I saw a post today on twitter about being haunted by ghosts. I posted here previously about ghosts, including the spectre of the child that sits at the bottom of our stairs, but it got me thinking about those other ghosts that haunt us. Not the lingering spirit form of the departed, but those of regret.
The ghosts that visit us in the past and ask for help.
I had a childhood friend, and for the longest possible five years or so we were utterly inseparable. But we were apparently, on different paths, or perhaps just one of us was. As we approached adulthood our lives diverged until just a couple of years ago and we got back in touch.
The intervening years had not gone so well for my friend and for reasons I can’t go into, he is no longer with us. This haunts me. Had I known I would have helped, wouldn’t I? All he had to do was ask.
The mind can take you to the strangest of places and it reaches back, far beyond our grasp. What if he did ask? What if he asked when it was possible to do some good, but I didn’t recognise it. A call for help stretching back through time to the one moment I could have made a difference. And I said no.
I didn’t know. I still don’t know. But what I do know is that one day, thirty years ago, a strange little man knocked on my door and offered his hand in friendship, and I had better things to do. How different things might have been had I not been so self absorbed. If there is a next time round, I will go for that walk and set the path differently.
She came to me in a dream the other night. His mother. I do believe that we can communicate in dreams, with both the living and the dead. She came to me in the night and brought a message that I cannot share, but I did get the chance to tell her that I loved her son. I impressed this upon her like her life and mine depended on it. Love, like brotherly love, and that I was sorry I wasn’t there.
Ghosts are real. They don’t always rattle chains and say boo, but they are with us, and we need to do right by them.
If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it’s religion. Not.
Do I practice religion? It’s difficult to say really. I wasn’t brought up to be religious. My interest lay in logic, and reason, and science. I was a big fan of star trek. Arthur C Clarke was my all time favourite author. There was no Sunday school for me, no baptism or confessions. The school dutifully served up parables and had us singing hymns with all the enthusiasm of a stale loaf of bread. I was led down the path of atheism.
I had to be an atheist. It was the only thing that made sense as a reductionist consciousness living in a material universe. Anything else was an absurdity, wishful thinking, or a means to control the gullible population.
And yet, my relationship with God was always a strong one. How could it not be? We are one with the divine.
My very earliest memories, from my very earliest years, they are obviously very vague. How can we process and store the vast amounts of experiences and sensations without any context? We can’t, but there are still memories. I remember being a toddler, barely able to walk or talk. I remember being shoed away from the things that weren’t for me, dangerous or fragile. But at that time, I remember the presence of God, always there, speaking, indistinguishable from the rest of the world.
I’ve had more than a couple of paranormal or spiritual encounters. Warnings on high that have saved my life in one way or another. Ghosts, premonitions, inexplicable things in the sky, and even a broadcast message from the future, I shit you not.
If you find yourself paying any sort of attention to the nature of what it is to be alive in the universe, we come across all manner of intractable problems. Questions such as why is there something and not nothing? What happened before the big bang? What even is consciousness?
It turns out that we’ve been asking these questions for thousands of years, and the more we learn, the less we can be certain of anything at all. Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe doesn’t even exist when we’re not looking at it. It’s almost as if all of this is in our head.
Nothing came from nothing, Cordelia, but the universe did. The unfathomably massive entirety of everything is thought to have a net energy of zero. In aggregate, the universe doesn’t exist. Everything leads to metaphysics.
Religion is villainised by atheists as the domain of ignorance and they shower it, and its followers, with ridicule. They attack its values and lore with nitpicks, but in doing so, they miss the point.
I certainly didn’t arrive at religion from a place of ignorance. I had the full atheist mindset for a long time, and it was only with thorough questioning of everything that I realised that atheism was the lie, not religion. The bible is not a means to control, though it undeniably can be hijacked by the ideologues for nefarious ends, but that’s to miss the point. The bible isn’t a blueprint for a kind society, it’s a guide on how to live a good life, and it’s purely serendipitous that a great society will emerge from a population that lived a noble and courageous truthful life.
Do I practice religion? Well, I don’t go to church, but I do practice gratitude, when I remember. Gratitude for the life we have gives us solace and serenity. I also try to live by truth because lying splits our spirit across multiple versions of reality, of which only one is true and the rest cannot last. Jesus taught us that we must go through hell to know heaven. If we think not of the afterlife, but as analogues for daily life, we know that nothing worthwhile is ever easy, nothing in abundance has value.
