A creature jumps down from a tree, escaping the constraints of a branch-bound world. The gnarl of bark, the fragrance of leaves. Its feet touch the sandy grassland. It sniffs the air. Nostrils flare, whiskers stiffen and twitch, senses awaken. Synapses ignite, signals fizz, spark and collide. A myriad of electrical pulses race around the cortex, ideas flood into uncountable cells. Combining, competing, spiralling. Contorting into instincts, signs, instructions, actions and incalculable reactions.
Crouching, the creature looks into the sun-dried grass as it sways in a primal wind to an unheard rhythm. The brittle stalks whisper and hiss, warning and enticing. Shadows dance. Prey and predator stalk and hide. The creature strains its eyes to see through the savanna. It becomes frustrated, it becomes agitated. The synapses crackle and tell it that this is not enough.
The trees were not enough, the grassland is not enough. The sand beneath its feet stimulates and irritates. The unknown, beyond its view, entices. The creature pushes back and raises itself onto its hindlegs. The sun burns its eyes, instinctively it raises a forearm to shield them. The burning orb in the crystal sky is its creation and its apocalypse. It is life and death, beauty and horror. It is photosynthesised lush green leaves and it is disintegrating black ash and ember. The creature desires it before it knows what desire is.
The creature straightens its back. It stands taller. Now it can see its environment. It can see the distance, it can see a horizon. It sees no obstacles and has no reasoning as to why not. It believes itself limitless. The ground beneath its feet is moving, slowly, imperceptibly, re-shaping the world that this creature will dominate. In time its descendants will re-shape too, they will change, they will disperse, they will interact and they will isolate. They will create boundaries to divide them just as the earth that this creature stands on will create gulfs, chasms, rifts and oceans of division. As if in a dance of equilibrium, for every step that this creature makes to collect and commune, there will be equal and opposite attempts to disrupt. Unity will disunify.
It takes a lurching first step. Its foot plants itself on the sandy ground, its toes curl downwards as if still clutching a branch. Its ancestral code tells it to hang on, to cling, to grasp, but its firing brains cells tell it to let go, to wander, to confuse can with should.
This creature is flawed. It will want more than it needs, it will take what does not belong, it will destroy what it does not like, it will believe itself superior. It will turn on its siblings, its cousins, and it will use its skills, its tools and its creativity to exterminate them. This creature will challenge and defy the structure and the reason of its own being. It will create gods to explain it and invent science to de-code it. It will remove itself from its environment, cover its skin, clothe its feet, reconstruct its food, create stimulants to shield it from reality. It will walk on tarmac and concrete, it will shelter under glass, steel and slate. It will detach itself from its origins. It will break itself into factions just as its world will drift and break into continents and countries. It will kill itself in the name of those factions.
From this moment, lost in infinite time, this creature and all its descendants will step further and further away from the fabric of the world until, a million years later, they will work out how to tear that fabric into pieces. To experiment and to play with the building blocks of their own existence.
They will call this journey; civilisation...........
Read more in Shadows of Hiroshima by Teddy James, out soon....