Peru 10,000 years BC
Tiahuanaco before the Age of Puma Punku and the Chavín de Huántar
The ancient Chavins surveyed the quinoa fields waiting for the sun to set and the rise of the black moon. This night had been a long time coming. For the first time in generations warring tribal factions had united in what would soon become one of the world's oldest Neolithic civilizations.
Hundreds of people stood atop the hills and watched as the fields turned to an amber gold while the sun disappeared behind the Cordillera Blanca Mountains. Tomorrow morning the first quinoa harvest of this newly forming civilization would begin.
As darkness filled the heavens the tribal leaders turned to the area in the sky where the black moon rested and with their torches made circular motions around its hidden circumference and chanted: Lanzón mandi Kilya dorma Inti disperti pasperi al Teraj axi mundi. Lanzón guide the moon god's dreams; the sun god's light, bring prosperity and peace to the god of the earth and to the underworld.
After several hours of chants and prayers the Chavins left the hills and returned to the campesino village in a parade of torchlight. Upon returning to their huts they each made personal offerings to their gods and ended the night with a journey to the dreamscapes.
In the middle of the night the ground trembled waking the villagers who were roused more by the cries of their frightened children than the tremors of the quake. It was not uncommon in this age for the ground to shake. The ancients had grown accustomed to what they interpreted as the footsteps of the Lanzón.
The next day the people of Tiahuanaco awoke to perfect weather. The temperature was mild, ceiling unlimited and glistening.
One of the ancients named Tjajago squinted his eyes as he, his wife and two sons left their hut to join in the great harvest. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the sunlight. As soon as they had he realized something was wrong, instead of an orderly procession of workers making their way across the hillcrest to the fields, people were running and gathering at the top of the hill. There was a flurry of commotion as most of the Chavins fell to their knees.
Tjajago and his family hurried to the top of the hill. Those who were still standing pointed frantically in the direction of the quinoa fields. Tjajago was afraid to look at first, but when he did, what he and his family saw are what we call crop circles today. They were enormous and extended across the entire harvest; flattened and displaced quinoa depicted the avatars of Kilya, Inti, Teraj, and most prominently of all the Lanzón.
On the other side of the world near the Jordon River, The Village of Palms was experiencing the same phenomenon - crop circles appearing in the wheat fields of ancient Africa. This was the birthplace of another Neolithic civilization called Jericho and like Puma Punku destined to become one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas of the world.
Three thousand years after the appearance of crop circles in these two distant and unique regions of the world, the age of the pyramids would take rise among the expansionist cultures of the Egyptians in Africa and the Mayans of South America.
In the not too distant future and approximately 12,000 years later
The elderly woman's riveting gaze reflected the blue sky as a dust cloud stirred up by a combine harvester caught her attention. She watched it evolve into a chiindii, raising her eyes a level from behind screen door until she saw what she was looking for. "A good spirit," she said to herself nodding in approval, "What I wouldn't give for a little air conditioning right about now good spirit." She almost laughed while swirling her finger clockwise in the air, but she wasn't really one for laughing. She never indulged in it; at least for not as long as she could remember, any laughter or happiness she allowed herself would always be dealt with behind her steadfast yet sorrowful veneer.
One of her true indulgences was the triumph of remembering, and reliving what she could of her tumultuous life over and over again in her mind, as if somehow she could bring back and change the past with pure thought alone. And there was her painting, although she didn't really consider herself much of an artist she had mastered it like a prodigy. She watched the good spirit until it reverted back into a cloud of wheat particles and dust taking its place behind the harvester as it chewed a path through the field of gold. She looked away from her distraction, her eyes pulling back crossing the gravel road she turned to focus the remainder of her attention on navigating her sparsely furnished cabin. Oddly enough for a woman her age there were no pictures, no hints of family or shrines filled with the faces of grandchildren. There were only the subjects in her paintings.
She steadied herself, although she was incredibly fit for her age; she was losing her battle with mortality. She worked her way over to the book shelf where she kept her journals and removed one. She then walked into the adjoining room, sat down at the kitchen table opening the hardbound cover and turned to the first blank page. She tried to make an entry, but today her hands trembled and she had trouble holding onto the pen. Some days it was like this. "Cancer my foot," She denounced "it's damned arthritis that's killing me! If I only knew then what I know now." She argued with the stillness of isolation, "It's been ages since Judgment Day should have come - but nothing. I'm still here - whats left of me!" She surrendered and slapped the journal shut, "To hell with it!" she cursed in a lamented gasp.
Sarah fought off the pity. ...hated it. It was not in her vocabulary. But she had become nobody's hero; living out her existence in this unrewarding life. She thought back to a time when when she had a reason - she knew there once was a reason, but for her the details often blurred like a landscape beneath a sweltering horizon; a symptom of the advancing stages of dementia. In reality, Sarah hadn't made a journal entry for years, she just didn't know it.
In the heat of the moment Sarah grew agitated. A fading mind, she thought to herself, is a marriage with death. "Bullshit!" she said angrily, "I'm not done, damn it! I still remember! I have more to do!" This was her routine she'd repeat four or five times a day. It had become an excercise in futility. She felt trapped. But something was different, this time she thought a new thought, breaking the hopeless cycle. I feel like a rat in a maze! A lab rat! Sarah rose up from the table and went back to the bookcase where her past resided. She looked to one of her paintings and then searched her chronicles. "A lab rat", she said to herself, "that sounds just about right!"
Finally after all this time a memory broke through the merciless fog. Sarah ran her fingers back and forth across the row of journals and retrieved the volume where it resided as if she'd written it yesterday. She looked back to the likeness in the painting and she spoke to it, "It's here John!"
From the Journal of Sarah Connor
Mark Twain once wrote about life following genesis and called it "Eve's Diary" in the opening sequence Eve ponders her reason for being, "I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing.
Very well; I will be very watchful now, and if any day-before-yesterdays happen I will make a note of it. It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM-an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more."
What is it about this quote from a story written as posthumous love-letter for Livy, Mark Twain's wife who died in June 1904, that it casts such a vivid reflection of myself when I peer into it?