Dissolution: A Novel

by Nicholas Binge

memory is the basis for expertise,” Raph said. “Studies that have been done on experts in their fields, whether it’s chess grandmasters, concert pianists, or military generals, show that one of the key differences is their working memory in that field.

Generals intuitively know the best tactic, the best strategy, but we all know intuition doesn’t exist. Intuition is based on subconscious memory. The more you remember, the more you can understand.”

It doesn’t matter how well you play the game if the other player gets to set up the board.

There is a mistaken belief that only the empirical sciences, only mathematics and logic, are the languages of the universe, but this is narrow-minded. If we ignore our shared mythology, our gods, our stories, we neglect the very thing that makes us human.

Sure, you can probably get some kind of machine these days to clean the floors in half the time, but that’s the thing about capitalism: it doesn’t work if you don’t have a working class. There’ll always be menial jobs for the people who need to be reminded of their place.

I am reminded of an Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“There is never a good reason to suppress knowledge, Maggie. Throughout history, humanity has tried, from religions and censorship to inquisitions and dictators. People who benefit from the status quo. People who are scared of change. That is what Sunrise represents. But it never works. It never helps.

There was such a sense of destruction in us back then, the kind that only exists when you’re a teenager, I think. Some of us liked wrecking other things, but mostly it was self-destruction.

creativity, whether in arts or sciences, can be defined as the ability to form connections between ideas and images—to create something new from the old, whether a building or a scientific hypothesis or a novel. If the core of creativity is linking disparate facts, then the more you have in your brain, the better you are at coming up with new ideas.

I could do this with ten thousand images and you’d get them right. The point is, it’s not a capacity issue. Your brain hasn’t forgotten which pictures it saw; it just isn’t letting you access them. This is like a loophole—a little work-around to trick your brain into letting you remember them.”

Two years ago, in ’61, they established the first council for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. There wasn’t a single one of our people on it—just whitefellas. It doesn’t matter what knowledge our people may or may not have. We haven’t been hiding it. The whitefella just isn’t interested.” “But with something as big as this, that could all change.” Simon shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s a structural matter—they view knowledge from a window that has been carefully placed to exclude the kinds of knowledge we have: old knowledge, Indigenous knowledge. What may have begun as an ignoring of our peoples turned into habit, a continued forgetting.

“It’s a question of what you value. You’ve grown up thinking that your rigid Western approach to problems is the only one that exists. It’s not that you ignore the knowledge we have; it’s that you ignore the entire knowledge framework. Any knowledge that isn’t come to by strict logic and empirical science is unimportant.

Faith isn’t about them. It’s about you. We can’t all have faith in the same thing. The question is: What will you put your faith in, Stanley? What will you believe in?”