It’s possible to assimilate these lessons without incurring religion, but even a narrow thread of intellectual integrity must admit that there is a ‘why’ to be accounted for, and that is a question only for religion. And when recognising this, the benefits of practicing religion become obvious.
Anyone blindly using AI to inform themselves or pass off knowledge and wisdom as their own needs to steady their steeds.
This very morning I spotted a post on twitter raising Population Collapse as a major risk to the future of civilisation. A quote, I believe, attributable to Elon Musk. I’ve been aware of population pyramids since I attended high school in the Eighties, and the economic impact of the cessation of perpetual growth, but is this really a problem for civilisation as a whole?
It was the plague in England, after all, that released the poorest from indentured labour, and a huge drop in available workers led to an increase in the value of their labour. The plague itself was terrible, but life was measurably better for those who came after, than it was before.
So rather than brush up on the evidence myself, I turned to AI to do the intellectual grunt work.
Prompt: What are the dangers of population collapse?
Population collapse is a serious problem that can have a number of negative consequences for a society. Some of the dangers of population collapse include: Economic decline: A shrinking workforce can lead to a decline in economic productivity. This can make it difficult to maintain a strong economy and provide for the needs of the population. Social instability: A declining population can lead to social instability. This is because a smaller population means fewer people to support the social fabric. This can lead to an increase in crime, violence, and social unrest. Cultural loss: A declining population can lead to the loss of culture. This is because a smaller population means fewer people to pass on cultural traditions and values. This can lead to a loss of identity and a sense of community. Environmental degradation: A declining population can lead to environmental degradation. This is because a smaller population means less demand for resources. This can lead to an increase in pollution and the destruction of natural habitats. It is important to note that population collapse is not inevitable. There are a number of things that can be done to prevent population collapse, such as increasing the birth rate, encouraging immigration, and improving the quality of life. Here are some of the things that can be done to prevent population collapse: Increase the birth rate: This can be done by providing financial incentives for families to have more children, making it easier for women to balance work and family life, and providing better education and healthcare for children. Encourage immigration: This can be done by making it easier for immigrants to come to the country and by providing them with the support they need to integrate into society. Improve the quality of life: This can be done by reducing poverty, improving education, and providing access to healthcare. By taking these steps, we can help to prevent population collapse and ensure a bright future for our society.
Google Bard response.
Superficially, this is a solid response and one that might well be parroted in an essay or an online argument, but some of the points just don’t make sense, so I challenged it.
Prompt: How would a declining demand for resources lead to additional environmental degradation?
A declining demand for resources could lead to additional environmental degradation in a few ways. First, a declining demand could lead to a decrease in the price of resources. This could make it more profitable to extract and use resources, even if they are harmful to the environment. For example, if the demand for oil declines, it could become more profitable to extract oil from tar sands, which is a more environmentally damaging process than extracting oil from conventional sources. Second, a declining demand could lead to a decrease in the amount of investment in environmental protection. If there is less demand for resources, there is less incentive to invest in technologies that reduce pollution or protect natural habitats. This could lead to an increase in environmental degradation, even if the overall amount of pollution or resource consumption declines. Third, a declining demand could lead to a decrease in the number of people who are concerned about the environment. If fewer people are using resources, there may be less public support for environmental protection measures. This could lead to a decrease in the enforcement of environmental regulations and an increase in environmental degradation. It is important to note that a declining demand for resources is not always a bad thing. In some cases, it can lead to a decrease in pollution and resource consumption. However, it is important to be aware of the potential negative consequences of a declining demand for resources and to take steps to mitigate these consequences. Here are some of the things that can be done to mitigate the negative consequences of a declining demand for resources: Invest in environmental protection: Even if the demand for resources declines, it is important to continue to invest in technologies that reduce pollution and protect natural habitats. This will help to ensure that the environment is protected even if the demand for resources does not increase. Increase public awareness: It is important to increase public awareness of the potential negative consequences of a declining demand for resources. This will help to ensure that there is public support for environmental protection measures. Enforce environmental regulations: Even if the demand for resources declines, it is important to continue to enforce environmental regulations. This will help to ensure that the environment is protected even if the demand for resources does not increase.
Google Bard response
The reply still didn’t ring true, so I queried it again.
