I am never-born, Danlo thought. I am not I.
He closed his eyes and lay back as he crossed his arms over his chest. As he rolled onto his side, he drew his knees up over his belly. He slept for a long time. He was two hundred days old, and he slept and dreamed frequently: dark, rhythmic, peaceful dreams. When he awoke at last, his mouth was thick with warm salt water, the ageless taste of the sea. He was floating in a lightless sea inside his mother's womb. In truth, the idea of lightlessness had no meaning, for he had never seen light, nor could he imagine that he might someday develop a sense of vision. There was only darkness, an undifferentiated darkness as black and seamless as deep space. It absorbed him so totally that he was unaware of it. But he could hear sounds: the gas gurgling and squeaking through his mother's bowels, the muscles pulsing in peristaltic waves, his mother's heart booming everywhere in the water around him. His own heart beat more quickly, and he could hear that too, just as he could feel the river of nourishment streaming in through his belly. Along a slippery, coiled tube, blood flowed into him and quickened him; he was conscious of very little, but even now, a never-born manchild floating in a vast ocean, he had a burning sense of his own life. And yet, paradoxically, he had no life of his own for he was wholly connected to the deepest tissues of his mother's body. Near him, across the layers of the placenta, he felt the womb arteries pulsing with blood. It was a magical and numinous thing, this ancient connection of blood. It seized him and pulled at him, just as he seized the nutrients from his mother's body. I am not I, he remembered. He was all water and fat and urgent cells organizing themselves into something new; he was muscle and memory and skin, and yet he could not quite tell where the boundaries of his flesh gave way to the long, dark roar of his mother's womb. He swallowed amniotic water and he breathed it into his lungs, and he sensed that he had no boundaries. Like a drop of water melting into the sea, even as his blood interchanged carbon dioxide and oxygen with the blood of his mother, he felt himself growing ever vaster, ever fuller, surging outward into infinite possibilities.
I am infinite memory.
He fell deep into recurrence, and he relived all the shapes of himself since the moment he had been conceived. Each cell of his body was woven with the memory of its origins, and all of his cells, blood, belly and brain, remembered their genesis within himself. He was a curled-up knot of urgent possibilities no larger than a baldo nut; he was a quivering ball of cells, dividing and redividing, furiously organizing themselves into liver, stomach and heart; he was a single cell, a fertilized egg, a union of sex cells made inside both mother and father. He would always be that cell, and he suddenly knew that he was a completion, a union in ecstasy, a miracle of trillions upon trillions of chemical events connecting back to the moment of life's creation.
All living things are conscious, he remembered. He was nothing but consciousness, the life consciousness of a single cell. Inside him was violence of metabolism, mitochondria ripping hydrogen atoms off glucose molecules, enzymes exploding through plasma, but inside, too, was a peacefulness more perfect than anything he had ever known. I that I am. He was hunger, simple and pure, an overwhelming urge to eat and grow. And, at the same moment, he lived in the silent joy of floating down an endless tube, floating and touching and tasting the sugars which sweetened the waters all around him. For the first and perhaps last time in his life, he was a perfect harmony of being and becoming. To seize the free-floating molecules of alanine and tryptophan and other amino acids and to feel them diffuse through his membranes was to know halla, and something more, to feel quickening inside himself a perfect and terrible will to life. He marvelled at this will, this love, this complete affirmation of living. It would be many days yet before he developed throat, mouth and lips, but if he had been able to give voice to all that he knew, the only words he could have spoken were: 'Yes, I will.' That, he remembered, was what the consciousness of a zygote was like, what it would always be like.
All things are in consciousness; the memory of all things is in things.
He might have been content, for a very long time, to remain himself as this single cell. But as he consumed sugars, amino acids, and rich lipid molecules, he felt himself swelling, growing vaster, becoming ready to divide in two. He feared this division, and yet he longed for it, for he could never experience all the beauties of human life as this single, swollen cell. He was too full of himself, and this was a kind of pain tearing apart his deepest membranes. There, at the centre of his self, inside his nucleus, was an awareness of pain and the memory of life. He felt it twisting and uncoiling, this long, ageless molecule of memory. His DNA was the most alive and holy part of him. It was always in motion, bending, twisting, and vibrating, a billion times each second. It rang inside him like a bell announcing the miracle of creation. And now the ringing was loud and unmistakable, and the sound of it shivered outward in waves through his cytoplasm. And now the almost infinitely long strand of DNA was unfurling, splitting like a zipper down the middle, replicating, creating more life. In the DNA's endless string of codons, as they opened up, was the secret of life.
