White Sands

On a summer day that in England was wet and miserable, leading to floods and incorrect use of commas, we found ourselves in what seemed like the tropics. This beach was wide and sheltered, fed by peaty streams, treadmills for the trout that came down from the mile-long lake higher up. Given an hour or two I am sure I could have tickled one up for tea. The fishing here was licence-free. In this part of the country, the children had already returned to school, so many tiny, single-room places all over this island, and the beach was ours. Maybe in the distance, we would see some flash of white as a caravan scraped its way along the single-track roads, trying to find hard-standing in the face of expected wet weather; maybe we saw the odd birder picked out only as a movement of green on green in the distance, but we never got close enough to speak to anyone.

One Sunday, shamed we were waved at by someone reading in a garden. We waved back, not sure if waving was allowed on the Sabbath but they looked liked mainlanders at the very least though the cow with its head over the wall being fed and tickled indicated that they lived here all the time. We walked miles in the sunshine that day not expecting to burn but we did. Sun from the sky and sun from the white sand got us from two directions. In the distance, the form of a sleeping woman was pointed out, an incubus maybe, for the faithful to these stones. And I saw her smile at our discomfort and dislike of the rest of the world in this perfumed moorland.

And the stones! This island was covered in aged reminders of us so long ago, families like us, existing in the face of harder things than we ever have to experience. A toothache un-checked, tiny bacteria raging across the population and now we get them in a second with cheap chemicals available everywhere. I imagined men, driven down by wet and cold and illness, hewing rock for months and then lugging it with brute force, up hills and for what? Something we can never know. In the early morning monotone, the stones took water like water, feeding the lichens and other rugged plants which clung to their sides. Close-up and they were like verdigris or some abstract painting of rough oil, not meant to be anything, but in this filmy coat were things more complex and meaningful than any art that humans may produce. The stones are laid out like an early cross, a symbol dragged up long before its current meaning made it one of three across the world that make us love and hate equally. Its long axis points at the sleeping woman in the mountains, indicating where the moon will rise out of the gaps. Where the two axes cross, there was found a cairn. I did read what they found in it but maybe it was not important enough to remember. Bones or pots but nothing really matters, only what it becomes as a symbol of the ultimate nostalgia. Go back then? Maybe not with all that sickness and dying young but start the journey to then, indeed.

You know when you wish you could go back to a time before some trauma, thinking maybe you could undo it or warn people? Think what would really happen. You would carry on the same way and simply have that terrible event to go through again. Maybe start as a child with all the knowledge you have now and be gifted. Perhaps that is what happens, these precocious children and so clever, than when older they find some way of starting again with all their accumulated knowledge. Not sure about that. But is there a time you want to go back to? What would you want to undo? Not a good idea really is it? I imagine myself, reading adult books under the shade of a tree in the rose garden (no running or shouting) at our old school. No work to go to, no football to play, just sucking up the future, making what I already knew better. Should I learn how to use commas properly but then again the rest of the world will have to define that before I can possibly know. Take this further and regress over and over, go back to carefree days and layer your understanding of the world, repeat, reiterate, learn new things and understand the world, the universe, the branes beyond it.

There was a description of a new type of brain scan on the radio the other day. It is called Magnetoencephalography and complements existing technologies in that it tells us when things happen and has a millisecond frequency. Take this together with older types of scans which are slow but locate actions in space within the brain, and you have mind-reading. Well maybe not but it makes me think of the acres of space left in our heads that we do not use. I was talking to my daughter yesterday before she went to sleep and we ranged over many things. At her leavers’ service for her infants’ school last week, one of her classmates said that when he grew up he wanted to be a scientist and discover a potion to make people live longer. My daughter was intrigued by this and it got us onto telomeres and why people get old. She asserted that learning new things pushes old stuff out of your brain and she was amazed when I told her that nothing ever gets pushed out because no human has ever come close to filling up the brain. I told her about memory in computers (she gave up trying to understand binary) but loved the idea of neurons and all the connections between them making memory. And all this comes out of that lump of jelly wobbling around on the top of your backbone, a complex thing making new connections all the time and forgetting nothing. We will have all that in machine before long, copies of mind. The existence of human physiology is proof that mechanical copies can be as good when the technology reached that point. What about memory and brain and consciousness? We are onto soul and that infinite point when mind and body come together in some confluence of two medical disciplines – probably more than two. I’ve got soul.