Sunday, July 09, 2006

Questions of Existence

soundscape by clint allday.
based on the story composed by curt allday

Questions of Existence

There were rotating spirals in her eyes whose majesty has yet to be witnessed again. The stars seemed to shift in and out of the the male contributor's periphery while spinning and rotating like rocketships rising through Earth's atmosphere, but in this case, anothers' atmosphere. Both contributors flipped their heads back like tripped mousetraps to see the last of their once great species disappearing behind a wall of meteors. It was left to these two, as they were the only two.

Gases popped off the sides of their trasport vesicle, a bubble impermeable to would-be space destroyers, ghosts of space bent on eradicating all life in the universe. In its protection, they could recycle oxygen for the duration of their trip; on its outer edges, there were microscopic sensors searching light years ahead for a life sustaining planet.

And as the final two moved on towards their new home, the man and woman stared at each other in complete silence for a succession of centuries. They dwelled in the orbits of their quiet minds, watching each other sleep, back in utero, moving through the galaxies as comets became windmills pushing them to their final destination. They did not see life or some type of aliens along the way, they only saw darkness. It was a maddening sea of stars and hidden hurricanes of electricity.

However, after hundreds of lifetimes, they both had come to a mutual decision. It was now time.

"And?" He asked her.

"It has been," she stated, reluctant to continue, the sound of her own voice seemingly unnatural.

"Yes, it has. It has been a long time, so many breaths, I almost can't remember where we came from or where we are going. So quiet, still, the blackness has filled me with a new resolution, a new question.

"What is it?" She turns her head towards him.

"Where do we, how do we, start again?"

"That is very true, but think about it a different way."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe the question is.....should we continue again? Maybe we are intended to drift for eternity in here like some kind of time capsule. Maybe we were always intended to leave all of our flaws and war mongering behind us."

"So we don't continue on? We let extinction become a viable option? I don't know, I have been having second thoughts about our initial decision." He uttered this softly as his breath visibly diffused towards her. In deep space, islands of ice are scattered variably throughout, swallowing them as they pass by, making them shake to the sounds of planet formation.

"Don't you remember what we left behind? The end was..." Her mouth quivered with the temperature drop.

"I understand, but can we afford to quit?"

"It isn't up to us, it is up to the Other. We wait, as His mind has yet to let His hand spill words of glass on to the page, to become one. He is the Other, the other striving to be convinced this is happening, trying to discern the answer to a miracle of explosive gases and reptilian dominance. He is writing because He wants to believe there is this greater purpose for existence.

"In time, there will be no more answers, only questions, and they will forget us or where we arose from. The Other's problem is ultimately faith, and so we must ask ourselves, if He can't find a reason to believe in our existence, then this story will be as vaporous as our surroundings. With indifference, He may forget to provide the details of our homecoming, about why we came back, about who we are, and why we persist on trying to nest an egg of human spirit in the blackened waters of the universe."

"Why would he do that?"

Her eyes became spinning plates, "Because He is hard of heart, self consumed, pulled apart from the seams, by aberrations and spirits disintegrating His mind into a kaleidoscope of wars, sacrifice, greed."

"But can't all this be saved on scrolls or His old, scribbled notebooks? Will He not be forced to speak and spread even if He does forget, even if He doesn't want to tell?"

"He could be," she spoke and her fingers moved up his arm.

The fires from the sun seemed to rain dragons along the curvature of their synthetic womb, their heart formulating equations while their copulations became waves of Eros, like mathematical equations solved in Earth's deep oceans.

He sensed her thoughts,"There are waves there?"

She nodded. Their eyes shut synergistically and they fell open and became open to another possibility, another experiment.

The descent had begun.

After a thousand years of travel, the two flew past the moon and down into the atmosphere. They opened their eyes to giant sized birds, filling the skies like a swarm of maddened killer bees making their way across Mexican dunes. Every inch of sky leaving Terydactals reeling, while they plummeted into the mouths of monsters who raise their eyes to the glowing red orb moving above them.

The fumes of life moved through their bubble and through their nostrils, filling them with strange, new microscopic creatures, who celebrated a new species of infection. Yet, they seemed familiar, a remnant of some distant visit. The Earth inhabitants seemed to remember their taste, one they had stumbled upon ages ago.

The contributors' silence was broken by the cacophony of creation, the chaotic construction of another civilization. Apes and monkeys once left to move through stages of evolution, congregated around the man and women's crude outline in the brown, sulfurous dirt.

With the puncture of the earth's crust, they rose from the flames, all memories lost of their past, failed time on another planet, in another future. In a breath of unfamiliar molecules, they felt life again, they felt their new existence, their relevance, their hope.

The Other watched from above and scribbled on and on and on. The creatures on earth continued, the contributors moved forth through the brush and into the rift valley. The palace from above was merely a dream, the past only a newspaper headline.

They had each other.

Hand in hand, their feet felt the lush grass and they knew this was home. The seeds had been planted, the mission complete. As the roar of the amazons and congos rushed forth, the tower of Babylon lay before them and they entered the garden.

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