Promethean: Chapter 6
Creativity
Follow these links to read: Front Matter & Ch. 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 7
Beyond civilization’s outskirts, where earth’s skin is raw and bare, he saw for the first time far-flung and countless eyes that were blinking, the first of the flashing sort not trying to sell him all he had recently considered offscourings. Directionless, he followed those watching from infinity. Afflicted by his load, he buried his packed pelf, skeptical it should ever be exhumed. In times before, he would have considered himself far gone, but in the moment, he knew one word to describe his place. Finger in the sand, he wrote “present,” then wandered off.
He had had yet never been, and being never, to who he is, he had no answer, for an individual he never was. Years that were days and days that were years were wasted accumulating things and symbols, objects and oil for the economic engine, owner of it all, so owning him, claiming crown over time too. Who was he but a man? –If that? All he wanted to be after his forthcoming destruction and creation. His mind kept replaying that image, the only thing he could see of himself, so far away from the metropolis of mirrored glass. He wondered, might his unstructuring and restructuring, zero to one, nothing to… something… envelop enough time and space that it forms a maelstrom, changing those around and beyond him? A force like that which ruled the depths he was moving toward, where death waited for him, and he for it, to one day be loosed upon the world.
These thoughts and disarrayed others flooded his mind as he walked, contemplating those he considered to have lived: mythological men once swallowed up, who returned transformed, immune to the wants of the destitute and despots alike. Those who, lacking ability, seek authority over the artist. For in the presence of the Almighty’s shadow, the first creator who inspired all inheritors, those without hearts to try keep those whose blood pumps by such a spirit from bringing to this crust the heavenly, not for lacking talent, but because the poorest and richest are equal in their distractions, simply opposite within the spectrum of subsistence and prodigality, out of which there is one choice: creativity. He had been taught it was a myth, for there is no creator and therefore no creativeness, only evolution, which had ended in all but technology, increasing as if by parthenogenesis, godlike in its metastasis. His gut told him it was a lie. Everything could change and improve. Lacking proof, he acted as if it were true.
Making his way across the desert, foot aching, dragging his boot heel, he etched in the earth his first creation: an asymmetrical face, man or woman, he didn’t plan or care. It was him and everyone all at once. The face looked skyward, alone. Screaming. Longing for deliverance. Wishing to cross the bridge and transform from dirt to stardust. Afflicted by where it was made, the mouth stretched, almost ripping free from its undeserving canvas. He mourned his ideogram before leaving it behind. A creation wailing for its creator. Witnessing its master’s decomposition into itself.
Winds came and caressed his visage, carrying it to the clouds one spec at a time: nature safeguarding itself before being stolen by the digital democracies and concrete confederacies, guile governments manned by the mealy-mouthed. Those who had debased art into currency and weapons, deceiving their populations into a hideous future they declared was predestined. The city of decadence faded in the distance as he walked maimed with a foot dragging every second step, writing a broken, dashed, and dotted code he didn’t know; his subconscious admission of being complicit in crimes against his people, enforcement for the power hungry; those who kept for themselves words and relics not for appreciation, but to say they had them stored somewhere, unseen, in an unlit and airless place, safe from the population, who in a glance might take inspiration and rise.