{"id":1072,"date":"2018-04-09T18:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T18:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/?p=1072"},"modified":"2022-10-26T12:44:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T12:44:44","slug":"man-of-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/man-of-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Man of Old"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Joe Stanley<\/span><\/p>\n

one<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Friday night came with the usual gathering in the camp\u2019s meeting tent. A new stack of beer cans in cardboard cases waited, the reward for a hard week\u2019s work. Through its lubrication, the stuffy, formal discussions drown in the music and swam in playful silliness.<\/span><\/p>\n

This and a work-free weekend promised the Professor\u2019s students a little vacation in paradise. Here on the Professor\u2019s family land, they were surrounded by a wilderness that could be harsh. That even the natives of the region weren\u2019t found out here was proof of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Professor brought students out here for the chance to experience fieldwork. They represented each of the college\u2019s departments, and their work went to the book the Professor had been working on. Contributing students would be credited in that work, for some it would be the first steps of many into scientific academia.<\/span><\/p>\n

They had come for the chance to earn that credit. It was an invaluable experience that promised to lead them on to greater opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Harold sunk into his chair, peering through sunglasses across the shining aluminum can. Beer, he thought, was a diabolical poison. It would lure you into a false sense of comfort, make you forget your troubles for a while. It always seemed to be there, standing by like a reliable friend, ready to convince you everything\u2019s okay. Then, one day, you wake up to find you\u2019re an alcoholic, with a dying liver. You\u2019re not as smart, or funny or desirable as you thought you were. It tricked you into making a fool of yourself, and now you\u2019re hung over too. Not to mention the disgusting gas, ready to escape you from both ends. Beer, my old fiend, he thought, you\u2019re prince charming in a can.<\/span><\/p>\n

He eyed them all with an intuitive suspicion, for intelligent people they were quick to ridicule and insult each other. As amusing as it was to watch intellectuals psycho-morph into drooling idiots, however, he had to admit it was more fun to join them. He promised himself that he\u2019d try to keep his wits, he knew he was swimming with sharks in a sea of ethanol.<\/span><\/p>\n

The music had died down and a discussion was hopping around the room, from person to person. He closed his eyes and listened, paying little attention to who said what, but following the journey from fact to fantasy with a strange sense of intrigue.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey seem kind of typical, beliefs of cycles in nature, that the world has been made and remade. I think that at least smacks of the idea of evolution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cScience in the guise of superstition?\u201d punctuated with laughter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think so, evolution is gradual, a world remade sounds like a sudden change. It hints that something existed before, people before people, so in the end nothing has really changed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople before people, sounds like a reference to the predecessors of modern man. It is believed that we coexisted with other \u2018things\u2019 early in our history, and it\u2019s almost implied that we not only knew of them, but that we had something to do with their disappearance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a common idea, there\u2019s a reference in the bible, something about giants, giants in the earth. I never really paid attention in Sunday school though. Then there\u2019s the eternal headache of the story of Atlantis, though that\u2019s obviously fiction\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cObviously?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just a literary device to illustrate some point\u2026political, social, cultural propaganda. Who cares?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThese are from the dawn of recorded history, Stories of the old world before us. I think it\u2019s to the point.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAtlantis isn\u2019t just Plato\u2019s story, it was obtained from the Egyptians. We know that they practiced the selective recording of history, that they omitted aspects they didn\u2019t like. Are we really supposed to believe that they also didn\u2019t indulge the urge to include things that weren\u2019t true? I think it\u2019s an issue to their credibility. If anything is suspect then all of it is questionable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt any rate, you can\u2019t even discover history in Egypt. It has to be approved by their historical society. Findings that contradict established beliefs are discredited, ridiculed and buried in the sand so to speak. Careers had been destroyed there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The thought of a dead career elicited a moment of silence.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSounds like they still have issues with the truth. I guess the Pharaohs still rule Egypt, despite the remade world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems that without constant maintenance, the modern world would be largely gone in a few decades, and the last, lingering traces would be lucky to remain for a few centuries. If we just vanished, there\u2019d be nothing to prove we were here for long. Really, who can say what might have been lost millions of years ago? The earth has seen multiple mass extinctions\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think we can presume we\u2019re the first of our kind, and the greatest so far.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy though? If we\u2019ve actually achieved anything significant\u2026 Remember that we have a ready means to self-disposal. What if there were, before us, other beings that had done the same?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cImagine that. Tempted by the ultimate evil they succumb! In the flashing fires of war, they burn their own civilization to ashes. Nature just rolls on, century by century, and the traces of them fade into nothing. Less than ghosts, lost forever.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut that\u2019s why we\u2019re here. That\u2019s why we dig in the dirt and sweat in the burning sun. We\u2019re not just looking for fossils or artifacts, we\u2019re looking for the truth. When we find it, once we\u2019ve decoded its lost language, we bring that truth to the world. We\u2019re bearing the greatest gift.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, as long as Egyptologists agree with it\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur lost friends believed it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Natives were a tricky subject. There were none out here, and those nearest had a questionable pedigree. They weren\u2019t the authentic culture of the region, but a mixture of old and new worlds.<\/span><\/p>\n