Prompt: This doesn’t make sense. How would a drop in oil price lead to tar sand extraction being more economically attractive?
You are right, a drop in oil price would not lead to tar sand extraction being more economically attractive. In fact, it would have the opposite effect. Tar sands are a type of oil that is very difficult and expensive to extract. The process of extracting tar sands requires a lot of energy and water, and it produces a lot of pollution. As a result, tar sands are only economically viable when oil prices are high. If oil prices drop, it will become less profitable to extract tar sands. This is because the cost of extracting tar sands will not decrease as much as the price of oil. As a result, tar sand extraction will become less economically attractive, and there will be less demand for tar sands. In addition, a drop in oil price could lead to an increase in the use of renewable energy sources. This is because renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, become more competitive with fossil fuels when oil prices are low. As a result, there will be less demand for oil, including tar sands. Overall, a drop in oil price would not lead to tar sand extraction being more economically attractive. In fact, it would have the opposite effect.
Google Bard response
So we did start to get somewhere eventually. But what this shows is that the technology is some way from maturity, and it’s answers often need scrutiny. Google freely accepts that the technology is still at beta stage and to not rely on it, and that’s not my point. If social media posts are to be believed, big if, then users are obtaining legal advice from these things and students are cheating on exams. I just don’t buy it.
The point of this isn’t about Population Collapse, I don’t have a qualified opinion on that, only that AI can’t be relied on to provide a qualified opinion either. Not yet anyway.
Evil is a strong word and I’m using it here in the context of harm, whether that harm is conscious and deliberate I cannot say, harm causes suffering, and evil causes unnecessary suffering, or something like that.
Lifestyle magazine is a catch-all phrase and I include websites and social media, and TV shows, and gurus in that. Cooking shows for example, property porn, that sort of thing.
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I watched a lot of property shows in young adulthood, in the early naughties they were hard to avoid. TV shows like Location Location Location and Property Ladder. It was the height of Gordon – no more boom and bust – Brown’s unprecedented economic boom, and aspirational telly was very much the thing.
What’s stopping you having a house like this?
Food shows too. Nigella’s cooking shows were particularly pernicious in their facade of perfection. The yummy mummy effortlessly fixing up a treat to share with her impeccable peers in soft focus and deceptive camera angles.
Saturday Kitchen too. I remember a chat with the butcher. He told me that whatever James Martin cooked that Saturday morning would always sell very well. It’s a powerful thing is lifestyle TV.
Mere exposure to these shows induced such swings of ambivalence that put me at risk of whiplash as my aspirations would switch from that of a city penthouse with double parking and views of the city landmarks, to that of a riverside cottage out in the Dales where I could grow my own spuds, keep hens, and buy fresh beef and unpasteurised milk direct from the neighboring farmer. None of these things I wanted strongly enough to try to attain.
Come Dine With Me, a show about four strangers competing to deliver the finest dinner party experience, showed me the error of my ways. I’d been doing it wrong for years, seating my guests to eat on the sofa, unmatched cutlery, serving gravy in a vase. No wonder they laughed. What was I thinking?
What I was thinking was that I had a lot of guests and needed a large vessel in which to serve gravy, a pint glass was too small and could break with the heat, but a clear glass vase was perfect.
We need, as a society, our cultural conventions, traditions, taboos, mores, values, and what better way to communicate them than through the TV.
We need role models that can steer us, help navigate the world and find the right path. This is why I think lifestyle magazines are evil. They don’t seek to set us on the straight and narrow. They don’t teach us how to improve our lives. They show us a life that we cannot possibly lead and tell us that it is easy. They leave us feeling empty and wanting more. They distract us from what is important.
Of the seven sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, lifestyle gurus encourage and perpetuate at least six of them. I’m struggling to fit wrath into this vague but sweeping commentary, but the others are definitely in there.
Sloth, the reluctance to make an effort. Lifestyle marketing is all about selling us an idea of a way of life that can be packaged for consumption. It’s a shortcut to status. It’s lazy.
Gluttony is an easy one to pin down, particularly with the food shows. They don’t do modest meals.
Envy is a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities or luck. Lifestyle media showcases what others have and deliberately frames it as something you should desire and have a right to expect.
Lust is possibly a stretch, especially if limited to a lust for sex. But lust can be for money, possession, travel. So yeah, I stand by it.
