Dark Matters

This my First novel and a book announcement. The book is a meditation on memory, sentience, and the threads between physics and belief

Quantum mechanics is rapidly unraveling questions that once belonged solely to philosophy and religion. Questions about consciousness. About observation. About whether information can ever truly be destroyed.

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Image by Thalame

Having survived near-death experiences myself, those questions stopped being abstract. They left an indelible mark. Death was no longer a theoretical endpoint. It became something I had brushed against," and come back from changed.

This story was born there.

Dark Matters emerged from a long fascination with quantum mechanics and human consciousness, and with the strange overlaps between modern physics and humanity’s earliest attempts to understand existence. Long before equations, people spoke in myths. Long before laboratories, they spoke of souls, witnesses, breath, and light.

What does it mean to be sentient?
Is consciousness something we produce," or something we briefly host?
If information cannot be destroyed, as physics suggests, what happens to memory, identity, and awareness at death?

These questions sit at the heart of Dark Matters. Not as answers, but as tensions.

The story follows a stuffed rabbit animated by a human consciousness in a ruined world," not as whimsy, but as metaphor. A vessel. A witness. A carrier of memory. Around him unfold forces that feel both ancient and deeply modern: entities governed by physics rather than malice, observers who shape reality simply by paying attention, and the fragile line between what is remembered and what is erased.

What surprised me while writing was how often modern physics echoed early religions and philosophies. The observer effect. Entanglement. The idea that separation is often an illusion. These are not new thoughts," they are old ones, rediscovered with new language.

I didn’t set out to write a book about death. Or grief. Or survival.

I set out to explore what persists.

Dark Matters is a work of speculative fiction, but it is also a meditation on consciousness, memory, and the quiet possibility that nothing meaningful is ever truly lost..." only transformed.

This was the moment the story revealed itself to me...

A faint wave of murmuration echoes in the alcove where his resting place lay. In his grogginess, he was unable to tell if it was his own voice or another’s, but he responded to the whispers almost as if it were a prayer:

“I don’t know who I am, but I know who I am.”

Reflexively shaking his head in disbelief, he bellows in an ironic tone,
“Of this I am certain, but don’t ask me my name!” 

Some of you may recognize this old poem that is included in the book...

Thalame Cathedral

Born of the echoes of heretofore,
Stands a majestic vault,
Etched in a myriad of hearts that implore,
Their reflections cast on basalt,
Forming the columns of upheavals adore,
To the cathedral of conclusion’s exalt,
Standing upon the liquid floor
Of an ever shifting definition’s fault,
With flying buttresses of whispering scores
Of evolution’s collective result,
To chorus the intentions of the spirits before
To the throngs on the nave, in the living’s consult,
To resonate the inflections of understanding’s restore,
And all of these voices collect to a roar--"

To a single witness on an altar in the apse of ardor.

This was part of the foundation of the story I mention this because as I wrote this book I found that the writing of each chapter is much like writing a poem in long form. So many of my old poems wrote themselves into the story as if was writing the book long before I even knew I was going to write one.

Dark Matters by Robert Trakofler  

Available on Amazon:  

https://a.co/d/bH2R5yZ 

Author's Note

https://a.co/d/bH2R5yZ

Reviews

[Ken Simm.]

You know I too have a unique understanding of your words above and therefore will look forward to reading your book my dear friend. Not in perhaps a critical way but more of an understanding manner. Saying I too have been there three times.

[Robert Trakofler]

Oh Ken... you just brought a tear to my eye! I would gladly send you a copy if you gave me your address. I am dying to see what comes from your experiences in your artistry as well!!!!! Your scrawls and imagery truly helped form the voice that types these lines today. Your voice indeed has left an indelible mark upon my pen good sir I am humbled