What they were like before was anyone\u2019s guess. Even the Professor had little to say on the subject. After decades of research on the land itself, he offered nothing to pierce the veil of the unknown that shrouded them. Although a few human relics had turned up now and then, there was no evidence of any nearby human settlement.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what they believed, there really aren\u2019t any of them left.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the stories they left behind. We can find the influence other cultures have had on them and, when we remove it, what remains is likely to be theirs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the problem. Early cultures, in their simplicity, are likely to have similar beliefs. It isn\u2019t even surprising to hear the same story – a story of remade civilizations- the great flood for instance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman beings need resources to survive. Early settlements were by necessity near sources of water, usually by rivers. When people have lived by a river for centuries, it\u2019s only natural that they would remember the floods and droughts that must occur. The death and destruction a flood could bring to those people is a ready-made cultural memory.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe find stories of a great deluge in early civilizations all over the world. We might start to wonder if they could really be talking about the same event. It\u2019s more likely that a flood is a such powerful, universal symbol that people in riverside settlements would naturally include them in their myths and later in their history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEven today we can trust the accounts of eye-witnesses. Embellishments and exaggeration usually hide the truth of things. When early people passed these stories on they were changed, no doubt, from \u2018a big flood\u2019 to the \u2018biggest flood.\u2019 It\u2019s simple enough to guess that through traditions of ancestor worship, to honor the ancestors and their many struggles, they would interpret the famous flood as the greatest of all time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe myth of the great flood, found all over the world, suggests itself as fact. Yet there is no evidence of a global deluge, there are only traces of floods that would have had a great impact on the people of the riverside.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Having beaten a dead horse, the subject seemed ready to evaporate.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn the subject of myths and remade worlds, I found a fable that referred to the last \u2018makeover.\u2019 At the end of it there were two groups – men from the old world and men from the new. The old man was bigger and stronger, while the new man was smaller and weaker. The talk about how the old ones drove them out of the forest kingdoms into a more dangerous world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe new men were forced to use their minds to solve the problems they couldn\u2019t meet physically.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere the story of the old ones becomes one of the bogeyman, a shrewd, hulking beast. Some relic of a lost world, it\u2019s jealous of the new man and his fire. Children and the child-like people of this early culture had a reason to fear the dark, the forest depths, and the wild man or beast man that haunts it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll together it makes for an interesting tale that\u2019s largely entertaining, but the idea is more than just a universal fear, I think. Even if there is exaggeration, there must have been a kernel of truth that inspired it. Like the big flood that became the biggest flood there has to be something more because people really aren\u2019t that creative.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the waters of the great flood finally receded and man was given a new world. What did they get from old man of the forest?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to the myth, he and his offspring still haunt the wilder places, places modern men have no use for. I would suppose that the benefit of this myth is a taboo of safety, preventing them from wandering far from home, keeping them safe and their culture together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an interesting story, but without proof it\u2019s just a story. We contradict ourselves, being both so ignorant that we don\u2019t really know what\u2019s going on, and at the same time we\u2019re clever enough to lie and deceive. The poor truth, whatever it may be, has some difficult obstacles to cross.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

next part<\/span><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

back to previous episode<\/a><\/p>\n

back to list of stories<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Joe Stanley one Friday night came with the usual gathering in the camp\u2019s meeting tent. A new stack of beer cans in cardboard cases waited, the reward for a hard week\u2019s work. Through its lubrication, the stuffy, formal discussions drown in the music and swam in playful silliness. This and a work-free weekend promised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[8,182],"class_list":["post-1072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joe-stanley","tag-joe-stanley","tag-man-of-old"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2871,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions\/2871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonathanharker.co.uk\/theghostlyworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}