Temporal Projection for the Unmaking of Regret

The rhythm of the Sun and Moon reinforce our perception of time as a sequential phenomenon - cause preceding effect ad infinitum. When the Sun and Moon are both below the horizon, as they are during the night of a new moon, for example, this reinforcement is at its weakest, and careful contemplation can yield a somewhat flattened perception of time. At these times, as many of you have experienced, memory is more vivid and divination is easier. The present takes on the quality of the surface of a still, dark pool of water, and past becomes depth.

At these times, it is possible to project yourself into the past, correct misdeeds, unmake regret, by following this procedure:

1. Achieve a "past as depth" perception of time. In the true dark of the moonless night, meditate on the nature of time, until you can achieve this "flattened" perception of time. I find it useful actually imagine the surface of that dark pool of water as a kind of aid. I also find that sound-cancelling headphones help.
   
   
2. Recall a memory of yourself that you regret. Bring it as near to the surface of the pool as you can, and do your best to clarify it - which involves the mindful removal of embellishments and self-deception that can adhere to memory like barnacles and algae - especially on memories of our own regrettable actions. This exercise must be completed in good faith.
   
   
3. Construct the empathic bridge. Once you can hold the memory near to the surface and you have clarified it, your regret, if unchecked, has the potential to overwhelm and dissolve the spell, leaving you with nothing but a vivid recollection of a regrettable memory. In order to achieve projection, it is crucial that you are able to construct an empathic bridge to your past self. Put simply, the empathic bridge is the recognition that you and your past self are the same. Experience the memory from their (i.e. your) point of view. Recognize that the growth and the hindsight that are behind you now are ahead of them, then. Recognize the fear (it is almost always fear) that caused you to act the way you did, and finally, critically, forgive yourself.
   
   
4. Achieve projection.
   "Projection" is an imperfect word, as it implies travelling. In reality, upon the completion of steps 1-3, your "present" and "past" selves become functionally indistinguishable with regards to time. This is not the imposition of your will onto that of your past self, but instead the recognition that their will is your will. Nothing is overridden, nor are any separate things joined. Instead, a timeless unity is recognized. Recognizing this unity, you can shift your attention to the will, agency, and context of your past self, gaining (or, more accurately, "recognizing") the ability to reshape the past. This step happens spontaneously as a result of contemplation of a well-constructed empathic bridge.

Unfortunately, despite the successful achievement of projection, your past self will not suddenly gain that hindsight and growth that has inspired you to undertake this process in the first place. To lean on the imperfect but useful "travelling" metaphor, when you project into the past, you will only know and feel what you knew and felt then. This unfortunate reality entails two things: first, that as your past self, you will likely, if not inevitably, behave the same way you did before, and second, that you will only ever remember conducting the ritual heretofore outlined in those instances in which you fail to achieve projection.

Understandably, These two seemingly insurmountable obstacles are enough to keep some people from ever bothering with this process, but I believe that with some careful re-framing of expectations, this process can still be fruitful.

• Instead of imagining reaching back into your memory, consider that the real trick takes place in the time-forward direction: recognize that you might now be a projection of your future self, seeking to unmake regret. Though it is much more difficult from the vantage of the past, you may be able to glimpse the empathic bridge that joins you and any future instance of yourself.
  
  Now that you know of this ritual, you are able to ask yourself, as a daily practice of mindfulness, "Why have I been sent back?"
  
  This need not be a new source of anxiety. Your future self would not expect you to do anything you can't do (in fact they could not possibly expect such a thing, having successfully constructed the empathic bridge). Furthermore, if, from the past end of the bridge, you fail to recognize the projection and you bring about the same regret, you can always (and inevitably will) conduct the ritual again later.
  
  
• Don't worry about failing the ritual. Recognize that you will remember every time you fail to achieve projection but you will not remember any time you succeed. What's more, I find that that the exercise of constructing empathic bridges to be worthwhile, even when I do not achieve projection.

I try to ask myself often, "why have I been sent back?". Of course, it usually feels like casting a fishing line into an empty ocean, but today I felt the edges of an empathic bridge, hardly there at all. I felt the nearness of myself. I felt my compassion. I realized then that I hadn't been the best steward of my own brain lately, stuck inside my home office, more beer than water this weekend. In the moment, I couldn't manage much else than to open a window and pour myself a glass of water. Not much, but it's a start. Maybe enough that I won't have to come back again.

Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

     Hundreds or thousands of years ago, somebody cooked what they imagined was a simple dinner and shared it with someone they loved. The two of them sat down to eat it, toasted each other, and took their first bites. God, watching this, got on His megaphone and pronounced to all the Earth, “Hearken, my children! It’s taken four thousand years, but you have found pasta, garlic, olive oil, parsley, and parmesan cheese, and combined them into a dish both humble and divine. Having found this Secret Dish, and shared it with another in a moment of peace and love, you have brought about the end of this experiment. It’s time for you all to join me in Heaven where we will live together forever – every day peace and love from beginning to end – and we will have pasta just like that every day and you will never get sick of it or get fat. What do you say?” Only no one heard Him, because the Devil, in his first and only act since the apple in the garden, had taken the batteries out of the megaphone. God looked over to Jesus, who shrugged and said, “Let’s just keep watching and see what they do,” and now here we are, cleverer than what’s good for us, clevering up all kinds of suffering worse than what God ever thought we could, and Him and Jesus and the Holy Ghost are all hovering around the TV, watching us and biting their nails.

Emergence

They are each grain the same

And so the laws that govern each

But desert plain is not a plane

And there are ripples on the beach

The crest is not the best – no less the lee, nor least the rest

Nonetheless is sand arranged at Sand's behest

Coal - Part II

The gritty desert wind carried a raspy, humming sound that tortured Michael’s imagination for half an hour before he finally came to the old aluminum street sign. The wind was playing it like a skeletal violin. In the sparse moonlight, he could only just make out “Old Highway Ten”.

No more, said a voice in his head, next time you see headlights, you have to stay in sight.

He would, he decided. But in the meantime, he would keep walking. He walked even though his feet were starting to catch on the road. He walked until the humming of the sign only came after him in derisive shreds. Then, he walked until those were gone, too.

If he had thought about it, he might have decided that moving felt better than standing still. But he didn’t think about it. He didn’t think about anything, until all at once, the horizon was glowing, and he had just a moment to wonder whether he had walked through the night, or he had fallen asleep on his feet, before headlights erupted over the crest of an invisible hill. They might have shone in through his eyes and clear out the back of his skull. He threw an arm across his eyes and instinctively stumbled towards the berm, but a voice shouted in his mind.

No. If you spend another night in a ditch, we will both die.

It was true, of course, but it still took all of his effort to stand still.

The vehicle slowly came to a stop some distance away – some tens or thousands of feet – unknowable in that liminal space made half of midnight and half of weapons-grade headlights and an engine idle that could only have belonged to a freight train.

The lights dimmed a little when the operator stopped the engine. Michael fought to see as much as he could through teary, squinting eyes, blocking the light with an outstretched hand. He heard a car door open and then close again, and after too long a silence, he felt a kind of claustrophobia set in. He was alone with some invisible stranger in a room that was at once infinite and too small.

“Hello?” Michael called out, when he couldn’t take any more of his nerves. Otherwise, he would have had to dash for the berm.

“Are you okay?” someone called back.

“I’m lost.”

And you’re thirsty.

“…and I’m thirsty.”

“Shit,” said the stranger, much closer now, “How long have you been out here?”

“Two days, I guess.”

“Come on. I got- shit, I don’t have water in the cab. Coffee would probably kill you right now. But I’ve got some carrots. Come on, I’ll call the police and we’ll see if they want me to take you somewhere. You’re a ways out from… well, from anywhere.” The driver’s indistinct silhouette passed in front of the headlights and Michael caught a flash of the desert around him – of sagebrush throwing long shadows far out across hardpack desert.

“No police. Please. I’m tr-AH!” A hand was suddenly on his shoulder, guiding him toward the headlights.

“You illegal?” Said the voice – a man’s voice. Maybe young.

“I don’t think so,” said Michael.

“Police will get you to your people. You don’t need to be scared.”

They passed out of the beam of the headlights and around to the passenger side of a truck outlined in a constellation of little yellow lights. Michael looked back to the illuminated wedge of desert and asphalt in front of the truck. He traced the light out along the road until it slowly gave way to dark. It was like staring down into an ocean, and the idea of wandering around in it was all at once terrifying to him. The man opened the passenger door, and Michael climbed up, hand over hand, into the cab.

The cab was clean. A sharp, chemical smell came up off of the seats and made Michael’s eyes water. But his seat was comfortable, and it was only seconds before his body remembered sleep. He blinked wide and sat forward on the edge of the seat. He would be able to sleep, soon, but not yet.

The driver side door opened and the stranger hopped up into the cab.

“Shoulda’ had the hazards on,” he said. He reached behind the steering wheel and the truck started flashing - ting tick, ting tick.

“I need you to take me to Salina,” said Michael, but the man was already reaching for his phone.

“Sorry, but I can’t take you anywhere. I’m sure the police will take you to Salina,” he said. He looked at the display on his phone and grimaced. “Shit. S’okay, I have a sat-phone in the sleeper. Hang on.” He started to leave.

