I
Action at a Distance
Isaac sat on the wall of the terrace facing the sun; his eyes squinted to razor-thin slights reflecting a sliver of the sun’s rays. He was collecting heat from the sun. Isaac had a profound understanding of action-at-a-distance phenomenon. He knew the sun was light minutes away, and while he could never travel there in his lifetime, he wouldn’t need to because the sun would influence him directly, from millions of miles away, delivering light and warmth. Isaac, black as he was, would fully saturate with heat in a couple of minutes, and he would then transfer that heat to his housemate, who was taking a siesta on the sofa.
He curled up next to her after carefully jumping up on the back of the couch, crawling down the arm, and slinking into place between her belly and arm. She didn’t wake up but put her hand over him, tucked it under his back feet, and curled her fingers around his toes. They slept for a while together, sharing the same dreams, until it was time to reengage with the day’s tasks which basically amounted to Lara preparing dinner and Isaac eating it followed by more sun and sleep for Isaac, and perhaps knocking over a thing or two on the patio or kitchen table. Lara had a few orders of jewelry to make for an upcoming show; an ancillary point only noted for the reason that she had to earn a living to provide for her partner, whose main occupation was turning order into chaos and chaos into order.
Isaac understood that, given enough time, heavenly bodies will coalesce under the influence of gravity, a purely attracted force that is, in fact, responsible for people falling in love; a point which Einstein failed to realize and directly contradicted, publicly, without seeing the flaw in his logic knowing full well that even light bends to the will of mass. Sir Isaac Newton Hayes, as he was formally known, didn’t have the insight Einstein had regarding the flow of light, but he full well understood that his body and Lara’s body were bound together in mutually elliptical orbits with love as the foci, and there was no force in the universe strong enough to break that influence. This made it easy for him to lounge in the sun free of guilt and with the only sense of responsibility being to honor that influence that bound Lara and he together while Lara worked diligently, sometimes late into the night, making pendants of silver and gold replicating his fine dimensions in different poses and postures.
These pendants, the Newton Collection, as they were collectively known, were in high demand because face it, people love cats and artists, especially when an artist manages to capture to essence of motion in still-life and the spirit of life in the inanimate. Isaac thusly thought of himself as a model engaged in a life-long cycle of expositions spending innumerable hours grooming himself for the next photo shoot portfolio.
Necessarily, too, he had to keep his spirits up because he knows that those who feel good, look good and those who look good feel good. To look good and to feel good empowered him, and that empowered Lara, which was his primary motivation for transferring the sun’s energy to her body while she was in repose and not directly engaged in the action-at-a-distance phenomenon-game the sun was playing with her indirectly. The Sun kept the Earth warm enough for life, in general, and when necessary, cats would transfer heat to their human counterparts to make up for the seasons, the clouds, the winds, the shade, and the coolness of the night.
II
In the Steppe: The Forest Organ
Some time ago, a small tribe in caravan arrived in the steppes and set up camp. One hundred and seventy-eight years ago, to be precise. I remember; I was here. So were many others in my family, among few of the surviving families since the last purge raged through the forest, wiping out the understory, shrubs, vines, herbs, ground cover, and many of the ground-dwelling animals among us. We were among the most resilient of the inhabitants and, dare I say, relied on such events to propagate. We watched the forest restore itself over time, so it appears today as it was in prehistoric times since most of the invasive species no longer had a suitable habitat to propagate in.
We hadn’t had human visitors for some time before their arrival, after the torrent, so we decided to gift them. Through council, conversations among our roots, leaves, flowers, branches, seeds, fruit, and trunks, we discussed what we would make for them to acknowledge their arrival and let them know that we are thankful and that we consider them our guests and will provide for and protect them. We came to the conclusion that we would build a forest organ that would play music conducted by the winds and small changes in the topography. Though the entire project would take a human generation, there were some things we could do on a smaller time scale that would say hello.
First, we had to trim back our branches in precise locations, creating a series of wind tunnels that would resonate at certain frequencies depending on the location and strength of the wind. Once a wind initiated a current, we could conduct it down the tunnel in concert, sustaining a sound directed at the encampment. Later, we would ask the fungi and animals to transmit our design to nearby groups of families among the plant kingdom. Not all of us locals spoke the same language, so the networks of fungi acted as an intermediary, or translator if you will. The sheep, cows, donkeys, and horses agreed to transfer the design to their respective territories. Still, as expected, the goats were quite disagreeable because only they could get to the hard-to-reach places, possessing exceptional talent, and they wanted compensation. In the end, they agreed because they couldn’t stand the collective shame cast upon them; we knew they would give in with the proper pressure.