Greed, the excessive desire for material possessions and wealth. A four bed detached house in a leafy suburb, with a kitchen diner, games room, twin office, large garden with lawn, water feature, decking with tandoori oven and outdoor dining, work shop shed, boat on drive, classic car and a Chelsea tractor in the garage, nursery and playroom, large well equipped kitchen with all the appliances, a potato ricer, home cinema with 70inch 4k TV and digital music system, power shower wet room, herb garden, and magnificent views of the Thames valley. Just the basics really.
The sin of pride is an excessive preoccupation with self, one’s own importance, achievements, status, or possessions. This is the very point of Lifestyle magazines and TV, to encourage self glorification. My own conception of pride is showing off, and that pride cometh before a fall.
Lifestyle magazines are evil because they make us lose track of what is important. Sin is originally a Greek word that means to miss the mark, to fall short of our potential. We cannot miss the mark if we are looking at the wrong target.
Happiness is not having what we want, it comes from wanting we have, lifestyle mags seek to subvert that. It makes us look at what we have and reject it in favour of the lie, and that leads to misery. Lifestyle TV doesn’t tell us that the most important thing about throwing a dinner party has nothing to do with the place settings or how what you serve the gravy in, it’s about having enough people in our lives that want to enjoy our company and whose only expectation of the food is that it doesn’t give them dysentery.
There are no shortcuts to friendship and respect, it’s not something you can buy and it’s not something the lifestyle gurus can sell to you, so they distract you from what’s real and good.
And the worst part about it is that you don’t notice the cuts, the death by a thousand cuts. You don’t have to rush out and buy the latest car or holiday or air fryer, to be consumed by the lie. You just feel, even if subconsciously, the emptiness in the space left by the absence of the thing you never knew you needed. And the feeling of inadequacy that you cannot replicate the simple meal without blowing the food budget, trashing the kitchen, and wasting a whole day in the kitchen, and it ends up looking and tasting like crap.
No. Lifestyle media is definitely harmful and therefore evil. Is it any wonder that half the population is in a mental health crisis? Be careful what you watch and read, it’s insidious.
There’s this thing in my head. A memory, a dream, a wish, a half remembered scene from a movie. I think of it often, picturing it, wondering if I could contrive a story around it, though that’s not the point.
The thing is something simple, and it delves deep into my psyche, and because I’m nothing special, it must resonate with others on at least some level, so I’ll record it here.
It’s about a lonely place. A temple or fortress or palace, perhaps all three. A once thriving hub of the community teeming with hustle and bustle, laughter and sorrow. The whole spectrum of human experience strung out across years and now fallen silent. Entropy has won.
To be alone in such a place. Wrapped in a silence so thick you don’t believe it, and conversations carry on the wind from the depths of time or the recesses of your own mind, not that it makes a difference in a place like this.
What is left of the buildings are little more than remnants of walls and floors, stone steps and columns, worn by wind and rain, and ticks and tocks. You explore the grounds but there is nothing to find. Nothing much grows anymore, the soil is little more than dead roots in dirt. Dust rests wherever the wind can’t reach it.
Where you are is hard to tell, the engraved text on the stone walls and pillars is eroded beyond comprehension. The statues that still stand proud are little more than featureless pillars themselves, nothing to identify them.
Except for one. A statue in granite, or some other hardy stone has stood a better test of time than the others. But who is this? Time has done its best to rob her of her beauty but the life in her eyes persists in the stone, and her gentle smile. Who is she? Did you know her? How long have you been here?
How long? Long enough to doubt yourself. Have you explored the whole place? Perhaps there is more to be seen beyond the eastern wall. There isn’t, of course, and it all seems rather familiar.
The pale sun sets and the stars come out, but you’re not sleepy, you’re never sleepy. So you return to the steps where you always find yourself, and you pour yourself a glass of wine. There is always wine when the sun sets. Best not to question it.
Maybe tomorrow you can look beyond the eastern wall for something new, but for now there are stars to be watched. Not so many as there used to be, it seems like fewer every night.
Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
What would I do that I didn’t do? What indeed? This is one of those dining on ashes things, and I’ve enough to feed us all.
There are many times I didn’t act, took the craven path, but one in particular sticks with me.
Long ago I took a journey on a train, a train that is now long since scrapped, from a place I no longer go back to, to a town where I no longer live. It was a late train, a late hour and delayed too. But it was buzzing, filled with weary travellers and revellers alike. It was the smoking carriage too, as I recall, back then it was where I liked to sit.
