Sunday, October 16, 2011

Humans at that time

You have to understand something about many humans at that time.

Many did not understand what they were. They conceived their existence on incredibly short time-scales. The day, the hour, the next few years. They did not understand themselves as the incarnations of energy existing since the beginning and still exists now. Their science told them they were made of atoms, elemental atoms, the same elements they saw in stars so far away that to reach them one needed to fold time itself.  But still they did not grasp it.

Instead, they stood blinking in the sun wondering, captured by primitive ideologies about methods and modes of exchange and beliefs about numbers now unknown to us. The saw the world and their lives as finite things to be structured in such a way as to accumulate possesions, trinkets, which often would fall out of use very soon after they were acquired.  They were utterly terrified of their "mortality" and expended vast amounts of emotional and intellectual energy attempting to counter and camouflage the decay of their own atomic structures.

Emissaries appeared long before they built the machines that let them see stars and atoms and sense the energy which connected them. In the language of their time, these "prophets," as they were called by those early humans, tried to show them their own reverent infiniteness. These prophets said that death was only the shifting of energy, that the now was not the end, nor was it the beginning. That their fear of themselves, which led to conflict and destruction, had no basis. That they could be free to stand with each other without fear. That there didn't have to be darkness.

Some understood this and tried to convince others. But others were not to be convinced. They feared the unbounded living energy that saw the tides move, the stars twinkle, and their children breathe. They took refuge in perversions of ancient emissaries' stories. They chained themselves to primitive ideas about how they ought to live and what made their families, communities and species function, turning on one another when these proved false. Many went screaming back to the stars while eviscerating their own host organism, poisoning the very air they breathed and the water they drank.

Some survived, and began anew.

We are their ancestors.

2 comments:

Alison said...

And possibly their ancestors also.
I love this. Looking forward to the paperback.

Boris said...

Thanks Alison. Maybe a paperback one day. In the meantime you might read Doris Lessing's "Shikasta."