A Cretinous Fugue

The light is created in the sun. It propagates through the super-heated marsh of simple elements and through the near vacuum of space that separates the sun from the earth. Billions upon billions of rays enter the earth's atmosphere, pass through it, and descend upon the surface.

The light is fast - the fastest object, wave or concept known to man - and it makes its interstellar pilgrimage of millions of miles in a perfectly straight line. When it finally descends upon the surface of the earth, a vast proportion of the rays cease to exist. They cease to Matter. The remaining few dodge the bare branches of a tree and smash into a conglomerate of slowed water molecules growing from a fountain in a barren park overlooking the city of Zurich.

Instantly there is chaos. The light is shattered. Some of it is reversed completely, flung back upon its lonely path, no longer Mattering, and into the centre of the sun where it is consumed. Some is diverted with careless brutality and doomed to refract and reflect about the earth, forever after without Purpose. Only an infinitesimal few survive the crystal. Only these few remain on course for The Destination. They have been slowed slightly, but they escape.
Of the infinite rays that began the journey, only this pathetic few will fulfil their Purpose. These few hurtle onward and, an instant after bursting forth from the icy catacombs of Righteousness, they collide with another substance. Again, there are casualties. Rays upon rays are rejected mercilessly from the fluid-filled orbs into which they have collided. Some penetrate: these are The Chosen.

The spheres are filled with a translucent amalgam and it is into this warm moistness that these few, The Chosen, enter. It is here they find the fulfilment of their Purpose. They have reached The Destination. They wash smoothly into the dark layer at the rear of the orbs and are absorbed into the blackness. Here, with infinite selflessness, they sacrifice themselves. They sacrifice themselves to the myriad tiny organic modules that make up the blackness. Their energy, their very being, is instantly given over. The tiny organisms of the blackness, stimulated, transcend their resting state in quantum leaps of Enlightenment.

The Destination blinks. As His eyelids close, the stream of The Chosen is severed, sending the hapless hordes scattering into the infinite nothingness of the Notme. A moment later, His eyelids open again and the procession of enlightenment continues.

I gaze upon the icicles. The world collapses upon me so that there is me and my surroundings and nothing outside of us. And then up away from the scene and there I am by the fountain kneeling with my camera in front of me. And my friends around it also. We are moving now, talking and laughing. The whole park, bare dirt and leafless trees with a wall surrounding it and now apartments just beyond the wall. A river. Buildings and streets. A city. There is movement everywhere - humans scurrying in the streets and cars streaming back and forth. Higher above and the lake is there, glinting with light, and the mountains obscured by the clouds. A little higher and there is no movement any more. The city and the lake and the mountains and clouds, all still. The lake is smaller and smaller until it is swallowed by the green and white. More blue surrounds the green and the continent slips down until the planet is everything. There is green and blue and wisps of white. The planet is spinning, and then the sun is visible beyond, bright but small.

The planet hangs in blackness spinning slowly.

And down and down and down again into the atmosphere, through the clouds and toward the continent and into the rift between the mountains and then the little valley, past the city, past its lake toward the park and through the bare tree branches. And there I stand gazing still upon the icicles.

Something flickers within me and I smile. I have had a thought and the thought is insignificance. I smile at the beauty of being Nothing.