A Myth of Creation: Strangers from the Grey Planet

It kind of shows how I see the creation of the universe, outside the context of religious or scientific explanations, while simultaneously combining the two.

There once was a planet called Sisyphus that was occupied by a culture of beings. Don’t pester me about what they looked like, because it’s irrelevant, but I will pander to your personal grievance against my lack of description by telling you they were for the most part anthropomorphic. They had the requisite primate parts and over-developed brains, but the specific parts of the brain for arbitrary meaning-assignment, those that afflict the average human, did not exist. As a result, their linguistic capacity suffered greatly. Where humans are able to construct beautiful and disastrously floral phonemes to which they assign both great and devastating beauty and arbitrary meaning, the Sisyphusians lacked this quality and their language evolved as a primal flurry of grunts and pointing. They didn’t believe that anything had any meaning; much like a planet full of solipsistic nihilists. Suicide rates were astronomical; but for spiteful curiosity, some of the beings did not hurl themselves off of high cliffs or erratically self-terminate through gracious, life-relieving bludgeonment. I don’t know if bludgeonment is a word, but I’m going to continue to use it anyway.

            The progeny of the grey planet Sisyphus knew nothing about religion, metaphor, art, or any of those beautiful things that Oscar Wilde so notably labeled “useless”. They found no meaning in existence; therefore constructing a medium where the sole purpose was meaning from nothing was a trite and silly notion that they rejected outright. Amazingly, even with greatly restricted conversation, they were able to create buildings and repositories of information (we’re going to have to be a little lenient with this point, as an inability to arbitrarily apply meaning to phonemic strings would make a civilization incapable of speech or language at all) by constructing a language of shorthanded pictographs to depict things, and using a system of moots to solidify and codify what they came up with. The premise, driving force, and terminal objective of society on planet Sisyphus was self-improvement through learning, but without the pretense of a personal perspective. Such a way of thinking will seem alien to us mere humans, because we apply our personal perspectives artistically and explain it artfully through, you guessed it, the arbitrary assignment of meaning. Language, art, and music are all three elements of creation and application of imagination. These components are inextricably linked together in human society, but we must try to purge our personal biases to artful understanding, in the case of the dreadfully and dolefully non-artistic society of the Sisyphusians. Ah, yes, I did indeed say it was doleful, but only from our perspective, tainted with that artful expression that even the engineers and the most sternly mathematical humans possess.

            As a result of their crippling lack of imagination, technology came from direct interaction with the environment solely and therefore at an incredibly slow rate. What humans were able to achieve from the point of sentience on, took at least thirty times as long for the Sisyphus, because cause and effect as evident from specific circumstances had to result from those specific circumstances occurring naturally, and not from scientists causing them to happen artificially. How long was that period of time from sentience to “modern” levels of achievement? It’s all relative, my dear reader, because we cannot possibly know the point at which in our history we became sentient, can we? The awareness of the self is highly philosophical by default and in a place where philosophy is considered an irreverent and unimaginable state of thought, it was never even considered. How could it be simultaneously considered irreverent and unimaginable while not even being considered? Good question, I know. The thought of an idea possessing a greater meaning beyond the tangible was taboo, and much like with us, taboo thoughts were supposed to be immediately stricken from the brain. Should a Sisyphusian lack the personal discipline to strike such thoughts from the brain, they were considered retarded.

            Because those who thought outside the normal range of Sisyphusian thinking were considered mentally handicapped, they were immediately destroyed without consequence to the destroyer. Even this brain of the Sisyphusians that functioned differently had to be logically described away, but trying to come up with an explanation without a deeper implication was difficult for the Sisyphusians. It was in fact a random and rare anomaly, which was how the Sisyphusians eventually explained it away, yet the actual truth was filled with deeper meaning, at least as a matter of opinion by the Creator, myself. Nature is like a painter, and though different tools exist in the far reaches of space-time, the black gooey medium of our little universe here, the drive to diversify genetic information and to drive forward past the limitations of the available tools and materials remains the same everywhere. This is simply the case whether we’d like to acknowledge it or not, regardless of what color the lens is that we apply to our perceptions of reality. Whether you consider Nature to be of divine origin, or whether it’s a biological process, it does maintain a direction or a course (that of overcoming its restraints), and how you explain that away is a matter up for your own conjecture.