The secret of life is more life.
DNA was designed to make more of itself and to arrange amino acids into proteins, into the very stuff of life. All the cells that he might become, through birth and boyhood, down to his final old age, would bear the signature of this DNA. And they would bear something else, too. Part of his chromosomes, where the DNA was ancient and usually silent, coded for the assembly of unique and rare proteins.
Memory is chemistry: chemistry is memory.
He was twenty-one years old, and he would always be twenty-one years old, and the memory molecules flooded the deepest parts of his brain. He tried to visualize these molecules, the proteins bent and folded into patterns of hideous complexity. Could memory, he wondered, truly be coded into chains of valine, cysteine and aspartic acid? Was his brain simply reading the memories coded there? Or were these molecules only chemical keys fitting into his neurons, unlocking the great remembrances that would always exist inside him?
Memory is memory is memory is...
In truth, no one had ever understood the mystery of memory. The remembrancers, for five thousand years, had theorized that memory is like water locked up in ice, or like information coded in bits inside a computer, or like a hologram. It was said that a race of gods, the Ieldra, long ago had tampered with the human genome and had carked all their knowledge into man's most ancient DNA. All their memories: the Elder Eddas were said to be nothing other than pure memory, but no one knew what they truly were or how it was that a woman or man could remember them.
Memory is.
A black hole spinning stars and stars and stars swallowing light out of blackness in blackness velvet bellywomb annihilating creating jewels of light and stars and planets preserved glittering bluewhite light spacetime distortions and gravity light locked in matter is light is light is light light light light.
The great memories came, then, and Danlo lay still as he let them wash through him. The Elder Eddas welled up inside him like an onstreaming of pure consciousness, or rather, a single, vast, eternal memory, as pure as the ocean. And yet, like the ocean in a storm, the Eddas were murky and multiple, great waves of memory swelling and breaking and reforming for a moment, only to burst into spray and fall back into the ocean's wild waters. The Elder Eddas were like drops of water, infinite in number, sparkling bits of knowledge, forbidden technologies and new logics, philosophies beyond counting, mathematics, languages and theories of the universe. The Elder Eddas were memories of religious movements, of the genesis of stars, and of strange alien yearnings, and of the love (and fear) that all life has for other life. The dreams and agonies of ancient civilizations were written there, and the memories of the gods. He relived the death of a galaxy out beyond the Ursa Major Cloud of galaxies, and he watched the stars of the Rosette Nebula being born. To remembrance the Eddas was to walk across alien landscapes, worlds of ochre and violet dust spinning in the light of red giant stars. And worlds of fire, worlds of ice, worlds constructed inside godlike computers, perfect crystalline worlds built up of endless strata of pure information. Much of the Elder Eddas was a memory of one race's journey godward. The secret of immortality was a part of this memory, deep and dark as an underwater cavern. Another part was a design for new senses, an extension of the aesthetic and philosophical senses that Danlo knew as plexure, fugue and shih. Without these senses, it would be impossible to apprehend the universe, in all its strange and infinite beauty. A god must have a sublime sense of beauty and so, encoded within the Eddas were a thousand concepts of beauty, as variegated and vivid as a painter's colours. Deep in the deepest of memory storms, Danlo tried to imagine what wonders the universe might unfold, but he could not see with a god's senses, not yet. And thus he could not truly understand. He could not understand the Ieldra's mathematics of the continuum, the paradoxicality of time and no-time, which were stranger than ever he had dreamed. Nor could he grasp of the calculus of systems, the connectedness theorems, the way in which all life and all ecological systems everywhere were related to one another. In truth, the Elder Eddas were hideously complex, a boiling chaos of memories, and he understood only a portion of them. He was a man ravished with thirst, like a seal hunter stranded on an ice-floe, contenting himself with a few sips of snowmelt while the great ocean of truth roared all around him.
At the centre of the galaxy was a black hole, spinning ...
