No Planet B - Part Eleven
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
MUSIC: finger symbol (twice)
The Buddha
[cockney] Nah, mate, I’m going back to me dad’s house to live the life of a pampered prince. In fact, do you know what - I know less after sitting on my jacksie under this tree for forty days than I did before I started. You got to be out there living, striving, trying to get on for this world to make sense. You know, like a dance you can’t figure it out until you’re in the dance. You know what I mean? I’ll lose some weight for a fucking start. State of me! I can’t even do my shirt up.
MUSIC: FINGER SYMBOL TWICE.
Babylon
By the time of the Babylonian Empire, English survives only in the odd, untranslatable word in an ancient song from the Hydrocarbon Age sung for the Sumerian kings by Ud players in the Great Palace of Sapor.
MUSIC: ‘ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK’ SUNG IN ARABIC. Listen to it here - 225kb
BACK-PROJECTION: ARABIC POEM
Alexander
Because Alexander’s carnage happens too late after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Gospels are neither written in Greek nor translated into Latin, thus Christianity remains a small Levantine cult with barely a presence in the Mediterranean states. In Istanbul, Alexander finds only one small church of fellow believers. The church is not even new-build, but converted from a Goth nightclub called Vaultz with a z.
Egyptians
A palace guard stands holding his spear outside the Tutankamen’s Palace. King Tutankamen walks in on his way to work.
KING TUT: All right? How are you doing?
PALACE GUARD: Yeah, good. Yourself?
KING TUT: I’m very well. Do anything good at the weekend?
PALACE GUARD: Well, yeah as it goes. I did some of that regression therapy. I was regressed back to a former life.
KING TUT: Oh yeah?
PALACE GUARD: Turns out, right, that in a past life I was the manageress of a crystal shop in Brighton.
KING TUT: Oh wow.
PALACE GUARD: Yeah, and I used to read this magazine called the Fortean Times and I was bang into the occult and all that.
KING TUT: Let’s meet up after work and have a long talk about it, cos I found out that in a past life I was an aromatherapist on a barge in Hebden Bridge, and I used to read a magazine called High Times which was for stoners.
The Hunter-Gatherer Years
Alas, humans discover fireworks before we have discovered fire. It is more difficult to harness the power of fireworks for cooking and heating. Hunter-gatherers cook by the ten second fuzz and buzz before the rocket takes off. ‘We must wait until a heavy mist before cooking lest we betray the location of our camp,’ they say. When the mist settles the cooking can begin.
Then humans discover fire, then forget it again. Just when we need it most...
The landfill’s toxic sumps start cooking and the sequestered carbon leaking. First the ice-caps melt, then the Gulf Stream switches off leading to a new Ice Age!