“Wait,” said Michael. There was something ghastly in his voice. The air shuddered to carry it.

The man surprised himself when he froze – one hand on the grab rail. He convinced himself that it was silly that goosebumps had crawled up his arms, but he didn’t notice that he was also holding his breath.

“Please, I’m trying to get back to my parents. The police make me go to my aunt’s house, and she makes me work. I’ll run away again and maybe I’ll die. Please take me to Salina.”

The man sat back down and shut the door. He looked like he might say something, but he didn’t. He slowly drew his seatbelt across his chest, turned off the hazard lights, and started the truck.

“Let me know if you get cold,” he said. The brakes whined and the truck rolled forward.

Michael sat back into his seat and shut his eyes.

Coal - Part I

After Michael had to run away, he spent about a year working in a restaurant for a man named Mr. Truong. Michael lived on rice noodles and marked time in Sunday dinner rushes until he was taken one morning - led across the damp parking lot, still night-cold under his bare feet, into a police car that took him to a series of concerned strangers, and ultimately to Mr. And Mrs. Marshall, who greeted him with a blue plastic tub full of sneakers of all different sizes, a bowl of buttered noodles, and a room that was to be his.

“And I won’t go in there unless you invite me or if I feel like you’re makin’ some kin’of trouble for yourself,” said Mrs. Marshall, “This is your room, for as long as you’re here.”

It was as great a kindness as he had ever known, or would again for some time. That was the first night he had slept behind a door that locked from the inside, and he slept deeply.

He stayed for three months - not long enough to heal, but long enough that mist began to creep into his memories – that same mist that takes your dreams. He found it hard to remember what was true, and that entire years of his old life could bob up to the surface and sink again like shapeless, rotting logs in murky water. He left the Marshalls’ on the day his sister’s face began to blur.

They aren’t going to take you back.

“I don’t want to go back,” he said, “I want to get Sara.”

Marking Time

               A few months ago, I pulled a rock out of the mud in a clear pool near the banks of the Winisk, where it lets into Hudson Bay. As soon as I did, I felt some funny kind of shame I couldn’t describe or justify. I put it back as faithfully as I could, smoothed the mud back over it, and watched the turbid water clear. Since then, the thought of it has persisted like a sort of memetic infection – loudest in what would have been quiet moments.

               I felt it again, more acutely this time. I had been rummaging for a AA battery, cracking open drawers that hadn’t had light let into them for months, and each relic they contained had a sort of dull heat radiating from it. At first, just like before, I couldn’t say what it was that bothered me. I just felt generally repulsed. And closing the drawers didn’t help; I had let something out. Working my way down the row, I came to the drawer with the watch in it.

               It was an old Casio with a black plastic band and a black face with radon-green hands, still ticking. It was white hot.

               I closed the drawer, I closed my eyes, but an afterimage persisted, still ticking. Existential heat – that’s what it was; I’d been burned. For the last however-long, I’d gone about my days and the watch had been there, marking time, its hours as long as mine. My ignorance of the hugeness of its being was gone and would never come back. I thought about taking its battery out, or just smashing it with a hammer, but in the end, I decided to put it on. It’s just a watch now, and the hours it marks are mine.

               But there’s still a rock in the mud near the banks of the Winisk, where it lets into Hudson Bay, and its hours are its own, and just as long.

The King's Alchemist - Part I

               Marcus had fallen asleep an apprentice natural philosopher. When Artom shook him awake the next morning, he was the King’s Alchemist – though the title wouldn’t settle into common use for several weeks. It was an unprecedented promotion in an unprecedented context, but the aspect of that dark night that would go on to win over Marcus’s memory was, despite it all, how well he had slept. He enjoyed many dreams, rich and long, throughout that night. He’d felt no unease as the world roiled and shifted under his bed. He hadn’t lurched awake, covered in night sweat, when the axe was put through his master’s neck. He might have slept into the middle of the day if Artom hadn’t awoken him. That he could know such peace through such a night would sow hidden thorns in any moment of peace he would have thereafter.

               “Marcus, get up! He’s gone and done it – worse than we thought! Marcus, the whole Academy is dissolved – run off or dead,”

               “Where is Boris?” Marcus asked, one foot still in his dreams.

               “Master Grey is dead – taken from his bed in the night and executed for treason,” Artom said, and Marcus’s ears filled with the sound of his own racing blood and his mind was a hornet’s nest. Artom went on, as if setting down a heavy burden, “The guard fell on everyone at once. The charge on each head was treason. Krauss was up through the night, by some grace. He heard them coming and knew it for what it was, bless him. He got a few of them out. The rest are dead – that we know of – paraded to the block like Dellian spies. There are some we don’t know about. Addie Mercer might have some people in the Sounding room with her – or at least, the guard was having trouble there – they were bundling sawgrass – they’re going to smoke them out – god! – Like rats!”

