I try to determine what the wall is, where it’s leading Essa, and what walking the wall costs
her.
This is the central conflict, dilemma, struggle, call it
whatever you want, of my newest novel,
THE
VALLEN. From conception (during the 2016 Presidential campaign in the
United States) to brainstorming to outline to writing
the rough draft then many other drafts after, I’ve come to the point where
I have now completed a submittable manuscript.
And all the while…
I’ve been asking…
Just what is the wall?
It’s Essa’s main nemesis, yet it is not just her
traveling along the wall, step by torturous step, starving, struggling to find
enough water in the basinlands where the wall stretches, without break, from
one horizon to the next. It is also her struggle with her own memories…
And what are memories but our own knowledge, gained through experience, accumulated over time?
People
smarter than me say that memory is like nodal network of brain cells, neurons
and such. That the relation of one memory to the next is unique in every
individual, such that what triggers a memory for you is not necessarily what
triggers such memory in another; that even memories of the same event may be
remembered differently by different people.
Memory is as plastic as our brain. Scientists assert that after
about only 10 days, if all sensual input was stored (remembered), the human
nervous system would reach capacity — we would not be capable of remembering
anymore. That forgetfulness (and
compression) is as pivotal to the
functioning of memory as actual remembrance
is, particularly when it comes to the timescales memories are “assigned” —
whether to be forgotten sooner or later, after a minute or after years have
passed.
And when that memory
is held by a society or by a family or tribe, and passed on, generation through
generation, we call that memory knowledge.
Social communication. Learning methods and educational institutions.
Libraries. Museums. Data centers. Brains. Media activities and types.
Transmittal of information in countless directions. Out to Earth orbit and
back. A hive of thought. A mindfulness, projected and humming, of the entire human race.
Is this the wall Essa must overcome?
Of brick upon brick stacking up to insurmountable,
incomprehensible height? Of knowledge built so high and over so vast a length —
a timescale, an x-axis — as to be un-understandable, ungraspable, no matter how
panoramic your view?
This is the wall.
This is what Essa must overcome, trudging kilom after kilom,
endlessly. Leaving all past knowledge over time behind her. Partition after
partition. Solid concrete.
This is the journey
not only she, but the dystopian
society she has left behind, must make. To forget some things. And remember
others. Only…
Which do we choose to remember and which to forget?