The bigger picture
10 August 2011 08:58 AM Categories: Writing prompts
The cracks in the parched ground represent lives lived, paths that no one should have taken, the way one thing flows into the next and then it’s all over, that brief period of time when we lived, when our blood flowed and our muscles were strong, our joints unfettered, our minds still clear and easy and free of clutter. It stretched off past the horizon, looked eternal, but this was an optical illusion. Somewhere at the end there was a grassy field, a meadow with flashing larks and swooping sparrows, a beach where waves lapped at the dry earth before disappearing, the sun boiling it down to nothing.
The earth started as an amorphous cloud of gas. Gravity pulled it together, the heaviest metals sunk to the core, meteorites pummeled the unsettled surface. It was fire and magma, volcanoes and explosions, and then it was rock and the oceans formed and life began, the bacteria, the protozoa. There were no vertebrates, no invertebrates. Slowly things changed, so slowly, and would you believe that trilobites, those marine arthropods, lived for something like 270 million years while humans have only been here a relative millisecond, around 200,000 years?
The continents were one. Lizards came and fish and amphibians and mammals. They predated the dinosaurs and then they died out, too, or most of them did. The dinosaurs had their reign, the large continent cracked into pieces that slowly drifted apart. The mammals reign now. Human beings are at the top of the heap with our big brains, upright forms and opposable thumbs. We burn the remains of plants that once furred the earth, releasing the carbon dioxide that has been stored as rock. We steal the energy of what was formerly alive, killing the earth in the process. Or changing it in ways that we can't fully anticipate.
The world we will leave behind will be wet, humid, with heaving oceans, our plastic and Styrofoam and electronics floating in the soup. Those left will have adapted to the heat, will be able take the supersatured air and the rays of the sun that knife through thinning ozone.
I find it comforting to imagine that our time here is short, that the average human lifespan is nothing compared to the earth’s epochs, that when our struggles are over, they are over, not even a memory. Human beings matter no more than trilobites, except that we are taking down the earth with us and the animals, we are changing the landscape. We are the catastrophic event, but our personal catastrophic events, the small tragedies of life, don’t matter against the backdrop of the whole of earth's history.
History without humanity becomes something else, a story without a narrator, without a theme, nature and its forces ruling without regard to conclusion or story arc. Does unwitnessed violence exist? There is just life, lived for the moment, trying desperately to reproduce itself before burning out.
From the prompt "Another country," which was actually the prompt for July 29th. My response for today's prompt was too personal to put up on the web (but not too personal to share with a stranger). I haven't fact-checked this one, so I could be wrong about the earth's formation, etc.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Most of the time. This one has been heavily, ponderously edited.
Image by mozpkim of Chile's Chaitén volcano erupting in 2008.
blog comments powered by Disqus