               “Artom, what do we… are they coming for us?” Marcus asked, and he hated himself for it, but he was relentlessly pragmatic, and anyone who knew him well would expect and forgive him his tactlessness. Artom didn’t know him that well.

               “We’re safe, if it comforts you to know it,” Artom said, “as safe as they were yesterday, at least.”

               “Do we run? What are the others doing?”

               “Most of the other students are doing their best not to draw attention to themselves. The outward position of the dormitories is one of perfect fealty. Godwilling, we’ll all be sent home to our families.”

               And that, they both knew, hinged upon how the sound of the day’s last beheading fell on the King’s ear – whether that moment would resound as the bloody exclamation point of his fevered raving, or another ellipsis in this series of ellipses.

               “Most? What of the rest?” Marcus was on the edge of his bed, lacing his boots, which he imagined was the first step to whatever came next, “There must be talk.”

               Something in the hall caught their ears. Shifting furniture. Hushed and urgent voices. Marcus was rapt, but Artom, who had already endured a hushed and urgent morning, continued.

               “There is talk. Some. Mostly variations on the theme of running. There’s a plot to destroy the registry and just fade back into the populous.”

               “You sound unconvinced,” said Marcus, still half-focused on the activity outside. He crossed the room, touched his forehead to his door, and shut his eyes.

               “The idea there is that, without the registry, we can escape and his majesty wouldn’t know our necks from any others younger than twenty years, but yes, I am unconvinced.”

               Marcus came back from the door, unsatisfied. “Because it takes as granted that he wouldn’t have every such person killed,” he said.

               “Whereas I think he might, if his rotting mind decides we’re also the enemy, and in destroying the registry we'd be openly declaring that we thought him ours. In that case, we should expect he do no less than what he has already done to rout all his other ‘enemies’,”

               “He has never killed half of his citizens,” said Marcus, “But I’m sure I see what you are saying.”

               “What he has done, over and over again, is surprise us with the degree of cruelty and unreason with which he acts in response to his capricious fears. His razing his own kingdom would be surprising. Everything he has done for these three exhausting years has been surprising.”

               “I follow you, and I suppose I agree, at least in that he would go to terrible ends. But then, are you advocating that we do nothing, or-”

Sounds in the hall, again. Not conflict, but definitely decisive motion. Both boys went animal-still trying to discern the nature of the commotion. Doors opening and closing, one after another. It was not random, but systematic. “It’s a search,” said Marcus, and a futile urgency seized them.

               “I’m saying we have to do far more,” Artom said, “The registry is a half-measure, but to be idle is to actively forfeit our lives. Marcus, we need you.”

Marcus felt a charge in the way he said ‘we’. The word crackled in the air between them. There was nothing hypothetical about it. Herman Krauss and Adalei Mercer were part of ‘we’. Master Grey was part of ‘we’, dead or no. Other students, members of the court, and some contingency of the guard who had seen enough cruelty, all passing coded messages and meeting in root cellars.

Most importantly, Marcus knew he himself to be part of ‘we’, but all he had time to say before the door opened was “Yes”.

First through the door was the end of a rusty halberd, held at length by some young guard conscript. The rest of his detail was nervously brandishing similar weapons down the hall in either direction.

“We’ve a summons for Marcus Locke,” said one senior guard among them, and he held at arm’s length what might have been the corresponding order, but his reach was half that of the boy’s restless blade, so the paper would go without scrutiny.

“I deny any charges of wrongdoing,” Marcus said. He began to step forward, but thought better of it when his eyes met the young conscript’s. There he saw a wild temper and little sleep.

“You are not under arrest,” said the senior guard, “I am to escort you to the Azure Mission. Now, if you would.”

“If I am not under arrest- The Mission? What is this? I could be of no use to the Mission.”

“And they will learn that to their satisfaction, I’m sure.” In a fashion he imagined subtle, the guard rested his hand on the pommel of the sword at his belt.

“I can make my way there, myself, if it’s all the same,” said Marcus.

“You are being deliberately and pointlessly difficult. You have no idea how lucky you are,” said the senior guard.

The boy with the halberd snarled.

“Put your prick away, child,” said Marcus, and then to the senior guard, “I’ll take myself to the Mission. What’s more, I’ll take my things, and I’ll take my time. You’re welcome to follow me, if you feel you’d otherwise be derelict in your duties.”

“Marcus, just go with them; you’re embarrassing yourself,” said Artom, holding Marcus’ coat and leather satchel.