Author Information
Melodies XLIX; Goeth Before
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
---Proverbs 16:18
Our first task (and the longest in terms of
calendars and clocks) was purgation of
humankind's base prejudices and
hatreds: war, first and foremost, and, with it
our frail susceptibilities to plague and to the
lethal cancers that our own bodies
confected in a sort of suicide
plot of which no one's mind could have foreseen.
Then, after that, murder, pillage, and rape---
those and all sorts of other crimes
(grand and petty) were cast out of us
through many generations of careful
selective breeding and informative
courses. The last to be abandoned were the
personal foibles and flaws that lurked
within us and between us to obstruct the
fullest blossoming of our species.
Creation and construction followed, next; and
preparation brought production to its
ihighest peak and full accomplishment. The
long gone centuries denominated as
the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first---
these eras of our ancient history---
had been merely a comic parody or
anticipation of fully human capability; and
sometimes a deceptive travesty.
So we destroyed their tangled legacy, and
started over, in earnest this time---which
was our time to answer the great call to
"multiply upon and dominate
this world"---a few words in an antiquated
poem, of which no copy now exists for us.
But missing texts do not provide pretexts or
contexts for failures, reluctances, or
hesitations to the work---the urge that
thrummed through all our flesh's cells, that
quivered in our bones, and seized our minds
like voices rasping dryly in our heads.
All that we had destroyed to clear away,
we rebuilt to a thousand-fold or more.
No cheap sideshows of entertainment or
distraction interfered with, or curtailed,
our concentration on our species' task.
We built up; then we built much further up;
we dreamed, designed, projected and proposed;
collectively approved after debate, and, as
collectively, brough into form for
any purpose that we had desired. The
fossilized bones of our ancestral
dead have mouldered beneath foundations that
we had raised; those elders---who among us lacked
even the least of their identities;
who had not dared to hope to execute
such plans and aspirations---now repose
within foundation trenches just as deep as
those that oceans once fully concealed. Of
course, our pride compelled our efforts toward
these goals. The skills and talents we possessed
fulfilled our exaltations of success.
We sought no idols, no priests, and no verses to
spur us on to greater glories for our
satisfaction: we needed only ourselves---
our wisdom, artistry, experience,
and full ambitions---only just ourselves:
alone upon this minor planet in
orbit around a mediocre star at
one edge of a relatively small,
chaotic galaxy. By all measures of
which we were aware, we were alone in
all the cosmos, here to demonstrate the
full expression of the very height of
quality in countless quantities.
Ten thousand generations, all long-lived,
had labored with devotion to this great
vocation, to finish the edifice, the
monument to our unique and full
existence in this otherwise empty and
vast expanse we called the universe. So
we declared a celebration for
ourselves at this completion of
ourselves, a jubilation in praise of
ourselves. And certain urges---once called primitive,
that we believed we had abandoned---surged
through us and delivered us to the
vestigal, animal desires (as useless as the
tails and appendixes we lost a thousand
thousand sunny years ago)
that we had not permitted to distract
us from our duties to our glory; but, now,
we gave ourselves up to them with
riotous revelry of orgasmic orgiasticies.
*
But during our extremest amusements, the
interlopers'---intruders'--- massice vessels appeared
upon our skies; these travesties of the
humanoid strode amoung us like conquerors,
showing off, to our vexation, their
much greater stature and intelligence
beside which, in both aspects, we seemed as
mere runts or petty imitators). And they said---
no, they demanded---that we must concede to
them (and to their glory as Proprietors of all) all
that we had constructed and had, until then, possessed
Aghast, we listened to them tell us that they had
compelled our evolution just for this, to
profit )as they always did from the foundation of
their hegemony) from our devoutly busy activity of
others on whom they looked down through eyes
that blazed in baleful multiples upon
their heads that look like the strange, mutated
beasts we created in laboratories and then, in
shocked disgust, hastily destroyed. To
these interlopers, we forfeited all that we had;
they took possession of what once was ours, and
valued the least of these items far more than all
our lives gathered into one sum.
Those few of us that they have not yet killed
serve them on petty errands or as clowns,
humiliating ourselves as they wish.
Some of us they have mutilated for
amusement or the curiosity
of how to recombine anatomy.
Thus, I have screened myself from your direct
sight, for I am more hideous than you or
I can bear to admit. Tonight they will subject
me to another laughing surgery as
I experience new and ever
expanding extremes of pain that
they impose and inflict, for my
untold and immeasurable agony.
I hope they err and accidentally---
or with a conscientious plan---kill me.
But this will, likely, not happen very soon:
their machines, like ours, have cancelled the
possibilities of unintentional death. especially
after their surgical pastiges and collages. An
I have no stomach to effect my own demise:
they removed my stomach and most of my flesh---
outdoors, beneath the few stars left in their sky.
Starward
