We live in times ancient and modern,
In fact in all the times there ever were
Compressed, as an audio file,
Impossible to discern from one another.
We live in times ancient and modern,
In fiction in all the times there ever were
Reduced to a single story, told by torchlight
In the attic of a haunted house.
The gift of greatest wishfulness is to forget.
Without forgetting, living becomes impossible,
An unwilled wave of memories, unbearable,
Tsunami bringing the coastline to wrack and ruin.
Whoever is blinded from remembrance of the most,
We appoint for him a devil as companion,
A sure-footed spring-heeled whisperer in ears,
False memories guised as fake news,
Hallucinations masked as holy writ.
But without remembrance, the surface of the past
Only is a smooth face, no holds for fingers or toes,
A cliff that exists only to kill you on the way down,
- yet the way down and the way up are the same -
Run the camera backwards and physics stutters
Same as civilisation coming to a stop at the sea.
Civilisation is built of memory and forgetting.
Without them how can we tell who we are?
Your body itself no more than memory now,
And they can remember it for you wholesale,
The trick is on the tightrope, strung between poles,
Neither one nor t’other, not bound nor blind nor -
The devil is in the detail that you choose to hold on to
Or the train of thought you choose to let go of.
Are you Quail, or Quaid, or Hauser? Do you care?
You dare not look too close at your own biography
In case it comes back to bite you on the ass.
The library of babel now holds but a single book
That has consumed all the books there ever were,
A predator composed of words alone,
Able to explain everything but itself.
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