What happened to the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed? What happened to them, cave-dwellers, driven to their caves west of the invaders? They knew they did not belong and could not belong; they knew the world was not theirs. They were not hunted to extinction, I know that, but died of shame. No one tormented them, the new breed were kindness itself, bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, and that to take them was to die of shame. For all that, they still died, ashamed by their heavy brows and brutishness. They died even as the world was offered to them. They died because of that same offer, because of the shame in their hearts as they knew they were unmatched to the world, that nothing was possible for them, that their old lives had fallen away and the new breed was coming.
But they also knew, as they died of shame, that their successors, too, would one day die of shame. They knew the new breed would become the old breed and there were others on the way. And it is true, with our apish nostrils we can smell the change in the air, we sense what they, the new breed, cannot sense. A change is on the way, and as we are excluded, so they shall be excluded. A change is coming, the new breed beyond their breed has set out to find them. Will it always be like this, succession and annihilation? Will they always be be coming, the breed beyond the new breed? Will we always be outdated, we who are driven to the West, to the edge of Europe? They will come as they always came, with new skill-sets and new enthusiasms; they will come with a new sense of project and possibility; they come - faster than before, always more keen and eager than before, always wanting to involve us and to include everyone.
But don't they understand that by their coming they condemn us to death? Isn't their cruelty clear to them, they who come with their new enthusiasms? The day spreads all around us; we are comfortable here. We live and die beneath the wide sky. But the edge of our world is trembling; a new epoch is beginning and it will reach us even here. The old world is rotting and the new world is coming. The old world rusts but the new world will regenerate us. The unregenerated will be regenerated, the new world is opening. But how can we be regenerated? How will acquire knew knowledges and new skillsets? There will be courses, we know that. There will be fees and bursaries to help us, we know that. There are funds set aside for the transition, schemes to get the sick and the tired back to work, we are assured of that. The leaflets are dropping through our letterboxes. A new world, all of us, black and brown and yellow and white, in the pages of the leaflets.
But where are we in the leaflet pages? Where are the unregenerated, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? Where are the Neanderthals in the pamphlet pages? What will become of our swamps and still water? What will happen when they drain our marshes? Only the Neanderthal knows of the distance from instant to instant. Only the Neanderthal knows of the space which stretches between intervals and of a whole life as an interval. Only the Neanderthal knows interval-space and interval-time, of the holes in space and time that are like the gaps between the arches of the railway bridge.
How can we explain our anachronism to the new breed? How can we speak of days and nights beneath time? What do we know of the new, we who are barely our own contemporaries? What can we know of initiatives and certainty, we who barely coincide with ourselves? How can we tell them that today, for us, is never yet today? How can we explain that we are not here, we who face them, that our gaze wanders elsewhere, that our souls are lost over swampy marshes? How will they understand our magma, our indetermination, and how each bleeds into each, how each of us is everyone and no one, how each Neanderthal speaks for all and for no one and yet not even of himself?
Laughter as our names are called and we step forward. Laughter as we pass along the corridor to the interview room. Why bother with us? Don't you see it? We'll die of shame soon enough, but meanwhile midges buzz inside our heads and mosquitos hatch in our heart. Why bring us here? Why call our names, we who were never anyone at all? Why when our names let speak who we are not? Laughter in our dull heads as we fill out your forms. What has this to do with us? It's over, you win, it's finished. We'll make way, we'll die soon, we know that, but why don't you know it? Look at us - we are the old breed, and you are the new breed. Look at us - there is an absolute distance, an absolute divide. Our heads are buzzing and our hands are trembling.
The great stagnancy! What will they know of that, the new breed? How certain they are, how keen. But one day a newer breed will come and the margin they occupy will become infinite. One day, the breed beyond them will come and the rustbelt they occupy will divide time and divide space, setting each apart from themselves. One day, they will come, the new breed and turn the pages of their flipcharts before you in small classrooms. One day you will sit as we sit, mute and incomprehending, your attention dispersed, your focus lost, as the new breed tell you about the new world.