            Devoid of meaning, right and wrong were elements that did not exist, just as existence was a solid-state that wasn’t considered beyond the scope of whether one should personally exist or not, and there were more negative connotations applied to existence than there were to non-existence. In essence, the non-existent were considered the smarter of the only two categories of the Sisyphusians, being the existent and non-existent. Again, without meaning, racism and prejudice based off physical anomalies rooted in regional evolution were not considered to be anything beyond adaptation to relative geographical diversity.  Therefore, categorization as a result of meaning associated to the concept of the “other,” did not exist.

            Idle time was considered impractical, so ill-fated industriousness with minimal result was commonplace but not seen as a bad thing, as there were no bad things. In a significantly slower pace of development and construction, lifetimes were spent at what we would consider fruitless labors. As a means of genetic facilitation, lifespans were significantly longer. A Sisyphusian day would be comparable to an Earth decade, and the lifespan of a Sisyphusian was typically four hundred Sisyphusian years, which each year was equivalent to five hundred Sisyphusian days. In essence, they lived at a rate of almost geological proportion, and found no meaning in it. The mathematical comparison shows us that the lifespan of an average Sisyphusian was in the area of 2,000,000 earth years. The more artistically inclined of you out there are probably suffering through the mere thought of such an existence, but you’ll probably appreciate the social proclivities of the neighboring planet much more.

            The neighboring planet was known as Neocortesia. To the inhabitants, there were an infinite number of names for the planet. The inhabitants of Neocortesia were unaware of the inhabitants of planet Sisyphus, but they imagined that there was a great society of beings there, whose art was unparalleled and whose existence was simply blissful and utopian. They could see the grey planet in the sky, and they took that visual input and let their imaginations run with the visual stimulus. As you may now be gathering, their existence was rooted in imaginative meaning assignment to all stimuli. They applied meaning to everything, literally. A pun! The process began imminently with their sentience at some point in their evolution, also many Earth eons ago. Yet this process of overt imagination application was extremely taxing on society, so lifespans were very, very short. Too much in-depth thinking in abstract ways seems to hornswoggle the years out of a being’s life. The days were much, much faster, occupying the likeness of a few human hours, two to be exact. One Neocortesian week was equivalent to six Neocortesian days, while one Neocortesian month was comparable to 534 Earth hours. To round out the timescale for you, the Neocortesian year was equivalent to two hundred Neocortesian days (400 Earth hours). With the average 45 Neocortesian years to a lifetime, roughly two Earth years is a reasonable approximation to make for the living existence of a Neocortesian resident. The twilight years began at reaching adulthood (the 30^th birthday held extreme importance and was met with a rite of passage into adulthood), and death was an exuberant celebration by some of the non-dead, and an artistically sadistic cataclysm to others, while simultaneously being a fairytale to others. The problem with their society, at least one of an infinite number of problems as seen and disagreed upon by the local population, was that no one could agree on anything. Everyone imaginatively applied meaning, but no two beings agreed on what the meaning was. Discourse and argumentation were both extremely happy occurrences expected of every member of the population, but every walk of life was examined differently, and purpose was at best a state of being, and being was never agreed upon once by two Neocortesians ever. Whew! Behavior that a human would consider lecherous was commonplace by some, avoided by others, ignored by yet different people, and the subject matter of literally an infinite number of poems, stories, and diplomatic and scholastic debates by the planet’s inhabitants. Now, imagine that all patterns of all types of behavior were viewed similarly, apart from creative output, which was the one agreeable standard by each of the members of Neocortesian society, yet no two of the species agreed on what artistic or imaginative output actually was. Evolutionary history of the Neocortesians spanned eighty-nine billion years according to human time, and a fairly short amount of time by the standard of the Sisyphusians.  It was a longer amount of time than the Sisyphusians even existed! Even so, the two planets were mutually ignorant of the actual existence of the inhabitants of their neighboring planets.

            The Neocortesians were also for the most part anthropomorphic. Their physical characteristics are unnecessary at this point for your understanding, but knowing how you, the reader, are going to constantly nag at this paper (or screen) before you about the details, you can rest peacefully knowing that later on in this story, the physiological characteristics of both species will be revealed, and you can go about your business in the wake of the headache that is most likely beginning to manifest in your brain at this very moment.

