It Is Not Gravity Which Pulls Us Down

It Is Not Gravity Which Pulls Us Down

 

 

Only these tired neglected gods still wander the floor of the universe, sifting joylessly through the detritus that lies there: the fragments of fallen planets grown so heavy with sadness they had lost the will to spin and orbit; the futile shards of civilisations been and gone, that had become so separated from anything worthwhile, they had lost all appreciation of beauty and fractured and splintered into broken remains; and the desecrated corpses of hope and love defiled by fear and hatred.

 

On and on these forgotten gods wander through the gloom, occasionally pulling objects from the silt, turning them around in their hands with detached morbid curiosity, before returning them back to the desolate and endless wasteland. On and on they drag their weary feet, the dust of eons rising in grey clouds of derelict despair and slowly falling like sad angels with broken wings.

 

And these abandoned gods roam silently, hauling the heaviness of immortality without hope, like great anchors and rusty chains — their shoulders forever stooped, and leaden feet sinking deep into the rubble of wasted possibilities.

 

Resigned to their eternal fate by endless time and endless pain these forgotten gods no longer look up to see the orbs that still float, for they know that these too will die and fall, and they know, without seeing, the perversity of devils worshipped as gods there, and the ugly pursuits of mankind already spreading like a virulent cancer disdainful of life; and soon enough the broken artefacts of yet another misguided race will be yet more accumulation of worthless sediment.

 

And, even in their dissociated state, these empty gods are still tormented by the memories of their exalted hopes from the time when the universe was young and of infinite potential - a time when their godlike naivety allowed them to believe that beauty would be the only inspiration that mankind would need; a time when even these gods had faith. And still they persevered no matter that each and every time man treated beauty like a thing to be feared, despoiled, and hated, or — at best — treated like a commodity only measurable in worth by the ugliness which they valued, and celebrated, more. 

 

And these sleepless gods forever move slowly, without purpose - but relentless even so, like tectonic plates or glaciers - on and on through the debris of their defiled dreams, and still compelled to stoop down and examine the remains of that which successive races of mortals had evolved to create: almost all of it colourless and bereft of imagination, beauty, or value; almost all of it obscene and blasphemous in its ugliness; and almost all of it conformation of the limited and meagre minds of men.

 

But even these empty gods, so numbed by the acceptance of overwhelming reality, weep and writhe in unbearable pain, when from the bleak rubble they discover a fragment of art so beautiful, rich, and inspired, that they are once again reminded of their own elevated dreams at the birth of creation: dreams where the conception of beauty inspired endless and limitless beginnings, and the beauty of this creation inspired more beauty, and beauty invoked hope, and hope engendered love, and infinite spirals of imagination emancipated man to dream and aspire like gods; dreams where the planets hung in the universe like iridescent lanterns, and the floating hearts of mankind shoaled in sensual, languid waves; dreams where infinite possibility was a vast canvas to paint with freedom and electric adventure, refracting the spirit of men in such a way that they too could become gods, each creating their own infinite and expanding universes.

 

Even these gods weep then.

 

They weep because these dreams are no more than dying stars, receding comets, and their own withered hopes. They weep to imagine that on these long dead planets, there were some who had aspired like gods, and they are torn apart to think of their beauty and dreams stranded in such horrific, bleak ugliness. And these ancient and forgotten gods weep because they know, that for those who had used those gifts of dreams and imagination, they had created a hell more terrible than their own miserable and hopeless abode.