In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

I liked this; it seemed to reveal a truth I already knew. The mystery of the ship applied equally to ourselves, and always had done. Our immersion in the past, our existence, wherever we might technically be, in times and places remote from the present. So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this more as I got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on the other side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors – seeing perfectly and objectively – is neither desirable nor possible. So as I fed the second pouch in the garden, as I stepped cautiously over the floor in the mid-deck, as I gripped Helena’s dive watch and as I listened to archived audio clips of my mother’s voice, I was moving in a world largely of my own creation, a dream of the future built from an understanding of the past. Exactly like the two points along the display.