‘Fuck me! What the fuck is going on!’
This was the thought, the first thought that ever was thought, that took us out of contact with it all. It seems a shame. Before words, we had been a part of things, not observing just being and doing. After words, we were still a part of things but we felt like we were apart from things. We thought about it all, talked about it all, as if there was an ‘it all’ that was somewhere else, and an us that was here.
‘Fuck me! I am really cold.’
It was surprising suddenly to find there were words for things.
‘The weather is terrible. I seem to be able to move this body as I want but I can’t stop the weather; I wonder if anyone can?’
‘Maybe the god that made us also made the weather? Fuck knows! What’s the use of these speculations? I am so fucking cold! First things first, how do we get out of this shitting weather?’ There were a lot of expletives in those days.
After these thoughts, which were spoken out loud by various humans, there was no more language for a bit, just grunts and gestures which took less effort and often worked better than the new technology of words. We got busy building a shelter. We used dead limbs of trees. Some weirdos felt guilty about using the dead in this way but most of us just thought, ‘Fuck it! We’re cold! The end justifies the means!’
Inside the shelter, we felt a bit safer even though, after a while, we learned from experience that a big storm could come along at any moment and knock it down and we would be cold again, with no protection at all from it all.
To be on the safe side, we would pray to the gods. The prayers seemed to work, apart from when they didn’t, which was a sign we had done something wrong, so we would pray some more and sometimes we would give the gods precious things like crops or animals or even children to say sorry, which would work for a bit but not for ever so, as you can imagine, there was a lot of disagreement about how to appease the angry gods. The weirdos said there were no gods just weather happening for no particular reason but all of life was sacred so we should not sacrifice crops or animals or children. They said the sacred life of it all would sense we were a storm and suck the wind out of our lungs. But everyone just laughed at those nutters and chucked them out of the shelter. They got cold and wet and begged us to let them back in, and we let them in on the condition that they stopped talking nonsense and they agreed but sat in the corner muttering to themselves, probably plotting a revolution or something. We left them to it. They seemed harmless.
But life was never only about escaping storms. In fact, the weather was often lovely. It was such a pleasure to bask in the sunshine. On sunny days we would lie about chatting and playing games that we had invented – just doing what we wanted to do, depending on how the mood took us. On days like this, it was wonderful to be in contact with it all. Sometimes two people would take a liking to each other and link bodies in ways that were surprisingly pleasing. This got to be a bit embarrassing after a while because we saw the animals doing the same thing, and we did not want to be like animals; anyway, it was so morish to link bodies that we kept doing it but we made up lots of rules about it, like a shelter made of words to protect us from being stormy. We had also invented things called clothes which we put on our bodies so that we almost never needed to be directly in contact with it all. We would take our clothes off to link bodies but only inside the dark shelters where we hid from the storms.
Over time we got better at building shelters. They stopped falling down even in really bad weather. We started to feel quite proud of how good we were at building. We began to forget that the purpose of a shelter was to protect us from the storm. We made shelters that were really tall to see if we could touch the roof of the sky. We marvelled at the beauty of the structures that we had learned to build. We began to wonder whether we might someday learn to control the weather. We began to wonder if the nutters who muttered in the corner had been right about there being no gods but we forgot about the other stuff they said. We saw that the whole world was ripe for the taking. We began to feel angry about the weather. It seemed unfair. We saw how beautiful our shelters were. We decided to get rid of the outside and make the world completely safe by building shelters everywhere. We declared a war against the storms and the stormy animals inside and outside us. And we declared war against weirdos that claimed to be human when they were clearly just animals themselves. We built machines to help us wage this war and soon everything lay in ruins. We were exultant because we believed everything that was not human was dead and we had inherited the earth. But then we started to discover that we could not breathe which was a downer. We began to feel terrible sadness and shame. As we died, we cried for joy when we saw the sacred life of everything start to repopulate the earth with beautiful animals, flowers and trees. The weirdos were there too and even though we didn’t deserve it they gave us a proper burial.
Yes To All Of It 