On the Third Day, Page Six
Occasionally, complexity is rounded down. The compromise with existence so stark that the most vivid richness gets compiled into a flag of one, all-encompassing byte.
Page Six: The Veldt Lining
How does your garden grow, my friend, my reader? Do you recall, but pages before, that we spoke of an enduring and verdantly lavish plot of perfection? I want you to visit that imaginary sanctuary right now, and assess its size. You might stroll through bowers, fancifully tapping at nascent rose buds as they poke through the arbor, arriving outer coral petals opportunistically taking advantage of your passage to flutter off, not realizing until it was far too late that their destiny was always the earth. So few make it to bouquets, no less scrapbooks!, it would be only youthfully fertile to dream of it. More wisely, they would shirk their renegade inclinations and provide solid support to the feathered limbs of pollinators. Reaching a small birch gate, undo the latch, and survey the bounty of controlled forestation. Before we tamed animals, we had already made great strides to hammer and sickle the land into submission, forcing it to function at our behest, to yield what we desired, be it fancy or food. Did our garden plot aesthetics bend to benefit harvest, as our eyes would see the ripeness of Vitamin C, or was it all exaptic, at times frustrating our own success? What was it like for <eveline> to hold the first apple seed in her hand? I do not mean to imply that the wily serpent informed her of its utility. No, saga-wise, it was the tree herself that offered the opinion. Did she hesitate before devouring? Did her face turn crooked as she masticated its bitterness and spat it back to her hand to review the status of the object inflicting so much discomfort? Had she known discomfort at all, up until this point? Was the sin of her undoing apparent in the act itself, or could it trace back to the will of the serpent, who willed her into existence, and willed her eat of the fruit.
But more importantly, how large can your garden grow before it is unwieldy? Certainly as-far-as-the-eye-can-see beggars the imagination, if you were but to walk, and never retrace a step, there would be no garden, only a path. A forward progression where you might confuse the similarity of oaks as being just one solitary Oak that you continually passed, over and over again. Each oasis would be the same as the last, recognizing only the pattern of water until you get to the sea.
So how does your plateau grow, Jeronathon?
Synthetic ten-stringers warp and flicker like steeple fingers that clack together as they knit and unbind, cursing in tall bursts of energy that ricochet off the columns of medicinal trees before streaking wild to the upper atmosphere, conjuring up temporary holograms of a billionaire space race.
No, farther, farther back, Jeronathon.
Let Us call it a meadow, then. Or a glen. Or the end of the World, before the ocean clings at a beach. You couldn’t infer the proximity of inevitability from this expansive patch of grass, the salt has short arms, and cannot reach far enough to spoil this soil.
Why is there a pathway here?
Here, in the ancient sedition of limb from limb, as the core burst through the mantle and shouldered past the ocean’s vault in search of air, there are no paths, it is an accident of birth. But it leads us nonetheless across the savannah, past wild carrot lace the height of trees, past rosehip punted into a bristly patch over yonder, ringed by a menagerie of creeping grass — zoysia, blue, and buffalo turf hopscotch one another, whiffling a motley and unbroken exhalation of contentment and satisfaction.
The palette hums with green, one roster of delicate exuberance in the polite grazing of the sun. (I know that the sun had not yet found its way to this terrestrial sphere, that it was too far away, its light too dim and too slow to have interfaced with this terrain. But I know that chlorophyll is king, and photosynthesis is merely a prayer in the absence of light. So the only remaining conclusion is that energy was introduced from somewhere, and I have it on good faith that it all comes from the cranium of one superman.) The artist, having rendered His most appealing expanse, puts down his brush before concerning Himself with floral pigments and watery dyes, and saturates in the afternoon lunch of existence.
What lies beneath?
One might think that beneath this thriving plateau there was nothing but skull all the way down. Breakable stone and metric tonnes of tectonic mineral friction give way to a wild fiery heart, burning endlessly with the desire to burn. So locust mad that it churns angrily on itself, corralled by the elongated tendrils of Yggdrasil, who musters trapped gas to tamp and surround the fizzling core in suffocating dirt. The two play, competitive yet congenial, at this grindstone game — it is not that either might tire, but that they have no choice, for there is no rotation to spot the hours, and no Geiger to lap at the residual radiance, so they are interlocked in struggle, and could not possibly entertain an alternate strategy of disentanglement.
“OUCH!”
“What is it, my dear?”
“It was hot when I touched it, and now it hurts!”
“Yes, little one. The stove is hot when I am cooking. I’ve told you a hundred times not to touch it when it’s on.”
“But it hurts.”
“Give it to me, I will kiss it and make it better. Is that better?”
“No. Mommy?”
“Yes, my dear?”
“What’s after God?”
“What do you mean?”
“So, God is up in Heaven, but what’s after Heaven?”
“There is nothing after Heaven. It’s Heaven all the way up.”
“No, I think of it, like… after God, after the night, there is just white.”
“What comes after the whiteness, then?”
“Umm… nothing, it’s just whiteness.”
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