A Dualist Myth for Science (and also, a swan)

Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was churning. Heat saturated all particles, and they would wildly spin into each other, and push, and pull, and pass each other unaware, as the light bashed photons at electric fields that would not stick and the chaos formed and reformed into accidental rocks. Rock and stone, rock and stone, anywhere bouncing, and then water as rain froze all the undulant motion and spoke a direction from the clouds: Down! And so down it went, Down! to the bottom of cliffs and crevices that boulders had worn away, Down! until it mixed with the ubiquitous heat, and cooled it, Down! until something was full and there was an ocean.

But there were two kinds then. The other watched, and tried to stay in the air as the carbon effused throughout and tore through empty space. They perched between atmospheres and watched the confusion of the rock, and the decisiveness of the rain. And they watched as the rocks dissolved in the water and how the down-going water would spin them in eddies, spin them in strands into golden proteins. And they watched as the proteins held each other and spun still, silent crystals between them. And they watched as the proteins would come apart from each other and bubble into the infinite ocean, holding their crystals in the center. And they watched as the bubbles made machines of each other and the machines became weavers and looms, and watched as the looms set themselves as the iterative term in an equation, and wove a bounty into themselves iteration by iteration: automatic looms, on towards infinity.

And the watchers watched and crept in the air and vanished and appeared and could not be still, for billions of years after the rain had stopped the rocks. And the watchers were frantic and trying to hold on, but the wild oxygen and the austere nitrogen would slip by them as they tried to take hold of something. And trying and watching, searching and grabbing, they would vanish as quickly as they came. They could not stick.

And the machines crawled out of the sea and demanded that rock be solid, so it was. And they built their brains out of warp and shuttles, and each shift in the pattern they shifted the warp, and wove reflections. The water still called Down!, but they couldn’t obey and were swept upward in a rising mechanical tide, restless, automatically reaching for what they could not desire. And the watchers bit their lips and looked, for the looms had swept themselves into nests woven with patterns.

So the watchers nested there, where they would be received. And they could be still, and see that they saw, and could hold on. And the machines slowed with the breath of the watchers, and were still and living and lasted. And the watchers finally had direction and rest. And they set themselves on the rocks and cut huge spaces, cities in the stone, where they sat and spoke and saw and did.

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A Swan

When I die, make me a Swan in the stars, where I’ll float on the ripples of empty space and call to the shouts of light from the edges of the sky. And give me wings, great wings, stretching onward to infinity, so that I can gather everyone under them, everyone who cries and labors, who smiles and curtsies. Give my wings huge shoulders where everyone can rest their head, and long feathertips that can feel the long waterfall hair coming down, falling onto the shoulders and arms that would rest in my starred pool. And let my reach be infinite, that my wings can circle all the world in soft down, and shelter every one.

Because I am so small now, and I don’t want to choose.