Forgive and forget
Forgive and forget, they say. It is so pervasive, so well accepted that I betrayed my longing to remember everything only to my brothers.Nike says: “Makes sense. You can only learn from what you remember.”
Nehmen says: “Makes sense. I don’t want to forget all the hellish parties either.”
Yet, it is more than that, and I don’t think I can ever explain it to them. Somewhere deep inside, I am knowledge-driven. I believe that if I gather enough information, I will become wiser, calmer, less scared of this life.
And so I read. I have read every book in Hoborg’s library at least twice, and I regularly ask him to bring in more. I’m not the only one who likes to read, but I am the only one who makes notes. I now have an entire cave in the underground filled with paper – and it is staggering that if the knowledge of the universe truly is infinite, then at some point the entire Neverhood could be filled with my notes and not even then would it be enough.
What I like researching particularly is the nature of the universe, its earliest history, and the nature of its creators. There are mad theories, some believed wholeheartedly by their creators. It is hard to make sense of it. And yet, a clear image has begun crystallising in my mind. And my greatest help with that was Klogg.
Klogg’s memories of the other side are badly jumbled, and I can’t talk to him often as he’s always out with Nike. So I have asked him to write down anything that comes back to him.
A lot of his notes mention a “gate”.
Apparently this gate was one of the most important things to him on the other side, as it was the gateway to our universe. Klogg does not know why, but he had to go through this gate in order to be born again. Unfortunately, the gate was “very high up”, “unreachable” - in order to pass through it, he had to split himself in half.
I am going off a tangent, but this is simply too interesting to pass up. I had to figure out on my own, from Klogg’s passing mentions and my own knowledge, why the Klogg we know is different from the Klogg who stole Hoborg’s crown. It was because he split his soul into two halves, a “strong” one and a “weak” one. Our Klogg is, apparently, the weak half. He needs friends and he has doubts about himself, which were weaknesses that he hates in himself. “Only if I were stronger”, “I wish I hadn’t had mercy” and “I should have killed him” are the thoughts that Klogg frequently recalls from the other side. He also knows that he kept thinking about the Neverhood and that this was where the gate was supposed to take him.
Why the “strong” half did not end up in its destination, neither I nor Klogg know. Perhaps it was a miscalculation on his part, or that the Neverhood refused to give birth to an evil being. Personally I like to think that Klogg’s “strong” half is not as strong as it thinks. Klogg disagrees, but I don’t think that he would trade that kind of strength for what he has now – love, acceptance and a home.
What’s most curious is that Klogg seems to be aware that his other half is also alive, somewhere in the klay universe. He has nightmares where he is someone else, and all that he can remember is calculated malevolence and shadenfreude. Nike tells me that he often yells from his sleep – orders, threats, death sentences. He even made a speech at some point, though it was in a language Nike did not understand. Klogg himself says that he feels incomplete, that a part of him is missing and calling to him. He has confessed that he has no idea what would happen if he met his strong half, but that it probably would be something catastrophic.
But enough about Klogg. As important as he is for being my best source of information, the mystery of this “gate” is even more appealing to me. See, if Klogg could come through the gate, so could someone else. I already know of six souls who will not rest on the other side after their bodies rot away – they are the White Mother and the five Guardians. They call their perpetual rebirth reincarnation, and though they remember nothing from their past lives or the other side, they are a living historical proof that the same soul can live time and time again – just like Klogg.
Which returns me to my question: What is the gate?
Right now, I believe that the gate is the pathway to reincarnation. That every soul on the other side can return to our world through the gate. And that the only reason why Klogg had such trouble doing so… was that he did not ask Quater for help.
