Bacteria with Still Life continued
The bipeds were divided into two groups: a small minority who liked to stir shit, and a vast majority who did not, but were either annoyed or pleased that shit stirrers exist. Diagnosis of the root of their problems was not difficult. What was difficult to decide was whether he should eliminate them or accept their existence as a natural process, in which case he would have to educate them, a task which he feared their primitive minds might inhibit.
§
Alias carried out his research in a Public Library. Between leather-bound volumes and the flickering screen of a computer logged on to the Internet, he placed his notebook on an oak desk, bathed in the soft yellow incandescence of a reading lamp. A gentle breeze from an open window turns the pages...a concise resumé of their history...from bacteria to primeval cognizance...fear was their first emotion...fear of darkness, predators, famine, disease, death, the unknown, from which came the faint synaptical spark of the metaphysical...higher fear levels...from which they imagined mythical spirits, forces of good and evil...fear drove them to a strength-in-numbers stratagem...tribes were formed...creating more fear...power struggles within the group...attack from other tribes, genocide and slavery...one method of defence was to make your clan believe its own gods were more potent than the enemy's...insidious propaganda...fire and brimstone...pagan rituals...virgins offered to Priests as the emissaries of Gods...livestock sacrificed on the summer solstice...promise of an afterlife...descendants of the first bacteria to hit the beach bear a genetic fluke which made their progeny wily warriors...a ruling class control serfdoms with, yup, you guessed it...fear as their weapon...Mammon the first and only universally worshipped deity...minor gods of ancient laities give way to the most flagrant demonstration of their irrational minds...the coexistence of the Gods of various religions...Holy wars...territorial divisions drawn in blood in the name of a mythical Divine Creator...two thousand years and they still stumble in the darkness of ignorance...
Late in their history, a few savants had debunked the God myth with scientific arguments as to the creation of the Universe, but no one had seen the third, and unequivocal answer to their metaphysical ponderings, that the Universe is a work of art, a still life in which a miniscule area they called Earth had become damaged by the bacteria which is humanity.
All of the words in all of the books float upwards from the pages and coagulate into inky clouds, their dry, blank pages turning to dust which is swept into a vortex as the breeze becomes a gale. The computer sheds a tear. The desk beats a hasty retreat, praying for a reverse reincarnation where its barley-twist legs morph into roots, branches, twigs, leaves, sap rising within a sturdy gnarled trunk.
Alias grabs his notebook to scribble a postscript to his notes: "Religion: illegitimate offspring of Fear and Hope, teaching Ignorance the essence of the fictitious."
The librarian's sickly cough echoes through the library...mercurial globules of toxic phlegm slither across the marble floor...an arcane semiotic code sent from the future dead...tick-tock...a bell rings...closing time. Ladies and gentlemen, The Artist has left the building.
§
At sunset, Alias crosses a fractured highway and enters a public garden. Circumventing mounds of decaying detritus amidst clumps of tangled weeds and overgrown brambles, he made his way to the edge of an ornamental lake. Above the city skyline, the firmament is a riot of colour, the density of the fusioning hues softened to granular pastel by the miasma of the sickness of civilisation.
Clearing broken glass from a bench with his walking stick he sits down. From the tower of a distant minaret comes the incessant ringing of bells accompanied by the howling of wild dogs.
'Yeah, though I walk through the valley of death, I fear no evil.'