I should point out that when I say “we,” I mean me and the others trees that I am connected to by networks of roots and the touch of branches and leaves. The tribe knows this, and I believe that is why they understood our message. I recall the small gathering at the base of the logging road they built into us. They didn’t realize it then, but they were doing us a favor, creating a portal directly to the mouth of their enclave. They stood there, somewhat drunk on the mead they made, mesmerized by the small chorus of voices wafting out of the logging road.
One of the younger women, there were eight of them, I think, caught one of our frequencies and began to resonate with it. An intoxicated elder began to drone at a lower frequency, bending the pitch in vibrato around the center. A wandering tribe, as they were, survived on stories of their lives’ tribulations and manifestations in the forests, villages, towns, and cities, an oral history often wrought in musical form. Soon enough, it would follow the rest of the small group began to hum and sing along. The rhythm formed, and a boy around fourteen began to sing one of their traditional songs about the fathers of their mothers’ fathers’ mothers’ tribe surviving on the lands they cultivated that nature provided already fertile and fruitful. It was a happy song, a childrens’ song written to expose the joys of life at an early age when you are still provided for by the elders before you have to make it on your own and experience the economic complexities of things like love and loss.
Their chorus grew so loud that people from the center of their village in the works came to see what was going on, some with the instruments they carried as they played by the fire in the town circle. The chorus was pretty much drowning us out, so the onlookers were slightly perplexed what all the partying was about until one among the chorus hushed the others with a few arm gestures and cupped her hand to her ear, and looked at the small, bewildered crowd.
A man, carrying a fiddle, stuck his bow up into the air with a muffled affirmation and began to play some of the notes of the forrest chorus. He created his own rhythm. The waves emanating from his fiddle began to interact and interfere with the wind orchestra emanating from the wind-pipe they built for us for them, creating a pulse that enraptured those present. They began to dance and sing and play their instruments. After many minutes of impassioned chant and enthralled movement passed, as if in unison, I recall, they all stopped what they were doing. Then we stopped what we were doing slightly after as if in response to their realization. Some of our new inhabitants began to laugh, while others began to weep, and a girl, the youngest among them who could speak, correctly spoke, “ეს არის ტყის საჩუქარი!” [It is a gift from the forest!]
III
Older than Words
The new fully human renaissance and enlightenment has recently begun, uniting experts in the fields of science, religion, spirituality, the internal arts, and the arts and letters. Sparked by a young autistic girl who discovered a language older than words, humankind has just been united with all of animal-kind and was just beginning to decipher the language of the plant-kind. Butterfly has recently been translated; completed dictionaries of sea mammals are being printed as I write this. The volumes on birdspeak took over bookstores and libraries.
Althea was born with a highly dense bundle of neurons in her brain stem and cerebellum. While this gave her the innate ability to process large quantities of information, it all happened simultaneously. She was unable to organize her thoughts and speech, which is nothing unusual for the autistic among us. Like many others with her affliction, she simply thought too much too fast and could not make sense of the complexities of human language, thought, and action. At best, her mental redux extracted the simple patterns her senses perceived, with a layer of fine detail often missed by most, but she had very little way to formulate her thoughts in a coherent fashion and express them visually or verbally. Her voice had a drawl to it like she was from Yerevan, though she was Gagra, and her words sounded more like an elder with no teeth talking while eating.
Still, she was loved as a baby, a child, and a young adult not out of pity but because she responded to everything with love and care. She treated an insect as if it were her baby sister, the village cats, and dogs as if they were her cousins, a wounded bird as if she was its doctor nursing it back to health in the palm of her hand for days, or as long is it took, feeding it with care, dropping water into its beak from the tip of her finger. She was admired by pretty much everyone in the town who looked up to her as a saint since most of them struggled with kindness, both giving it and receiving it, and struggled with patience enough to take the time out of their busy lives in their remote village along the sea where not too much was going on but the interference of the modern forms of communication through cell phones, the internet, social media, and the entire catalog of human music, video, film and literature streaming on demand.
One afternoon Althea was sitting on her favorite boulder, among the reeds, loosestrife, cattail, goldenrod, buttonbush, jewelweed, and milkweed, along the bank of the pond a short skip from her home. These flowers are a favorite among many species of butterflies, precisely who Althea was waiting to see. She knew if she went out right after sunrise, before the mist rising from the pond had dissipated and the morning dew evaporated, she would be surrounded by all manner of flying creatures, not to mention the frogs, salamanders, crickets, snakes, rodents, and small mammals. She knew that when the sun rose a little higher into the sky, the butterflies would come to begin their feeding frenzy. She could sit among them with her eyes closed and feel their presence around her like she could track them in her mind’s eye. She could smell their positions in space relative to her and taste their names and the relations among them. She could feel their thoughts and intentions.
