworld blasted and forced up to the
surface! Apparently earthquakes abound in Mongolia, but perhaps the earth’s
crust is stronger there; I must check it out thoroughly. One thinks of gold
smelted in the massive fires, then those piles of ingots generating bankruptcy
for those desperate Spaniards, feeding those insatiable wars, in the
Netherlands and elsewhere, ever after. The poorer terrain can have the greater
resilience. The discovery of gold could be the prime explosive, capable of
detonating the whole world – gold, later deputised by masses of choking paper
and brittle plastic. I was haunted by the idea of engineering an explosion,
which I would either have to suppress, circumvent or engineer – sometimes such
things have to be done to curtail conflagrations like forest fires or exploding
oil wells – supplements to rain. I always feel the world is being inflated to
near bursting point, crude mercenary economics making a chronic thinning of the
crust. I comfort myself by saying that there will be a global holocaust after
my decease. I came to realise that Chile may echo
the heights of its mountains in many respects, epitomise the world by being the
most volatile, unstable zone on earth, with all its earthquakes and volcanoes,
as well as its being the centre of the unremitting 300 year war with the
Mapuche, the native Chileans, probably the world’s most sustained human
conflict – a veritable encapsulation of the world’s anxieties, reverberating now
in Iraq, Afghanistan and many parts of Africa. Chile, for all its long, straggling shape, is a
sort of global centre. The world is the epicentre of its greatest earthquake
zone. Our vision is best dichotomised by the world’s highest peaks. Nice to
think of ice capping the lava to make gigantic geysers, modulating a global
refrigerator and gas oven, heating, comforting and preserving.
***
The clock on my wall
has stopped – it probably needs a new battery; that makes me think – is a token
halt in time portentous? The clock could have run both from the mains and with
a battery. What if all the world’s clocks and watches were paralysed by some
global, seismic force – spanning the oceans and the poles, and then could be
reactivated to scroll backwards and forwards according to any individual’s
caprice? Can one reflect and force oneself back into the past by sheer
willpower? I think so, as its relics remain tangible, if fragmentary. Could
there be worldwide computer jams, paralysis of new technology, where all the archaic
construction methods have to be re-learned and reapplied, all those mountains
of discarded apparatus levelled? Sometimes sophisticated systems overdevelop
into fragility, generate their own self-destruction, while the more elementary
ones have greater resilience and adaptability. Dotted around the world there
are precious pockets of stubborn preservers of archaic lore. They put on the
vital brakes to protect the ecosphere. The equilibrium of the world depends on
a quota of its population freezing time, or moving backwards in it. Otherwise
all the bubbles will burst – after all, the world is shaped rather like a
bubble. In its earliest stages, it could burst just as easily.
***
Being desperate to personalise history and put myself, and my halo, in
the midst of its vortex (and be an icon of time, sustaining my self-willed
power of dream-flight), I spent many hours in the Central Registry, poring over
the family trees, only to find all their roots tangled and distorted by stones
– for a century of two backwards, until I got perplexed by all the dubious
intersections and missing pieces – masses of cases of disputed parentage and,
inevitably, a high degree of illegitimacy. Ultimately, everyone is a bit
mixed-up and cross-bred, ‘pure blood’ is probably just an ideal, fabricated to
consolidate power; humanity is a rainbow – its spectrum embracing blurred
boundaries. Nor are we finally divorced from the animal kingdom.
So much for the human roots: as for the botanical ones, I felt that some
of those mighty trees must have had nails knocked into them for extra strength
by the first explorers, for now they are duly gnarled by the centuries, but
super-durable. Hunched and grotesque, they look as if they have been stunted
and crippled by drought, yet they have survived, resilient and ugly, probably
safe from all the blights too – they must have scared all the germs off after
absorbing them and surviving them. Countless crowds, plodding forwards and
backwards in time in slow-motion lemming desperation, tramping parallel to each
other, perpetuating an illusion of stasis. They are convinced of their
happiness in their eternal circles.
Yes; I extrapolated and distilled a
personality interface from the masses of historical data I had read. I even
found a lookalike portrait – willed my doppelganger fabrication into
quasi-organic life – a character who burst out of his book-shell and superseded
his author. Spiriting myself into the form of a volunteer Conquistador, fancying
myself as an adventurer (and perhaps something of a strutting Hidalgo), I had blindly volunteered for that
expedition against the Indigenous people, thinking it would gain me fortune and
honour and, in the process, further enhance the greatness of my country (I
adopted Spain, though remaining British in spirit. Those illusory objectives
were intrinsically brittle, predestined for dissolution like salt crystals –
but replaced by something of infinitely greater import, seeing, and seething, into
the inner earth itself – respecting it, not sucking out its oil like a guzzling
parasite.
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