Nomads
by Ben Osborn
This morning I started to write it all down, and this is what I wrote:
Marie says that they came out of nothing, only invention and determination. Light out of darkness.
Because all there was was a slope that wasn’t black but the actual absence of black, lit by dim distant stars.
I heard from Marie that they didn’t have flying saucers or nothing like that, not even spacesuits really, nothing like something she-or-me’d recognise as a space suit; what they had was oxygen alligators. Bubbling canals in the void from mouth to mouth; a big conga-line kiss of life. Allegation systems.
What they found in the dark was rocks, just rocks and nothing else, rocks covered in ice, so they knew the ice meant water, and water meant life, and rocks could mean earth, one day, with patience. I always imagine they tore at the rock with their fingernails and stuff, pulling out clumps of new moist earth with green shoots already growing in them.
Now I forgot to even say what we were doing there. Us I mean. I’m all jumbled up. I don’t even believe my own self, and putting it in words isn’t helping. Is it alright if I just tell it like a list of things and not with a reason why, would that be alright?
I’m sick of all the high and mighty-ing, see. I was brought up Manichaean, right, but I don’t believe it any more. All of that hierarchical stuff. Lots of things in capital letters. It’s not for me, no. Prophets and angels and stuff like that – well I don’t think that’s how they spoke, not really. I don’t think everything was such a muddle of being totally clear about everything – saying things like This Was The Way It Was – and then cut down to still seeming just as clear, but now being a big mystery – saying: this was the Way it was, or: this was the way It was – I don’t think people spoke like that, not even when they were talking to God, so I’m putting a stop to it in myself. My Manichaean Guilt. I’ve looked up at what I already wrote, and it’s as big a mess as any of the words of Mani. ‘Light out of darkness’ – well let me tell you what I meant, by which I mean, what I saw. Let me show unto you that which was shown unto me.
See, imagine if you read a line like ‘God said, Let there be light!’ or somesuch – well, imagine if that meant, ‘Just now, God said, Let there be light!, and that’s why it got light just now’ – imagine if, in fact, you were reading a description of your own eyes opening, and only opening to read those words, too. God said, ‘I am saying’. You said, ‘I am saying in reply.’ Do you see where I’m going with this? Believing is a kind of doing, after all. Reading too. Doesn’t matter when it happened, what you’re reading about, because you’re reading about it now, so it’s happening now.
Well for me and Marie things got really sped up like that. We saw the past coming out right in front of us. So let me start again; ‘cause if I could start telling this again, I’d start it like this:
Marie says to me, look at that – they came out of nothing!
Because all that we could see in front of us was nothingness, not even darkness but the absence of darkness itself.
See, we had gone out on a little trip, Marie and me. We want to see something we’d only heard about, about our past. Our people had been nomads in a nowhere, and now they were us, but we’d heard that there was a way to see them as they had once been. So we took a little trip out to the edge of everything; you know what I mean, like where the light really stops. We landed on a little bit of rock and grey dirt. She told me what it was you were supposed to do there. She handed me a big spade and I dug a pit out of the grey dirt and then she opened her sack and there was a sheep in it. Still alive. She put it in the pit and held its back legs – sheep looked really scared too – and I shut my eyes and brought the sharp edge of the spade down on the sheep’s white neck. Didn’t work first time, so I had to open my eyes to aim better and really go for it, and this time the sheep just bellowed one croaky bleat and with it came great spheres of crimson, bulging like they were ripe, just splatting into the pit. We really went at the sheep then, ‘cause you got to get at all the blood, and that’s harder when there’s less gravity, plus it’s the first time I ever killed anything and I thought I might as well go all the way with it; and then, just like it’s supposed to happen, we saw them out in the middle of the darkness. They came out of nothing. Nomads – they survive on invention and determination. These things – we were them now, you see? They were the old versions of us. We’re what they became. We were looking at the ghosts of ourselves. I picked up the spade and kind of – brandished it, I guess – trying not to let them come too close. And they had those what’s-it-called – irritation systems, oxygen irritators – so that it was like they were all one big thing. Like dancers in a conga line, like I said before.
And I looked at them as they crowded around the blood and I really saw then where life had started. I looked at their broken fingernails and saw where they had broke them tearing life out of the rocks.
