Memories

When our childhoods come back, the natural problems of memory distort the image to make it wrong. Think of how many nostalgic memories you have that you know, deep down, didn't happen the way you remember. Maybe it's one lie you told yourself. Maybe three or four. Maybe the whole thing is made up. I don't blame you. I had a good childhood but if all that people have of your own is a fantasy then all I can offer is a hope that your abuser, whether they're a person or a system, dies and burns in Hell.

I have lived my life so focused on nostalgia that my day-to-day living has become full of holes in the present, just as there are holes all throughout my past. The future, that sea of infinite possible timelines, is probably nothing more than a Sea of Holes.

And here we have the first personal node—Yellow Submarine was the movie I watched the most growing up. I had an LSD-soaked childhood and it braced me for a similar adulthood. The hippies who were the first audience of that movie had a private belief held by a small few among them. They believed that a child dosed with psychoactive substances from birth would become a supernatural being. Aleister Crowley theorized about the Moonchild, a child visited and possessed by fourth dimensional spirits. Lutum Hominus, the ancient monk, dreamed of a Sunchild who would save the world. (This was believed in his time to have already passed, in the form, naturally, of Christ—one of the reasons why Brother Lutum was burned at the stake.) Stories have been passed on for ages about Thunderchildren; traded among the fans of Jagged Skull, Johnny Nickle, and Eagle Stokes, about a child reborn in the deity glow of music. The Phantom of the Opera believed, at least for a short time, that his beloved Christine was a Thunderchild.

Then there are Dreamchildren, our dream-selves, made of psychoplasm, which we don like armor when we sleep. No one can become a Dreamchild, as far as I know—though the Moran and Batson files are definitely interesting.

Doesn't it make sense that only children could dream themselves into such power? I think maybe we kind of all understand that when we're Children, we can tap into powers we know we'll lose.

Nostalgia is a sign that it is a mistake to be human. Because of how angry and scary it can be.

We have no choice in the matter of our own species. But as the existentialists always reminded us, we do have the option of self-destruction—of self-negation, of erasure of humanity that manages to harm no one. At least “harm no one” in the sense that it's not the same as murder. The self is one's own domain, to be held and preserved at one's disposal. Grief is normal, as it should be, but one should understand one's own logical faults and weigh them carefully on an existential level.

I'm kidding. I don't buy Randian bullshit like that. Don't kill yourself, you deserve to live. But I bring up the idea of suicide to prove a point.

Even cynical reflections like that are a harkening back to youth. In our middle school days, we learn for the first time that the world is a lie. Or, well, it's that the world that they taught us about in elementary school was a lie, and to be fair, in retrospect, there were some signs. Actually, there were a lot of signs, a lot of stuff that's genuinely creepy when you think about it. Think of all the racial crimes there've been—all the murders—that were completely hidden. And hiding those things from kids—well, maybe some there's some good in that when it comes to violence. But it goes deeper. The things that made those murders happen were also hidden, and hidden fanatically. Because lawsuits come creeping in from people. People who want this nation's reeking dog breath to never be mouthwashed...but that's another day—a day when I'm comfier being raw.

We have a bitterness towards experience, or more properly, towards the painful process of gaining it. And nostalgia is such that we even romanticize and fetishize that childhood anger—all the types of it. (I think that's why a lot of us are so unhealthy when it comes to the ladies, dudes.) Once it's done, we're so positive that that pain was nothing, and so it ends up a kindly thing in our past, same as video games on Saturday or candy from the gas station. There is trauma, still. Trauma and nostalgia are bound together as parts of memory. I've never had passive memories. They're either ecstatic or horrifying. That there's nothing in between is an illusion, but to my unfocused mind my history has only seen those life-shaking tremors. I don't need to say that in my old age, if I reach it, a lot of my past will fade away from me. Some call that mercy, as if in recognition of how time is totally alien to us, like a small god.

But I could go off on this dumb hipster bullshit all day. Instead, I want to talk about how nostalgia is creepy. This is where we get into Freudian territory, with the old pseudoscientist's primary role once again being a supplier of tropes rather than an accurate or ethical psychiatrist. This is the unheimlich, baby—the uncanny. Just like the X-Men. Except not. Uncanny is not a synonym for fantastic—it refers to the perverse valley of disturbance that comes with something being both familiar and strange. Photoshop yourself with your eyes twice their normal diameter and you'll know what I mean.

Maybe a good example is the Mandela effect? It's a variant of it; and deja vu, as well as jamais vu, are echoes of the central core of it. I know one of my fellow cashiers—fellow artists, I should say—who keeps having the same dream every night that she had all the time when she was a kid. She told old Batuu about it, but didn't take his advice. That's a damn shame, not taking the advice of the Dreamkeeper. I only met him once, and his advice changed my life. You know, when that dream comes true for her, it will be deja vu and unheimlich alike. But the Mandela effect: named after Nelson Mandela, who a lot of people once collectively believed died in prison many years before his death in real life. Some attribute this collective misremembrance to an overlap between parallel universes. And the fools don't know that's not at all what a Syzygy looks like; if two universes are overlapping it just means weird shit happens like series of fantasy books crossing over that no one remembers. Along those lines (but also not, as I'm not talking about Multiversal Syzygies anymore), consider the Berenstain Bears books. And, oh man, look at that, you always thought it was spelled with an “e”! And if you haven't heard of this little magic trick before, now you're looking into it—yes, it's always been Berenstain! Behold the power! Your mind is blown!

But in all seriousness, the Mandela Effect is nothing more than confabulation and false memories. It makes sense, shouldn't it, that we can so easily modify the past? Hell, we change the present as it happens around us. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon, IL—he never existed but people made him exist, like the tulpas of old. (I guard myself against such manifestations with psychic light.) All it took was one person smelling sickly-sweet gas, and suddenly the whole town smelled it, and what's more they saw a masked man pump it into people's houses. Or what about the Halifax Slasher, an apprentice of Jack the Ripper; he possessed the amazing ability to cut women up without having a body or even an existence with which to do so. And mass hysteria isn't the only way we rewrite our present existence. The past is not what led us to our present—it is a toy, when it is not busy being used as a political weapon.

But the toy comes back, like a zombie teddy bear. It's uncanny. We play with time, time plays with us. And we can try as we like to kill history, but in the end history kills us all.

Oh, sure, it's not always “history.” People wouldn't call it history for someone to die in bed of cancer, or even to be shot down on a battlefield. Get close enough and specialized enough and obviously the numbers behind this are history; but there is the terrifying example of the impermanence of inhuman memory. For there are two histories—the personal and the global. And personal history is individual. It fades, if, like the Halifax Slasher, it was ever there to begin with. Is it a default state to want to be remembered forever? Is that our response to the fear of death? And furthermore, have we created humility and self-acceptance so that we don't destroy ourselves in the quest for immortality?

Or is it just that deep down, people who are like me—bad—are the only ones crazy enough to want to live forever? It takes a special kind of person to want to beat time. Even I'm not fool enough to want literal immortality—but if it was ever offered to me I would take that victory over time, rather than allow death to reign over me.

For in my unheimlich memories I have seen death reign. A special kind of death.

For I am Johnny Whistler. I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.