            As the Sisyphusians deemed the material remains of the dead as a sort of post-industrial waste, the Neocortesians considered the bodies to be a spiritually remnant manifestation, likened to a used sacred vessel, among a few various other artistic interpretations. Case in point, Neocortesian dead were glorified and their bodies preserved before interment into giant tombs underground. Due to high volume, one can understand (at least one human can understand) that this planet had to be huge to facilitate such a great number of dead. Unfortunately from our perspective, there was no systematic means of putting them in the ground, and there was no rhyme or reason to how they got there, or where they were located, and sinkholes resulted from the obvious fact that the ground became unstable. The Neocortesians viewed it as punishment from one of their 9,643 recognized deities, or one of the 186,456,784, wait, 187,439,587 no, 194,498,322, (you get the idea) unrecognized deities. The people that did happen to agree on which deities to believe in formed “tightly” knit groups, but splintering factions of each of these groups appeared within Neocortesian weeks of the inception of any “recognized” religion. Creation myths and histories were always being created and retroactively revised by the Neocortesians, and a nearly innumerable amount of tapestries, songs, and other creative interpretations of these things were held in the Great Library. The Great Library had undergone many iterations, as some Neocortesians thought it to be an artistic expression to destroy the Great Library, while others thought it to be an artistic expression to create new interpretations of what it should look like. It may help to imagine it as an unfinished painting wherein the main object is never really materialized, but the surrounding landscape is as vivid and irrationally dysfunctional as a Salvador Dali painting. To further exacerbate the lunacy of the whole affair, we can also insert a dedicated adjective label in the middle of that vaporous non-painted structure. I apologize, reader, for the absurdity that I’m trying to get you to imagine.

            At current (as well as in the future and the past simultaneously), there are on the order of fifteen million variations of the name Aiden among the population of the Neocortesians. An artistic (albeit misinformed in my opinion) movement swept the lands of the planet where it was artistically acceptable to homogenize naming, which is both surprising and maddening for the fact that even homogenization of expression can be artistically acceptable! At least it is to the simple, categorization-craving human brain.

            As Fate (or at least Fate in this context being my directive) would have it, one day at the same point in astronomical time, space travel was discovered and utilized by both of the planets. Due to relative proximity in the spatial manner of speaking, it was simultaneously decided upon both planets (in the blink of an eye to the Sisyphusians and in a near eternity to the Neocortesians) that three members of each planet would investigate space exploration to the other respective planet. To this sentence, the number three is the first to have zero greater metaphorical implication beyond an arbitrary assignment by myself, or the Creator in the case of this story, and it is your duty as the reader to find meaning in the other numbers, or is it? Actually, I lied in that last sentence. Did I lie? Maybe I just adulterated the truth so that you couldn’t quite understand things the way the Creator, me, does...    There is great significance to the number 3, can you guess it? The only numbers that are not metaphorically representative of something are the crossed out numbers aforementioned in the previous pages. I’m the Creator; I can do what I want regardless of how cruel, arbitrarily wicked, or gracefully kind it is. Sometimes you just have to accept where you are located in the pecking order, and at this moment you are relegated to the status of reader; experience-er. You are currently subjugated by the whims of the universal author, just like always. Are you subjugated by those whims? Now, I must explain how naming worked as a rule on Sisyphus (and will work in the future, though that doesn’t make any sense now), and then we’ll carry on with the story.

            Naming on Sisyphus was a matter of numbers. A running count of the population was maintained by the Society of Numbers, and that was assigned to the population by order of chronological birth. The one exception to this was the number Zero, also known as 0, which was a lineal descent title given to the oldest living Sisyphusian alive at any given moment. The extreme care that the planet’s populace gave to this (numerically counted to the Sisyphusian second) is almost incomprehensible to the average human. Every time 0 died, the next in line was given the title.

            Now, let us regress to the spatial comparison given to the size of the Neocortesian planet. For the fact that it was very large, but due to physics must spin at a much greater rate than planet Sisyphus, we can thus apply deductionary (also an invented word that really ought to exist) reasoning and understand that planet Sisyphus was much, much, much, larger. At least ninety-six times larger than our largest known star, ninety-six being another well-placed, arbitrary number assigned by the story’s Creator, me. Back to our current story, the three designated space travelers from Sisyphus were 0, 666, and 1347. The three designated members of Neocortesian society were Aiden with the Small Nose, Aiden with the Bigger Nose, and Aiden with the Biggest Nose. We’ll shorten these for the sake of brevity to A1, A2, and A3 because I’m a lazy writer, and you’re a lazier reader.