- - -
Ben Osborn is a student at Warwick University, UK. When he writes articles for student newspapers he tends to get emails from confused readers.
by Ben Osborn
This morning I started to write it all down, and this is what I wrote:
Marie says that they came out of nothing, only invention and determination. Light out of darkness.
Because all there was was a slope that wasn’t black but the actual absence of black, lit by dim distant stars.
I heard from Marie that they didn’t have flying saucers or nothing like that, not even spacesuits really, nothing like something she-or-me’d recognise as a space suit; what they had was oxygen alligators. Bubbling canals in the void from mouth to mouth; a big conga-line kiss of life. Allegation systems.
What they found in the dark was rocks, just rocks and nothing else, rocks covered in ice, so they knew the ice meant water, and water meant life, and rocks could mean earth, one day, with patience. I always imagine they tore at the rock with their fingernails and stuff, pulling out clumps of new moist earth with green shoots already growing in them.
Now I forgot to even say what we were doing there. Us I mean. I’m all jumbled up. I don’t even believe my own self, and putting it in words isn’t helping. Is it alright if I just tell it like a list of things and not with a reason why, would that be alright?
I’m sick of all the high and mighty-ing, see. I was brought up Manichaean, right, but I don’t believe it any more. All of that hierarchical stuff. Lots of things in capital letters. It’s not for me, no. Prophets and angels and stuff like that – well I don’t think that’s how they spoke, not really. I don’t think everything was such a muddle of being totally clear about everything – saying things like This Was The Way It Was – and then cut down to still seeming just as clear, but now being a big mystery – saying: this was the Way it was, or: this was the way It was – I don’t think people spoke like that, not even when they were talking to God, so I’m putting a stop to it in myself. My Manichaean Guilt. I’ve looked up at what I already wrote, and it’s as big a mess as any of the words of Mani. ‘Light out of darkness’ – well let me tell you what I meant, by which I mean, what I saw. Let me show unto you that which was shown unto me.
See, imagine if you read a line like ‘God said, Let there be light!’ or somesuch – well, imagine if that meant, ‘Just now, God said, Let there be light!, and that’s why it got light just now’ – imagine if, in fact, you were reading a description of your own eyes opening, and only opening to read those words, too. God said, ‘I am saying’. You said, ‘I am saying in reply.’ Do you see where I’m going with this? Believing is a kind of doing, after all. Reading too. Doesn’t matter when it happened, what you’re reading about, because you’re reading about it now, so it’s happening now.
Well for me and Marie things got really sped up like that. We saw the past coming out right in front of us. So let me start again; ‘cause if I could start telling this again, I’d start it like this:
Marie says to me, look at that – they came out of nothing!
Because all that we could see in front of us was nothingness, not even darkness but the absence of darkness itself.
See, we had gone out on a little trip, Marie and me. We want to see something we’d only heard about, about our past. Our people had been nomads in a nowhere, and now they were us, but we’d heard that there was a way to see them as they had once been. So we took a little trip out to the edge of everything; you know what I mean, like where the light really stops. We landed on a little bit of rock and grey dirt. She told me what it was you were supposed to do there. She handed me a big spade and I dug a pit out of the grey dirt and then she opened her sack and there was a sheep in it. Still alive. She put it in the pit and held its back legs – sheep looked really scared too – and I shut my eyes and brought the sharp edge of the spade down on the sheep’s white neck. Didn’t work first time, so I had to open my eyes to aim better and really go for it, and this time the sheep just bellowed one croaky bleat and with it came great spheres of crimson, bulging like they were ripe, just splatting into the pit. We really went at the sheep then, ‘cause you got to get at all the blood, and that’s harder when there’s less gravity, plus it’s the first time I ever killed anything and I thought I might as well go all the way with it; and then, just like it’s supposed to happen, we saw them out in the middle of the darkness. They came out of nothing. Nomads – they survive on invention and determination. These things – we were them now, you see? They were the old versions of us. We’re what they became. We were looking at the ghosts of ourselves. I picked up the spade and kind of – brandished it, I guess – trying not to let them come too close. And they had those what’s-it-called – irritation systems, oxygen irritators – so that it was like they were all one big thing. Like dancers in a conga line, like I said before.
And I looked at them as they crowded around the blood and I really saw then where life had started. I looked at their broken fingernails and saw where they had broke them tearing life out of the rocks.
- - -
Ben Osborn is a student at Warwick University, UK. When he writes articles for student newspapers he tends to get emails from confused readers.
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