For the journey I kept myself to myself, enjoyed what little view there was of the argon lit streets in the sparse towns that punctuated the blackened fields of the English countryside, and occasionally sparking up a hand rolled cigarette that I had made for something to do.
About halfway through the journey I became aware that the shouting had lost its jovial hue and had turned quite sour. A barely intelligible Scots woman was hurling the most obscene insults at another passenger.
I was stunned. I couldn’t see what was happening but none of the other fifty odd passengers saw fit to intervene and that only reinforced my cowardice.
And what would I even do? I was a spotty bespectacled student with less meat than a half eaten buffalo wing, and even less gumption and street smarts.
So I listened, I winced and I cringed, and slowly I had pieced together what had transpired. By my estimation the plus sized mother had made the mistake of asking the inebriated Caledonian harpy to perhaps lay off the profanities and all hell ensued. This diminutive windbag hurled all manner of verbal abuse at the poor woman, who could do nothing but pray for a swift end to the torment of herself and her terrified son.
What could I even have done except make myself a target? You read all the time about heroes being stabbed for their trouble. But how likely was that? So if I stood up and took the flack, could I not withstand the noise of a screeching harridan for a couple of stops? Was this the man I had grown up to be? Had I forgotten the jubilation of the time I stood up to the neighborhood jerk and flung him out of his own garden? Sure, that jerk was no more than ten years old, but that was still older than I was at the time, and he never bothered us again.
What might have happened is that others might have stood up with me, and shown that terrified mother and her boy that there was still a shred of decency and hope in the world, and I might have retained that sense of forthright dignity that has evaded me ever since.
In the end it was the police that ended the ordeal. The train made an unscheduled stop at some nowhere town and the gob, along with her silent companion that I hadn’t even noticed, were removed from the train. The crowd found its voice again and cheered for removal, but I didn’t. I was glad that the ordeal was over, but I had no right to celebrate.
Years ago. Not so many as that train ride, but a good while nonetheless, my career meandered me on to various medical practices and surgeries, and on one occasion I was privileged to shadow an oncology consultant delivering the all clear to an immensely relieved and grateful patient.
The patient spoke to me directly, looked me square in the eye and told me, warned me, to take care of my body, and to watch out for the changes.
It’s not that I ignored the guy, I took the advice with good grace and promised to abide, but did I really? Did I? Did I go see my doctor all the times I should have, perhaps, perhaps not. What I do know is that had I taken more action along the way, perhaps the presence of the hairy hand of fate would now be just that little less apparent.
How do I use social media? To be honest I’m not sure if it’s not the other way around. Social media seems to use me more than I use it, I certainly think social media gets the better deal.
I use it to keep in touch with friends and to share ideas, in principle, but in reality I mostly use it to search endlessly for something to justify my anxiety. Something that reminds me that my existential dread is real and must contended with, lest I relax for a moment and find myself happily getting on with life.
The world turns, but I miss phone calls and meet ups and reading magazines and journals. It’s not 1995 anymore, which is a shame, I’d just about learned how to cope with the world by then, but they had to go and change it.
An AI generated story. I don’t expect anyone to read it, I’m just playing with the free AI apps and seeing what they do. That said, if anyone wants to explain the ending to me I’d be exceedingly grateful. I have worries for the future of writing, of stories. Content creation is so utterly easy now that human curation is almost redundant. I say almost because the need for it remains, though it’s easy to negate.
I asked the AI to tell me a story, but I had to come up with my own title. The audacity of these things:
tell me a ghost story with a twist about an anxious traveller with a secret, waiting for the last train out of town, in a snow storm, in 1920s England
Fair Cop, by AI
Arthur was a nervous wreck as he sat on the bench of the empty train station, waiting for the last train out of town. It was a bitter winter night, and the snow was falling so fast that it was difficult to see beyond the platform. Suddenly, Arthur heard a faint humming noise, which gradually got louder and louder until it morphed into a woman’s voice singing a haunting melody.
Arthur tried to ignore the eerie noise, but it was impossible to ignore the fact that the voice was coming from the abandoned train tracks. He looked over and saw a woman walking slowly towards him, her figure just visible in the blizzard. It wasn’t unusual for travelers to be stranded due to snow, but the mood of the singing woman chilled him to his bones.