            With zero emotional reaction by the Sisyphusian population, the members of the space crew left the planet and took a few human weeks to get to planet Neocortesia. With a great deal of artistic and expressionistic interpretation of the greater metaphysical implications of space travel, the Neocortesians were able to escape the rabble and take the same number of human weeks to arrive at planet Sisyphus. With giant thuds, both landing craft from each ship landed on the respective destination planets. For the sake of ease of explanation, the atmospheric constituents of both planets were similar enough that they were compatible with the lungs of the alien arrivals, but they had different resultant effects on the aliens, which were immediately noticeable. The atmosphere on Neocortesia gave the Sisyphusians a distinct enhancement to their critical thinking skills, their ability to reason and identify results in equations, and a keener ability to empirically understand sensory stimuli. The effect of the Sisyphusian atmosphere on the Neocortesians was one of liberating intoxication, like a mixture of THC and alcohol on humans, that enhanced sensory stimuli to the point of making it more interesting, while limiting impulse control and causing a slight headache, but pain was considered an artistic liberator to the Neocortesians, so it was welcomed with open arms.

            Because of the analytical nature of the Sisyphusians, the Neocortesians were seen as an inferior species that lacked critical thinking skills, and the alien arrivals were seen as no better than animals. A1, A2, and A3 were allowed to look around and engage in discourse with the normal population, because it seemed to the Sisyphusians that they were harmless, idiotic hairy lumps of flesh that carried on an existence free of intelligence. Surely, no harm could come of this. The Neocortesians were pink skinned mammals by our standard, with sloping foreheads and big protruding snouts and large ape-like lips. They had long, shaggy black to brown hair, large musculature, long arms, and were prone to walking on their knuckles. They used flowery language that through interpretive dance and gesticulation became somewhat understandable to the Sisyphusians (more because of the gesticulation than the interpretive dance) with some periods of confusion that would eventually be straightened out. Problematically, however, the Neocortesians would blink in and out of existence to the Sisyphusians, because their time and movements were so fast by comparison to the time scale of the planet Sisyphus. Regardless of that fact, the speedy movement of the Neocortesians in a relative eternity according to their perspective allowed them to see many Sisyphusians many times, on multiple occasions, and they were able to interact intelligibly enough to evince a change in the society of the Sisyphusians. As much as the Sisyphusians rejected the perspective of the Neocortesians, the constant and repeated inundation of the perspective of the Neocortesians spread like a virus, infecting the direction of innovation and evolution of Sisyphusian society. At short length, and with a disagreeable immediacy to the Sisyphusians, society changed. As well, with shocking immediacy, three generations of Neocortesians passed in a matter of days, yet as both the inhabitants of Neocortesia and Sisyphus only created a single progeny during copulation, the population of the Neocortesians dwindled to one at the onset of the third generation (with the lack of artistic stimulation, the urge to mate was severely restricted among the Neocortesians) and the Sisyphusians eventually determined that in order to get a better understanding of Neocortesian reproduction, they must mate with one. So 1933 was designated to mate with Aiden 6, 1933 being the male, Aiden 6 being the female. Copulation was achieved, and during childbirth Aiden 6 died.

            As a result of the brief interaction of the Neocortesians with the inhabitants of Sisyphus, society became rife with misunderstanding and diversity of interpretation, two previously foreign notions. It was too late for Sisyphusian society to right itself, and within three Sisyphusian years, it was doomed to destroy itself. Before all was lost, the progeny of 1933 and Aiden 6 was put into a space travel capsule and sent to drift into space in a state of suspended animation. Within a single Sisyphusian generation of contact with the Neocortesians, all life on Sisyphus was extinct.

            As a result of alien biology (obviously), the progeny was a male, it was noticeably more Sisyphusian than it was Neocortesian, and it drifted in space for eons. It would only reanimate when it landed on a planet with an atmosphere similar to the native planet.  After landing and being blown off many different planets, it finally landed on another hospitable planet, one that would alternately be called the blue or the green planet in the future, just as it was called in the past. Again, that doesn’t make sense now, but it will, if you trust me, dear reader.