He sank into the softness of his futon as he tried to understand his memories. The Elder Eddas came into his mind in the form of voices, musics, images, and brilliant dramas. Much of this memory a part of him automatically encoded into words, or into the symbols of the universal syntax, or even into mathematics. This was a way toward grasping the ungraspable, a highly formal and abstract way. But gradually, as he descended deeper into the memories inside him, he became aware of another way. His nascent sense of iconicity – the ability to see equations, theorems, information, or ideas as vivid icons – gradually quickened. He remembered very well that there was a great black hole spinning at the centre of the galaxy, where the stars were thick and brilliant as diamond clusters around a ring. He remembered almost perfectly the mathematics of black holes. He remembered so intensely and vividly that he began to understand gravity not through symbols or the elegant mathematical ideas encoded as symbols, but rather as something like a grave and heavy 'face' that was completely familiar to him. This transformation of idea into image was eerie and frightening. He marvelled at the way Schwarzschild geodesies flowed into cheek-planes, the spinors transfigured themselves as eyebrows, and the tensor fields spread out and grew into the forehead of this blazing, inner face. He saw the naked singularities as brilliant black eyes staring out at him and drinking in whole galaxies of light. But most compelling of all was the way the Lavi Curve became as one with the face's mouth, the smiling mouth, the blessed and terrible mouth whose lips were turned upward in mysterious laughter. The image of this face was as real to him as the memory of the cave into which he had been born. He could see its blackness opening up into the blackness of night, could feel its intense gravity pulling at his cells and hear the echoes of the universe inside. The memories that came to him, then, consisted of a billion such faces graven with the expression of all possible knowledge. Some of these faces he had to struggle to see. Some were more like archetypes or ancestral dreams than faces, and these he knew as deeply as his own scarred countenance which stared back at him whenever he looked into a mirror. But most of the iconic faces were utterly alien, and they flickered inside him at an impossible speed. This flickering caused the faces to merge together so that it seemed a single, dynamic face was weeping and singing and dancing, continually evolving toward some unknown shape. This, he thought, was the unfinished face of the universe, all clear-eyed and fierce and shimmering with a terrible beauty.
What is the colour of the night? What was your face before you were born?
Once, when he was a young novice, he had tried to identify a picture of his family in the seemingly chaotic colours and shapes of a simple foto. Through the sheer force of his will he had succeeded. But now he had to apprehend an endless sequence of thoughtscapes, idea complexes, and alien sensibilities, to view and understand these memories through a sense that he did not yet fully possess. This heightened vision and new consciousness nearly overwhelmed him. In truth, it was infinitely more difficult to make sense of the Elder Eddas than the faces of a foto.
At the centre of the galaxy was a great black hole, spinning around and around a point of singular and infinite density. The black hole was like a belly – or like a womb – of infinite blackness. Its intense gravity had pulled many stars down toward its centre, pulled them apart into leptons and photons, annihilating them. And yet paradoxically, in the black hole's tremendous time distortions, each star was perfectly preserved, ten thousand glittering flung against an event horizon of black velvet. Each star was an exploding mass of two billion trillion trillion grams of matter; locked in matter was energy and light. The black hole was an organ for the creation of infinite streams of light. Someday, at the still point of the black hole's centre where all was eternity and silence, a whole universe of light would burst forth into time. That was the true secret of the gods, the way light created more and ever more brilliant light.
But the most brilliant of human beings could understand this secret only imperfectly, and most men and women, hardly at all. For many long and harrowing moments, as a hunter trying to break free of a sarsara's blinding snows, Danlo approached the threshold of a new way of seeing. Guiding him on this journey, above all other things, were his wildness and his will. He had an intense will to seeing, a will to live new experiences and new worldviews. He was quite ready to abandon all that he knew, including himself, in order to behold the Elder Eddas. And so he made difficult associations and startling connections between impossible ideas and phenomena, and he remembered things that few other human beings had ever remembered. He almost understood the connection of matter to memory, could almost see it, the way memory is locked up inside matter's terrible symmetry. He could almost see the dazzling, undifferentiated oneness of the universe as it eternally differentiated itself, falling into time, willing and becoming and evolving. And thus he almost understood the important thing about gods, which is that they must continually create, or die. They must create themselves. All gods, especially the Ieldra, regard creation as the supreme work of art. And so every moment they create themselves from the stuff of the universe, and create the universe in their marvellous, eternal memories.