Dripping with water you emerge from the womb of unstarted time. Welcome, now, to where everything happened before you were born. All the ephemera of reality remains frozen here in a jumble of anachronistic chaos: Roman soldiers do battle with tricorned Frenchmen, Kongming shakes hands with Maggie Thatcher; legions of astronaut saints wait to be martyred by a faceless Emperor and at the same time John Goldtongue crushes heresies in his sleep; the Mayans trade silks with the Phoenicians; a child Von Neumann plays Game Boy with Boudica. The world wars are one and other wars don’t exist for you; the planet has at all times one civilisation, doing one comprehensible thing at a time.
This is the time of the saints: any time before yours. Every day different aspects reappear, old characters in new dramas. Fossils are unearthed by your elders in age and learning. They dig up the bones of the saints and add them to the broth of life you are told to drink. Before your time – this is the time of Kings Arthur and Agamemnon, Crassus and Constantine.
As for how it all fits together: don’t ask me. It’s your conception. Everything you can imagine drifts aimlessly through your bowl of primordial saint-time soup. Lumps touch and float apart and disappear under the surface. There’s a medieval period and there’s a “time of witches” and there’s a time where everyone wears three-piece suits, slowly exchanging the frills on their clothes for penicillin and aeroplanes. Someone invents a gun and there are two world wars. There is another state of Israel, and then there is a lot of talking and a lot of boring organisation and computers appear so everything seems to settle like sand into a jar and then you are born.
The bones in your life-broth are the stories you’re told, about things you think ended before you got here. But there’s marrow in those bones, or they’d not be in your soup.
However, in talking about your time of the saints, I’m not telling you to drink the broth, and suck dog-like on the bones. Nor am I exhorting grave-robbing – choosing to remember. It’s your choice.
Isn’t it odd how, before you were born in purple, everyone’s life had only one notable thing in it, and it was obvious what was right and wrong? Isn’t it odd how everyone wore only one outfit all the time, like a cartoon character? All of a sudden – when you came on the scene – endless new considerations appeared, millions of questions, clothes and objects, and a planet’s worth of tiny little countries that didn’t exist before. Suddenly nothing was cut and dry and there were many organisations and refugees and seemingly good reasons to do things you thought must have been bad before.
And know – there isn’t just one bowl of broth, but many. All mixed differently.
Dripping with water you emerge from the womb of unstarted time. They give you a bowl: will you drink from it?
verso folio 