            Concurrently with the arrival of the Neocortesians on Sisyphus, the Sisyphusians arrived on Neocortesia. The grey color, the tall height, thinly proportioned figure of the Sisyphusians (coupled with their large eyes, small mouths, holes for ears, and barely noticeable noses) seemed alien and artistically offensive to some of the Neocortesians, blissful to others, and inspiring to others even. None of the Neocortesians could agree on how to interpret such a huge event, and it proved to be cataclysmic to the extremely fast (by comparison to the Sisyphusians) nature of their society. Everyone came to see the Sisyphusians many, many times, taking future generations to see them. Interaction with the Sisyphusians, though interesting, was generally damaging to the fragile and flippant worldviews of the Neocortesians, a fact that was dealt with through interpretive dance and depressing poetry writing. Eventually, xenophobia and mutual disagreement between Neocortesians would prove overwhelming to a society that usually engaged in symbolic warfare through artistic expression. Freestyle poetry read-offs were changed to physical combat at the suggestion of the Sisyphusians, and that immediately spread like wildfire through Neocortesian society. Warfare was unnecessary to the Sisyphusians on their planet where no disagreement ever existed, yet it came as a natural deduction to the Sisyphusians as a more definitive means of conflict resolution to the irresolute Neocortesians. As a result, mass extinction became rampant. To cope, the surviving Neocortesians decided to engage in mass sexual encounters in free love exchanges, yet it was to no avail. All the kissing and genital mingling in the world on that great planet was not enough to cease the artistically appealing nature of bloodlust that fueled the newfound self-destructive desires of the Neocortesians. The rampant xenophobia also led to the destruction of two of the three Sisyphusians, the last remaining one, 0, was the male that a Neocortesian group of females all tried to engage in copulation. Yet biology determined that copulation could only be achieved by the specific performance of one biological occurrence, and all the artistic free-acting ceremonial love and biologically deviant application of the sexual reproductive procedure was just a bastardization of that process, and would ultimately be impotent to progeny production. The end result was that one female offspring was produced, much more Neocortesian than Sisyphusian, which was put into a space travel capsule and sent into space, a ludicrous reminder of what happens when worlds collide. Within seventy generations of Neocortesian society, the entire planet lay lifeless, with no reminder of what had come to pass before, apart from the corpses decaying in the streets and on the mountaintops and littered across the artistic landscape.

            As this story’s Creator would have it, this particular space capsule also made it to the green planet, or blue planet, depending on the interpreter’s perspective. The capsules both opened within a few Earth days of each other, that association of time being appropriate because that green-blue planet was in fact Earth, and the two hybrid creatures met, one being male, the other being female, and began trying to understand each other’s dreadfully different ways of understanding that world in which they both occupied. By this Creator’s hand, the male of the more Sisyphusian persuasion was named Adam, and the female of the more Neocortesian persuasion named Eve. By technicality according to Sisyphusian custom, Adam became the new Zero, and shortly afterward the arrival of Eve made her the new One. The count restarted with the decimation of all the other Sisyphusians. The two were unaware of how they got to where they were, so they made a few different diversely interpretable stories of how they came into existence. These stories would grow in depth and change in meaning throughout the lives and generations of their children. In effect, there was a Truth and quantitative/qualitative means of explaining their beginning and set of circumstances, each with innumerable variations. All of these were, are, and ever will be “true”. That simply is the way it was, is, and ever shall be.  

            They both had a proclivity toward sexual reproduction, and so engaged in coitus with each other and their offspring. This was done as a means of perpetuating their new species, which over time lost its hair and began to fuse the tall and short, grey and pink, hairy and hairless aspects they took from their progenitors. History was invented, languages codified, and while understanding was debated, it was universally sought by all who became aware.

            The truly maddening aspect of this story is that the end is really the beginning. As space in this universe is able to occupy opposing and selfsame locations simultaneously as a result of cosmic infinitum, time is relative and ignorable; therefore the linear nature of human time is as obsolete in reality as it is absolute to human understanding. At least this is all true to me, the Creator of this universe, the one you’re reading. Or is it the one you’re living in? As this hybrid species of hybrid species advanced its ability to travel in space-time, it deposited a few members of itself on two planets. One was known in the past as Sisyphus, and would be named Sisyphus again in the future. Through a sort of biological evolution, the planets changed the shape and the nature of the new inhabitants, much as happens on Earth, dear reader, regardless of whether or not there was a Divine inception. The beginning is a null point when meaning is in the journey. The other planet was known as Neocortesia in the distant past, and would be named that again in the distant future.

            History is not a metaphorical cycle, or a metaphysical one; it is an actual, instantaneously repetitive cycle that is never affected by time. We in fact created ourselves, and continue to do so, and will do so in the future; all at the same time.

The end.

Author's Note

It's still kind of in draft form, this is the third draft.

Reviews

[Bethany Woody]

I think I get it, but I'm not 100% possitive I do. Maybe it's still too early for me to wrap my head around, but I'm giving it a go.
Basicaly what you're saying is time and life are both relative because we live, die, and recreate ourselves all at once. Each 'aspect' is happening simultaniously, be it emotional birth, life, or death, or mental, physical, we live and die at the same time and are creating the next us with our thoughts and actions always. A karma thing?
I can say this, it is a well written piece, there are certainly numerous thought provoking aspects.
I did see a corrolation between events in the story and events that jave happened in EEarth's history. Free love and the hippies jumps out at me for some reason.
I'll read this again and see if I get a better understanding.