As it turns out, many of them had been doing the same with her for some time. There were many ponds and flowers to choose from, but Althea was only at one of them, and they chose her. She didn’t know this until the fateful day when Allancastria caucasica landed on her left hand with its back to her, facing the pond, and sat there for quite some time, enough time for her to stare at it until she began to dream with her eyes open, until she began to realize that it was not there, on her, by chance. Althea began to understand it was communicating with her directly. Still, she didn’t get the message because, at first, she wasn’t using the correct sense. She was waiting for thought or sound to instruct her. But when she began to dream journey, her eyes began to decipher the scripted pattern on its wings.
The dense bundle of neurons in her brain stem that typically caused confusion was busy extracting and extrapolating the array of colors and shapes, formulating what was to be the first time recorded in human history when humans realized that for the entirety of their existence, the whole of the living ecology which they were a part of, was in direct communication with them. This may have been well understood by the indigenous inhabitants of the mothership but lost somewhere down the line when the human ego overpowered the original instructions. Althea brought it all back home with her discovery. When her brain had finished processing the message carried by the carrion butterfly, the words “We love you, too, Althea” became evident. She sat there crying a joy mothers and fathers cry when their child slides out of the womb for its first vision quest.
Aglaya, Althea’s mother, called to her from the kitchen window. Breakfast was ready. Althea didn’t respond, and after several attempts, Aglaya sent Piotr, Althea’s father, out to see what was going on. When Piotr arrived to Althea, sitting, softly weeping on the boulder next to the pond among the reeds and flowering plants, she looked up to him and tried to speak. She tried to explain what was happening. If Althea even understood what the word disbelief could mean, then that is what she would have been trying to communicate. Except, for Althea, there was no disbelief, and there was no mystery or miracle. It simply made sense, and she could see the words written all around her in the patterns on the skin of snakes, in the bark of trees, in the colored patterns of a bird’s wing, and in its song.
It was far more than a new day dawning in human history. The portal to the multiverse of transspecies communication had been opened by this young autistic genius. She was the primary interpreter and instructor for the linguists who realized that written language was not created by humans as an expression of internal need and desire. Religious scholars believed this was proof of the existence of their respective gods and goddesses and now considered all living beings to be scripture and verse in motion and that the entire planet was the garden of Eden, and somehow they missed that. The spiritualists gave a hearty yawn with a slightly cockish ‘we told you so,’ though now they had the proof. The biologists among the scientific community had to reinterpret the basic functionality of DNA transcription and translation and a dynamic ecological process and disavow the static process of molecules doing what they could within the constraints of electrochemical potentials. Physicists believed this new understanding was somehow linked to the grand unification of all of the fundamental forces of nature which they felt, or knew, but didn’t know where to begin to verify, that the universe has its own intelligence, that light has its own intelligence, that matter, and the field, and the second quantization were not just things that happened, they were things that happened with intention, and the intention was an organic manifestation of existence possessed by the things themselves.
Althea’s father had no idea what she was murmuring about as she sat on the rock, pointing to the butterfly perched on her hand. Still, he could see her joy and her tears, and he knew when she was serious and when she was clowning around. He couldn’t remember a moment in her life when she was more serious except when her little sister was born. She had the expression of complete bewilderment over the realization that this new life, that this new being, was the definition of divinity. She was instructed to care for and protect this little being, even if it meant giving up her own life. It would take Piotr a few days to correctly interpret and be convinced of what Althea discovered. Yet, with the next few days passing, Althea managed to come down from the heaven she was in, formulate a few words to try to explain what was going on, and translate a few more of the messages carried through time immemorial, conducted and patterned by the crystals that carried all of the genetic information of all life forms, to her father who finally began to understand what she was doing when she led him to the pond, pointed to a spring peeper, and translated the message on it’s back that said, “Father, it has always been this way, and now communication has been restored. You are more fully human, and I am more fully frog.”
The real miracle was not that humans began to dialog with the rest of the species. The real miracle was the new dialog that began among the human tribes, that they were not god’s chosen species privileged among the varied life forms on earth to use the earth and its inhabitants for money or pleasure. The real miracle was that humankind began to see all living beings as equal parts of a grand ecology. The real miracle is that all of the human disciplines were busy interpreting the language of others, the languages older than words, that warring between themselves began to diminish and eventually fade away as the news began to spread to the four corners of the world. The real miracle is that the human species rejoined the mutual space that the rest of the species inhabited now that they have received their original instructions, as it were, from the animal and plant world which, this whole time along, had been speaking to them with messages encoded on their skin, in the vein networks of their wings, in the patterns of flight, in the colors of their flowers, in the song of the wind wisping through the brush, through the incoherent voices of their autistic children, and through every motion of body, every scintillation of light, and every wave pattern on the surface of a pond, for everything that occurs in this place happens only as a reaction to everything else that took place so that all paths of motion and meaning could be extrapolated to the same source.
