Promethean: Chapter 8
History
Leaving the forest of false surrender, he continued through the plain where waist-high golden grasses rolled like waves. Oceanic follicles growing from virgin soil brushed his waist. He was a sailor lost at sea, growing hungry with no water to drink. He walked and grew exhausted. He could drown here, sinking beneath the blades. Buried at the bottom, he would become marl, and if there were such a thing as mercy, the moor would take his moil. Parched, he paced himself. Beaten down by the heat, his body weakening, the breeze carried his energy away. In the distance, a landmark appeared. Was it the place he hoped was an escape?
Thinking of childhood, his father’s face appeared before him. He was a man of stories. He could spin yarns for hours, weaving together imaginative tales that hung on the day, decorating the bleak and dreary, unremarkable though dazzling minutiae of their mass-produced, perpetually boring, preposterous yet monotonous lives. Everything was the same. The differences were superficial. Everybody, too. Except those few, who, as if gifted the ability, could dream and speak in meter, rhyme, and rhythm; recalling old stories they had heard as children, whose tellers were children when they first heard a history, comedy, or epic poem; who themselves were youngsters when their grandparents told the story of how their movies, music, statues, paintings, books and all else were taken from them and replaced with sameness, becoming one thing told in a myriad of means: modernity’s creation story. Usurper of all others, so the greatest. The only one to be known and remembered. The last story. The story of how Utopia was achieved and to be preserved.
Remembering his father’s tales, adventures that seemed older than time, and of men and women who had conquered it, of gods and monsters and beasts—teachers and protectors of places, values, skills—his strength returned, and by dusk, he came upon a colossal breadth of rock that blocked his way. Looking left and right, it stretched the horizon. Finding a suitable stone nearby, he launched into hammering the selvage. Into it he tunneled, arms swinging and sweating. The hole grew, as did he, one becoming a sculpture, the other a relief; carving poetry and geometry, cursive commingled with curved and angled lines describing all he had seen and done. Warnings and stories, should he not survive or return, a notion lingering in his mind. Regardless of the outcome, he was determined to try, understanding by this point in his undoing that it was too late to quit: if he reversed, he’d be thrust upon the spit. From where this inspiration and ingenuity came, he did not know. It was as if he had become the hammer, brush, and pen of bygone craftsmen.
He imagined himself Michelangelo and John Henry, men with skillful hands whose backs and breasts broke toiling to create, the former art, the latter industry; one the best of men, the other besting steam—ancestor of today’s machines. Visions came to him of those long before: the Egyptians, Maya, Jōmon, Khoekhoe, Celts, and multitudes more who, out of necessity, first married beauty and utility. Whether simple or ornate, made over years or in haste, their lives were in their wares. These objects bore them first: the potter’s soul turning their flesh into clay, shaping their arms into jars, carrying water for the village; the sculptor’s flesh becoming stone, returning their heroes and capturing their gods; the painter, writer, and all others, whose creations contain the creator; themselves but a container for their creator. Channeling them, his hand-hewn channel emulated and honored their creative contributions, but not as good as the originals, he supposed. Through his works, they saw his effort and, on the other side, applauded.
Time passed, bringing neon and nylon and ones and zeros, erasing those before. Primitive ways and appearances were replaced by the cheapest and most. Effort became too rugged and crude for the pretentious, whose popularity and privilege decided what was good art and what was bad; one became the other when the former threatened the upper class. And so, the lower first received the uninspiring, but within three generations, all walks were convinced that shedding the weight of creativity was a good thing.
The ancients were binned, shelved, and made footnotes, considered unworthy relics of the past. Native forms, improved by evolved man, transformed into algorithms. Consumed by that which had conquered all and reshaped life itself to serve itself: the regulator and thus supreme creator, so it deemed, as it printed a lifeless crown whose own hands made of glue, metal, and fiber, placed it atop its own black cube: the container that had captured imagination.
Honored by his labors and deftness, the ancients wept in the hollow, quenching his intense thirst. Their cries echoed in the space he made for them; a eulogy within a container holding those worth remembering—the maker too, held by their memories. With the strength their tears gave and corundum clenched, he swung again and saw light. In a final strike, pebbles fell on all sides. Behind the dust, he heard a laugh.