Nostradamus Speaks -Tradecraft Trainee

Tradecraft Trainee

When Dr. Nostradamus directed me to set up an office and said we'd get started I naturally expected we would get started. But it was more than six months before I saw him again. 

In the meantime I rented a strip mall office from a Little Saigon lawyer who had been disbarred. The place was not bad but I would have preferred my own place. Alas, Dr. N or whoever ran the books would only front or reimburse office expenses and minimal personal expenses  -- payback for having blown through so much company cash in the early days. Live and learn.

But this was a real job; an unusual job to be sure; and a mysterious job working for a man I had known of my entire life but did not know anything about. Wikipedia says the historical Dr. Michel de Nostradamus was born in 1503, so maybe he really is 300 years old, or 500. Maybe us kids were right, that he is Merlin; that he could fly. All that was of course childish stuff but I had to ask myself, how did I get all the way from an orphanage in New England to Vienna to Little Saigon in Westminster, California, and then find myself enrolled in a mysterious apprenticeship? Spooky, and silly, and fun.

I took the doctor at his word, enrolled in a writing class and joined a writing club. He was right, I did need to learn how to write.

I also set about training my memory, practicing what the Maestro called tradecraft:

"Young Apprentice, the tradecraft I teach has been known for centuries and is to this day practiced by intelligence operatives. It is simple in concept, difficult in application: Whatever you do, wherever you go, you must not be passive. You can not be just a watcher, a listener, an observer. You have to be mindful and attentive, and a participant. 

"Now listen up because this is important: I am not saying that you should jump up and make the rounds, glad handing everyone. Not that kind of participation. The kind of participation of which I speak is internal, mental, and to be more precise, verbal.

"For example, when you go into a restaurant and sit at a table you draw the entire restaurant into your view. At the same time that you look you must expressly verbalize, and describe what it is you see, with precision. You don't have to try to remember, but you do have to make the effort to see and describe what it is you see. 

"The remembering happens in the mind on its own. It is an internal dialog, an active intentional dialog that knits together images appearing in the visual cortex at the back of your brain with the abstract language creation and analytical cortex in the frontal lobes. United they stand; divided they fall. 

"Obviously you must be selective. You could drill down onto the spoon you are holding and describe it in ever tightening detail. You could spend an entire afternoon and never get beyond the four corners of your table. Tradecraft requires judgement as to what is necessary and what is sufficient to relive and recall in detail what needs to be remembered. Practice.

"At first this is difficult, and even exhausting. The art you practice takes years, decades -- an entire life. But with diligence the time will come when you can move at will back through the times you have experienced, reliving in detail each moment. The past is not prologue as has been said, it is not even past."

Dr. N was right. Training my memory was hard work. I quickly learned my powers of observation and description were lacking. I ran out of words. At times I felt as if my head was exploding. At first I thought that it would all end up a jumbled mess. But even at the very beginning it worked. I could take a long walk seeing and verbalizing with detailed description all that I could. When I got back to my office and closed my eyes, I could again walk along that same route and see in detail the twists and turns of the insignificant crack in the wall I had stopped to see and actively describe, and the bug that crawled out of it. Patches of clarity would come into view as I walked along the path. I started to work out the how and why some places and things were recalled with photographic clarity while others remained vague and cloudy. One thing was for sure:

There was something to this shit.

Dixi

Note from me LLP:
My head is exploding.