It's been a year since the catastrophe that we caused by naming
things. Winter, as devastating as hunger, as abject as head-churning
thirst slowly came and slowly went. Spring then found us, a surprise to
feel relaxation spread, a pleasure to sense sunshine. We're now in
autumn, having survived a dry, sweaty summer where the dust was high.
My
eyes were taken by a mad dog who seemed to take pleasure in ripping the
sight out of me. With one briefly surviving eye I observed my
mis-treatment. Finally he gobbled up what was left of those eyeballs of
mine and I was left screaming in new theatres of pain, alone.
It
was a good thing that loneliness didn't last all the way until now.
After a traveller took pity on me, we spent some of the winter together.
In a temporary hut, leaking, creaking in the wind and only just about
warmer than the outdoors, he fed me soup, which smelt bad, both rancid
and bland at once, but tasted like an opening up of every taste bud. We
had hunks of ancient bread.
In spring I was slowing him
down. We'd barely spoken, but the conversation we had the last time we
sat together was our longest, well, he spoke a lot anyway. "Adam, stay
warm when you can"; "don't give up, Adam," he kept saying. He liked to
convince me there was some point left to life. He left me on an uneven
rock by the side of the road.
Now that summer's given hope
to many, and its sparse fruits and faint tastes still linger, people
seem more abundant. I sometimes encounter more than one a day, but I've
stopped speaking. For one thing, no one must ever know that this
terrible future was my making, and for another, I cannot bring myself to
utter any animal's name, which leaves vast, often unbridgeable gaps in
my conversation. Also, there's fear, I'm so sure only bad things will
happen when I speak that I'd rather stay silent.
Showing posts with label David Bellos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Bellos. Show all posts
Friday, 8 February 2013
75 - A Terrible Genesis
Wandering through the gardens together, we were as happy as could be.
At times we linked arms, or he'd drape one of his over
my shoulder. I felt special.
As we went he told stories. He let me rabbit on too. Then we hit upon a new game. We'd lain on the damp grass for sometime, a relief from the sweat-drawing sun, when, idly tramping a dandelion, softly enough that it rose slowly back up each time, he started to sit up and said we should name all the things we know, and by naming them make them appear.
Before long we were surrounded by pigs, foxes, iguanas and all sorts. The joy hardly lessened with each new conjuring, instead we got steadily more intent on seeing more and exercising our imaginations to the fullest.
The idea became not to see what would happen, since that was manifest before us, so much as to see what the most far-out creature we could think of was. "Lemur" I said and one grew up out of the earth. "Erm, marsupial," he snapped, drumming his hand against his leg, grabbing at his first thought, and a few hundred animals, each one of them a marsupial, unvanished, filling the air where they'd not been a moment beforehand.
"Crocodile" I returned and one went snapping and writhing off away from us. "Rhinoceros" he cried out gleefully, so I said "hippopotamus" just to top him. We went on for sometime, far longer than we needed to. In fact even if we had some perverse plan to wreck our own gardens we still did more than was needed.
Now, writing this on one of the last scraps of paper in my possession, I'm scared and alone, having seen in the last few days horrors I never could have dreamt of. Where there were grasslands and meadows just 72 hours ago, there are now barren dust plains, the ground is dark with blood in many places, from where the different species turned or one another or simply turned to cannibalism.
He went the night before last. He could be alive or dead, I've no idea. A rotting whale carcass, a massive, final, ill-thought-out suggestion of ours lies there amid the carnage. Big cats and scavengers stalk about. If I knew a quick way to end it all, I'd do so.
While reading David Bellos's magnificent book 'Is That a Fish in Your Ear?', I was impressed by the following passage from Genesis, which he quotes:
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Genesis 2:19)
As we went he told stories. He let me rabbit on too. Then we hit upon a new game. We'd lain on the damp grass for sometime, a relief from the sweat-drawing sun, when, idly tramping a dandelion, softly enough that it rose slowly back up each time, he started to sit up and said we should name all the things we know, and by naming them make them appear.
Before long we were surrounded by pigs, foxes, iguanas and all sorts. The joy hardly lessened with each new conjuring, instead we got steadily more intent on seeing more and exercising our imaginations to the fullest.
The idea became not to see what would happen, since that was manifest before us, so much as to see what the most far-out creature we could think of was. "Lemur" I said and one grew up out of the earth. "Erm, marsupial," he snapped, drumming his hand against his leg, grabbing at his first thought, and a few hundred animals, each one of them a marsupial, unvanished, filling the air where they'd not been a moment beforehand.
"Crocodile" I returned and one went snapping and writhing off away from us. "Rhinoceros" he cried out gleefully, so I said "hippopotamus" just to top him. We went on for sometime, far longer than we needed to. In fact even if we had some perverse plan to wreck our own gardens we still did more than was needed.
Now, writing this on one of the last scraps of paper in my possession, I'm scared and alone, having seen in the last few days horrors I never could have dreamt of. Where there were grasslands and meadows just 72 hours ago, there are now barren dust plains, the ground is dark with blood in many places, from where the different species turned or one another or simply turned to cannibalism.
He went the night before last. He could be alive or dead, I've no idea. A rotting whale carcass, a massive, final, ill-thought-out suggestion of ours lies there amid the carnage. Big cats and scavengers stalk about. If I knew a quick way to end it all, I'd do so.
While reading David Bellos's magnificent book 'Is That a Fish in Your Ear?', I was impressed by the following passage from Genesis, which he quotes:
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Genesis 2:19)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)