• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1075 0

swelled and moved and vibrated on the Moon, on the cold moon, on the cold dead moon, the warm Earth’s cold sister, the stepchild, the terrible moon who sucks and leeches and clutches on to the warm earth that was alive, for the moon wanted to live, the moon would live, the moon was like a poor sad still-born babe, but the baby would live, it fought to live, as eggs drag lime from hen’s bones, and foetuses pull life from their mothers, the moon sucked and leeched and was like a dragging magnet of need that was the earth’s first metronome in the dance of the planets, for it was nearest, it was the deprived and half-starved twin, the earth’s other self, the Necessity.

Here was the frightful cold weight of sorrow that had lain on the edge of my mind since I had first been absorbed into the Crystal—the knowledge of the moon and its need. So close was the moon, so much part of earth, that it was earth—for seen even from that short distance they looked like a pair of brothers always in movement about each other. The moon was so very close, the always present force that is easiest overlooked when the tiny human mind looks for reasons and answers. Much easier to look out—right out, beyond even the furthest orbits of Uranus and Pluto, out to Riga, even to that other mirror, far Andromeda and beyond that to …

Oh yes, that’s what our mind does most easily, but right here, in close, so close it is locked with us in a dance that moves waters and earth in tides twice a day, and swings in our veins and arteries and the tides of thought in our minds—close, flesh of our flesh, thought of our thought, Moon, Earth’s stepchild, setting our stature, setting our growth, feeding appetites and making them. Moon spinning closer in to Earth makes animals and plants such and such a size and Moon lost or disintegrated or wandering further away changes animals, plants, the height of tides and probably the movement of land masses and ice masses, changes life as draconically as a sudden shower in a desert will change everything overnight. On the surface of the little Earth, a little green film, and part and parcel with this film, being fed by it, the crust of microbes, mankind, mad, moonmad, lunatic. To celestial eyes, seen like a broth of microbes under a microscope, always at war and destruction, this scum of microbes thinks, it can see itself, it begins slowly to sense itself as one, a function, a note in the harmony, and this is its point and function, and where the scummy film transcends itself, here and here only, and never where these mad microbes say I, I, I, I, I, for saying I, I, I, I, is their madness, this is where they have been struck lunatic, made moon-mad, round the bend, crazy, for these microbes are a whole, they form a unity, they have a single mind, a single being, and never can they say I, I, without making the celestial watchers roll with laughter or weep with pity—since I suppose we are free to presume compassion and derisiveness in the guardians of the microbes; or at least we are free to imagine nothing else—compassion and amusement being our qualities, but who knows what sort of a colour or a sound laughter, tears, make there in that finer kind of air?

Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the path of this race of man between the “I” and the “We,” some sort of a terrible falling-away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning back (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes, spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and cannot, save for a few, say, We.

Yes, but what awful blow or knock? What sent us off centre, and away from the sweet sanity of We? In a moment I’ll know, I’m being sucked back like a mite revolving in the vortex