As she approached the platform, Arthur noticed something unusual about her. She was transparent and appeared to glide along the ground rather than walk like a normal person. And when she spoke, her words came out slowly and distorted, as if she was speaking through water.
He tried to compose himself, but his nerves soon got the better of him, and he blurted out the question that had been gnawing at him for days. “Do you know who I am?” he said, his voice trembling with anxiety.
The strange woman stopped singing for a moment and regarded him with an enigmatic expression. “I know everything about you, Arthur,” she said in a voice that was neither human nor animal.
Arthur felt his heart pounding in his chest. He knew he had to confess his secret, the reason for his anxiety. “I’m running away from the police,” he said. “I stole a valuable coin from a wealthy man, and now they’re after me.”
The woman stared at him for a moment before the blizzard suddenly cleared, revealing a police officer heading towards them.
“Arthur Thompson, I’m placing you under arrest for the theft of the Golden Medallion,” the officer announced as he arrived.
But before Arthur could react, the woman suddenly dissolved into the air, leaving only an icy chill in her wake. Arthur looked around, confused and scared, before he realized that she was a ghost from the past, warning him of his impending capture.
He was baffled by the twist of fate, but grateful, nonetheless, as the ghost had helped him avoid the inevitable punishment that would have awaited him in the hands of the law for the rest of his life, all because of his greed. He whispered a silent thank you, even as the officer cuffed him, took him to his cell to pay his penance.
It’s not going to win any awards. I’ll say that much. Maybe it’s because it’s not the premium version, but for a minute read I was mildly entertained. I’m not sure what happened at the end though. He was grateful for the warning and avoided punishment, but was caught? I dunno.
Maybe I could have saved myself some effort if I asked the AI to write a blog post about a ghost story written by AI with a very brief critique. Content is content is it not?
Some pictures have appeared in the media lately from the Mars mission. They’ve been described by some as resembling dragon bones.
As awesome as that would be, that’s not what I see in the images. To me, they look like poles sticking out of the rock, much like rebar protruding from unfinished concrete blocks. They cast long shadows along the stone.
Looks like rebar and nubs
It’s hard to determine the size of them, or their true shape from these images, but I find that the explanation given, that these are merely mineral deposits that have been revealed by the erosion of the much softer stone, to be a little weak.
Erosion on Mars is paltry by Earth standards, and even though the surface of Mars is billions of years older than Earth, the explanation doesn’t ring true. It’s an unsubstantiated assertion. We don’t know the age or erosion rates of this rock, or what the supposed mineral could be.
That’s not to say that I think this really is rebar in cement, just that it’s what it looks like to me.
Another interesting detail in the image is the presence of the small protruding nubs, which to me look a lot like the ones found on ancient megalithic stones.
Nubs
These nubs are not understood but it seems reasonable to assume that they probably served some purpose in the construction of these sites.
Again, not suggesting that this is what it is, but this site on Mars is definitely worthy of a second look.
There is an old episode of Doctor Who that starts with the Tardis landing on the Titanic. His assistant, I forget which, had persuaded him to take her on an opulent voyage so he honed in on the Titanic and off they went, but they didn’t land on the deck, nor were they in Southampton, and it wasn’t even 1912.
The Tardis had materialised atop an outcrop of sandstone in a hillside clearing, surrounded by dense ancient woodland. No sign of docks or sea or ladies in hats, just trees and scrub, and creatures unseen rustling in the ominous undergrowth
“Where’s the ship Doctor?” The assistant shrieked. I’m thinking it was Tegan.
The Doctor, Tom Baker’s I think, hushed her and listened carefully to the wind whistle past his curled ear. Then he licked his finger and held it in the air.
“Ah” He said at last. “Seems we missed the sailing”
“No kidding, so where’s the ship now?”
“You’re standing on it”
Beneath their feet was the weather worn sandstone lip. It was nothing remarkable, much like any rocky outcrop in any clearing in any forest.
That spot upon which the Doctor and his assistant now stood, we learned, was the very same spot where the Titanic had come to rest on that fateful night in 1912. And it was that same spot where it remained while the years took their toll. The iron hull and super structure slowly corroded away and the sediments settled above, hiding all trace of that legendary watery grave.
Europe and North America drifted apart over the aeons until the process reversed and plate tectonics brought the two continents back together where they formed a new mountain range that would come to dwarf the Himalayas, had they too not succumbed to time and long since reduced to gentle undulations beneath the new Antarctic Ocean.
