*A Swahili wisdom tradition teaches that time is divided between the Sasha and the Zamani. The Sasha is equivalent to the present and not so distant past, while the Zamani encompasses the distant past AND the deep future--perhaps eternity, although the personal oblivion we’re all headed towards may be closer to it. (But only as remembered individuals, as we'll see below). As long as there is one person alive who remembers the deceased--and actually knew them--the departed remains in the Sasha, along with the living. When the last person dies who knew the deceased, as an aunty say, the aunt is absorbed into the Zamani. So the Zamani holds both the most ancient of pasts as well as the future that awaits us all—even the most famous. Alexander the Great, for example, passed into the Zamani not even a century after his untimely demise in Babylon.

(For Western schools of thought perhaps the nearest we come is Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious. From their location deep in the distant past, Jung’s universal archetypes continue to shape and drive human behavior.)

Zamani is not the same as oblivion—the ultimate in forgetting. Instead, the deceased joins a kind of undifferentiated, or so it appears to mortal eyes anyway, planetary, if not universal storehouse of knowledge. And it’s true that so much of what we do, know and inherit is subconscious, below waking, analytical reflection—the ground beneath our glittering, unsteady façades. Although today the nonlinear, relativistic  nature of time underwrites much of our technology (the maps on our cellphones would be worthless otherwise) nearly all First Peoples, in fact pretty much every culture not affected by some version of “ethical” monotheism, have long understood the timeless nature of time. As did William Faulkner.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. ” Faulkner may have been writing about the American South but his observation applies to everyone everywhere in every time.

At some point, or really at various points, people who attempt to become historians of their own lives are confronted by the enormous, unwieldy data set that represents their personal history. Like professional historians they may find themselves reaching for the tools of analysis and generalization. At their peril these auto-historians (Chevys only please) may then draw conclusions, maybe even ‘learn lessons’. Yet any effort at objectivity is probably doomed from the start: Whenever a two legged activates their own mental time travel portal--even if the coordinates are set for a sacred time and place, say their earliest memory--brain researchers report that the very act of retrieving that (or any) memory changes it, if only slightly. The voyager may think they're going back in time but the entire trip takes place in the present, and the future as it moves into the present moment by moment. So not only can the past determine the present, our present is constantly changing our past. It’s a truth so obvious as to be almost invisible: the quantity and the quality of what we’re perceiving at any given moment--whether the show is projected from without or within--is utterly dependent on our mood, circumstance, and attention (or lack thereof.)  Talk about The Unreliable Narrator...

If Zamani encompasses pretty much all ancestral knowledge than what survives 50 or 100 years after the final bow? Effects—consciously performed and not. These would include but are not limited to genetic, societal, and environmental effects—both those inflicted upon us and those we’ve inflicted, er bequeathed, unto others. A daughter’s smile and way of tilting her head brings back a great grandmother she has no conscious memory of. An anxious parent or legal guardian opens their mouth and father, or grandmother, or some other ancient care giver comes leaping out. Completely unbidden. Or so it would appear. Back to that sub thing again.

For those hoping to be reborn as a bigger, badder version of themselves Zamani may be pretty thin gruel. The concept could actually be more useful for our present life: Sasha and Zamani remind us that memory is really all we are. I also take from it the salubrious reminder that there is no such thing as History, enthroned and marbleized. Much less the bearded one’s “judgement”. And there never was. There are only histories, lots and lots of histories. And while every single version is woefully incomplete, taken altogether they are the map marking the home we came from and where we’ll finally return, hoping along with Elliot to know the place for the first time.