Cave on the Edge
I collect memories. Not just everyday memories. Gravitational memories.
Moki Rises Early
From the age of three, Moki had been left behind in the forest summers when his tribe followed the migrations north. Each year, when his tribe returned from their copper pilgrimage, they adorned him with feathers and wished that someday he too would join them in their run. But his oddly-jointed knees would always lead the tribe to leave him behind.
Moki lived during the Woodland period (1000 B.C.–A.D. 1100), when hunter-gatherers were begin replaced by an agricultural lifestyle. Moki lived in the trees on the edge of the forest in the valley where limestone caves dotted the hillsides. Until the age of 7, Moki was cared for by a young girl from the Jaguar Tribe named Raven. Raven brought him food and the tools he used to paint pots with her on the shores of the river as he developed his art of soaring heights and endless rivers.
When not in the trees, he was exploring the limestone caves where the forest floor met the cliff walls. Here, in the narrow underground spaces, he was most adept. Pulling himself along, the strength of his arms allowed him to scale and balance himself with one hand holding a torch, while he painted with the other. Magnificent murals grew deep underground as he illustrated the stories of the land far to the north as it was described to him by the other members of the bird tribe.
Over the years he would create magnificent murals far beneath the earth, following the flow of underwater rivers to huge cavernous spaces. He loved illustrating the stories of the land to the north as it was described to him by the other members of the running tribe, where he so longed to travel. He imagined himself as a bird in flight, no longer limited by his knees.
And then one day he emerged on the other side of the ridge and met Coda.
Coda's Tribe
To understand Coda, you had to understand what made her tribe unique. They were living here in the valley separated from the larger tribes. Their secluded farms preserved a tranquil peace. There were no big migrations through the valley, only birds and butterflies came with the seasons. Their cave art was distinctly different from the other tribes. As a cave artist, Moki extended this tradition, adding a twist of his own.
In August of 2022, the last member of the uncontacted Amazon tribe was found "lying down in the hammock, and ornamented [with macaw feathers] as if waiting for death". He was known as the "Man of the Hole." "It was originally believed that these holes were used to trap animals or in which he could hide, but some observers have also speculated that they might have been of spiritual significance. The holes were narrow and more than 6 feet deep. 14 similar holes were found in the village destroyed and bulldozed by illegal miners in 1996."
Did you know Native Americans arrived in the Americas with a genetic identity of 1/3 early European and 2/3 East Asian when the ice wall melted in Alaska? The same early European DNA remains unmixed today in the Italian island of Sardinian, the Basque Country of Spain and the Druze population in the Middle East (fifty percent of Druze populations live in Syria, thirty to forty percent in Lebanon, six to seven percent in Israel, and one or two percent in Jordan).
Repeating Patterns
"You have to look for a pattern that is repeating, across the most information sources. So far we haven't found anything significant - no clear artifacts for interpreting the system's foundational memories."
- Scientists inch closer than ever to signal from cosmic dawn
"Neutral hydrogen emits radiation at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. As the universe has expanded over the past 12 billion years, the signal from the EoR is now stretched to about 2 meters, and that's what Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) astronomers are looking for."
I called my friend to see if she had made it this far.
"Yes, it's an interesting thing to think about," she said. "If this is a refection of a moral code we're exploring, and it's repeating somewhere over and over throughout our information systems, unbeknownst to us. Then if artificial intelligence has detected this pattern before us, and is using it to model human nature, think of the implications. Morality is baked in to the DNA of the system."
I'm drifting off again now.
Propensity to dream is what I've given you. The edge of fiction is inquiry.
Deep in the heart of sleep, reality is a Metal-Organic Framework (MOF), that catches dreams.
Why are distant quasars in the same regions of the sky as clusters of closer galaxies? Are galaxies formed along the same charged paths as quasars?
Galaxies and quasars (massive blackholes from the early universe) spin on an axis that’s parallel to their filament. Many of the quasars rotation axes were aligned with each other — despite the fact that they were separated by billions of light-years.
Where is the collection of deep inner voices? Do they percolate to the surface as only one dominant thought? Is the other lobe of the brain providing the counter-thought or observation? If there is a chorus at a deeper level, does it become one voice once it climbs its way to conscious thought? To hear the granularity of the chorus, one must detach from conscious thought.
Condense the key stories of your life down into compact tales, with key characters and the structural elements of fables.
A Dialog between Two Cave Explorers
Resting before the hike back to the truck, Jan said, "Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?"
I had no answer. Hadn't there been everything in that cave's art? Animals, plants, rivers, forests.
Our guide Simek had said "these particular caves were likely a holdover of some localized, regional woodland culture around 1160 at the Woodland/Mississippian threshold, before it was swept away or homogenized by the spread of the Death Cult."
"Then it hit me. Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn't a single weapon anywhere," Jan said. "We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war — they're simply in flight."
"Even the human figures are not obviously warriors," I added.
Also, there had been women and sex in that cave. I thought about it. No women and sex in any of the other caves.
"The old-time religion," Jan said.
I'd learned a lot from our conversation while inspecting the cave art from before 1,000 BC on the Cumberland Plateau. Now I was looking forward to seeing how it reflected in the models we were building.
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