One hundred million years brought this spot of deep ocean bed back to the surface, and millennia of ice and wind and rain chipped away the layers of sedimentary rock until finally, the iron remains of the sleeping leviathan once again saw the light of day.
In the yellow sandstone on which they stood, a thin band of iron ore stained the otherwise uniform rock. Fifty thousand tons of metal, and 1500 souls, now a barely perceivable geological curiosity.
Then there was a scream and off they ran to their next adventure.
Time is deeper than any ocean, and there is way more hidden within it. Every day it seems that new histories are being washed upon the shores of our knowledge. Tidbits of antiquity, seemingly inconsequential to the untrained or uninterested eye, but putting them all together, a picture is emerging.
On a treasured but dusty bookshelf in my office I have a series of books that I have had since childhood. It includes such wonderful titles as Alchemy the Ancient Science, Dream Worlds, Magic Words and Numbers, Ghosts and Poltergeists, among others, but there is one book in the series that I don’t think belongs. I’m reminded of Winston’s interview question in Ghostbusters.
Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
Janine Melnitz – Ghostbusters
One of those things is not like the others. I’ll admit, I’ve had this movie quote in my head for five decades and it never struck me before. For the longest time I had no inclination to believe that the city of Atlantis was anything more than a myth, a legend, but that’s hardly surprising when the matter is always listed with other fringe topics in the book shop.
The YouTube channel Bright Insight has a great video outlining the evidence to support the Eye of the Sahara, the Richat Structure, as the location of Atlantis, I won’t go into detail here, but just looking at a picture of the thing and comparing it to the countless artistic impressions that have been created over the years forms a compelling case.
Atlantis is a curiosity, like Near Death Experience, Alien Abduction, not really given much credence, but why? Plato wasn’t, by all accounts, an attention seeking nutjob, why was it treated as anything but a historical account? I suppose it doesn’t help that Plato’s account was not first hand, it was passed down over 9000 years, so there was some room for error, but evidence is stacking up that there might be more to the story of Atlantis than mere parable or whimsy..
The Richat Structure Atlantis image search
This isn’t exactly a “The hair proves it” moment, but it’s hard to dismiss it. It’s entirely possible that a deluge, of the type that is known to have happened often during the 12000 bce Younger Dryas, could have swept Atlantis off the face of the planet in one night.
I don’t think this is a myth anymore. Not now that the evidence for high technology in abundance, scattered around the megalithic sites across the world has been brought to my attention. The work of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, and YouTube channels such as UndiscoveredX and Bright Insight are doing a wonderful job shining a halogen torch on the historical inconsistencies, and I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.
It’s spring as I write this, and as I looked out of the window of a holiday let, across the tree tops of the steep hill of the park, and out across the water to the timeless view of Scottish mountains, I am struck by the enduring permanence of the view. The mountains carved out from solid rock by miles thick glaciers. The murky depths of choppy brine that flow to the ocean. Centuries of farmers have tended those hills, raised crops, driven their sheep. And centuries of sailors, merchants, adventurers, have plied those waters. An unbroken history, going back down the generations.
But then my gaze is broken abruptly by a thud on the window. A bumblebee ramming the glass brings a new perspective into focus. Against the backdrop of the seemingly eternal landscape, the ephemeral bee, brand new to the season makes its presence known. And the tree tops, over which I enjoy the view have recently been cut back. The bee knows not the date, it doesn’t know what year this is or what happened in the previous cycle. It is merely here and now. The trees are not what they might have been had they been allowed to grow, they will grow back, and they will be cut back again.
In this information age we have grown accustomed to knowing who we are and where we came from, the certainties of our past, the story of who we are, but is that an illusion? A lie? A cope? Does the bee have any doubts about its identity? Will it be remembered by the next colony? I have my doubts.
Just as the ship destroyed by Propsero’s magical storm sank beneath the waves and left no trace, so too the memories of the behemoth that was the Titanic will also vanish in time, but for those who know where to look, it’s mark will be found and understood.
The world turns and the crust churns. We cannot know how many shakespeares there have been, how many Einsteins, or how many Hitlers for that matter, if the passing millennia tear down all that we built, but the slate isn’t wiped clean every time. Some remnants remain to be found and understood, if we care to take a second look.
Duggan's Dig 