Authors: Mark Lavorato
I watched my friend rise into the air, healed and healthy, spiralling upwards in long graceful arcs, its dark fingers pointing rigid and proud at the horizon on either side of it. The stubborn earth was finally passing under its body, the terrain broadening like an ocean with every circle as it climbed higher. Dana had once told me that the majority of cultures that had existed believed that animals (excluding our important selves, of course) weren't capable of emotion. I would have liked to have one of those ignorant people beside me then, watching that bird flap and glide in slow, beautiful rings that expanded with every new line it traced. True, I can't pretend to know what it was feeling, but anyone, regardless of how imperceptive they were, could see that it was some form of elation, a kind of euphoria, a type of celebration that we would never be able to partake in, but could at least witness, admire. Soaring high overhead, its serrated black shape finally began to drift out of view, and after giving out one last giggling murmur, was gone; leaving me with a smile that drew a long line across my face for the rest of the day.
It seemed reasonable to think I would never see the bird again, but this wasn't the case. Several days later, while resting in the midday heat, I heard it flutter noisily into one of the fruit trees. I walked out into the open until I could see it perched on one of the boughs, studying me with quick twitches of its head, as per usual.
"Well hello! Have you come for some food, my friend?" I called out. To which it promptly jumped into the air and flew away without ceremony.
But it returned a couple of days later, and this time, instead of speaking to it, I quickly found one of its favourite fruits, cut it into tiny cubes, sprawled them on the grass in the centre of the trees, and walked back to where I'd been when it first arrived. After a long while the bird swept down and plucked one of the pieces from the ground, flying away immediately afterwards. It was wary, suspicious of me; which was only understandable.
However, that suspicion slowly faded, and it returned again, and again, sometimes staying for a few minutes, making its gurgling noises, or calling out from one of the trees with its grating, metallic 'toks'. More often than not, it would fly away right after it finished eating, though other times it would return to one of the trees and clean its beak before flying off. It even happened a few times that it didn't eat at all, but only slouched over on a branch, watching me for minutes at a time with a serious, brooding silence. I was glad when this happened, as it seemed to verify that I wasn't alone in feeling a kind of connection or friendship between us.
So I was always half-prepared for the raven to drop out of the sky for a visit, and spent a lot of my day looking over my shoulder. And I found that this constant anticipation of the sound of wings, along with looking up at every shape that flew across the sky between the branches, heightened my awareness to other birds as well. The shrill peeps and tiny songs, the ruffle of their miniature bodies coming from the dark spaces under the leaves, their beady eyes scrutinizing the world between the flashing of eyelids, the cluttered flocks of them, falling like leaves, twisting in the wind until it almost became a visible entity. They had always been in my world, but before my experience on the mainland, I don't think I'd ever stopped to appreciate how remarkable they were, how quietly extraordinary. There was something inside them - especially in the raven - that humbled me, that somehow turned my critical views inward. Until, one day, just as this inspired reflection seemed to be cumulating, something happened that would bring me to one of the strangest conclusions I've ever come to.
That day, the raven, which had been eating on the ground in the centre of the trees, sprung into the air and flew away as unannounced as it usually did; only this time, it lost one of its tail feathers as it took flight. As it disappeared over the plateau of bushes, I watched the feather spin to the ground in a slow, fluid spiral, and started walking toward it to pick it up. The early-afternoon sun was casting a hard shadow on the grass at my feet, and when I crouched down to the feather, and brought it out from my shade and into the direct sunlight, it came alive with every colour imaginable, dancing between luminescent shades of purple, blue, and green. Of course, I'd marvelled at the raven's colours before, but there was something very different about holding onto one of its feathers that particular afternoon. I continued to move it between the direct sunlight and the dark of my shadow, the plume shifting from brilliant colours, to a muted black. And then it struck me: this was exactly how a human perceived truth - or, for that matter, how we perceived everything.
I had been thinking about the Creatures a lot before that day; about how I had so easily contorted them into something they weren't, and how I couldn't really explain when or how I'd let that happen. Until it occurred to me that, though I might have
begun
thinking about them with some degree of objectivity, as time passed, my thoughts had shifted into patterns that were quite different, patterns that could effortlessly sculpt and reshape things that had already been established.
So even before that day, I think I was on my way to the source of the problem, which is that, as intelligent as we are supposed to be, seeing something as a fragment of a much larger and intricate network of relationships, or even just as being multifaceted, is almost impossible for us. Our brains are in love with easy-to-follow timelines, two-dimensional graphs, one-dimensional stories. In fact, so much so that, even if we
try
to consume things in their initially complex form, our bodies can find a way to override us, can amend the information without our knowing it, crudely breaking it down, splitting it up again and again - always rejecting the more difficult halves - until they deem it a simple enough form to digest. I think things that might be grey in our world are never really taken in as grey according to our mind's eye, that they are transformed into either black or white, that they are turned into a stark enough shade as to be easily-referenced in the future, adjusted until their tone is bold, time-efficient, plain. In other words, if I hadn't seen the Creatures as a dangerous enemy, I would have almost certainly seen them as a docile, harmless animal - but nothing in between. And though the Elders had essentially said the same thing, the more I thought about it that day, the more I realized that it went much, much further than just this natural act of oversimplifying things; in that the act was perpetuated every time we mulled something over, or even just recalled it.
Nothing in our heads is stagnant; not even memories. True, they might
seem
like the frozen ashes of things that have burned, but what I'd learned through my experience with the Creatures was that, each time we blew on those ashes (in order to get the picture we wanted to see in the smoke), each time we consciously recalled a fact, a suspicion, opinion, or emotion, we also altered the shape that it was in when we'd first haphazardly stored it - the act of bringing something to mind was also the act of displacing our already tentative reference points. If I thought, for example, about a simple piece of cloth that I had found inside the hut and thrown away, and tried to remember the exact size, texture, pattern, and colour of it, I knew that the more I rolled these 'facts' over in my mind, the more imprecise they became. (This, I'd already proven to myself through countless examples in my life where I was
positive
I was right about some stupid, confirmable fact, and turned out to be shockingly wrong.) And, as if this weren't disturbing enough, I realized that, while the accuracy of the things in our minds are
diminished
by revisiting them, our
conviction
in their accuracy actually
increase
s each time it's revisited. Meaning: the further we drift away from the truth, the more convinced we are that we have cleverly sailed right to it, and have been there all along.
I knew that it could only be evolution that was responsible for this, and so tried to think of ways that it might be advantageous to see the things that our complex species did - while living in a complex world, and wading through complex situations - as simple, as reasonable. And the answer I came up with was that oversimplification was the very thing that allowed us to make definitive judgments, to draw rigid lines through things, divide them, dominate them; whereas without it, we could only waver, hesitant and unsure, lost in a precarious pattern of inaction, always waiting for more information to decide, growing hungry, letting possible dangers loom closer. Evolutionarily, it doesn't really matter that none of our ridiculous categories or divisions exist - good people, bad people, right, wrong - because in nature, actions speak louder than truth.
So it wasn't that we were 'innately horrible' as much as it was that we were perfectly wired to deceive ourselves, constructed to fumble around in a blurry existence, certain that that blurriness was translucent, even illuminated. We were designed to whole-heartedly believe in the individual worlds that we constructed and then reconstructed, to believe in our opinions, our interpretations, our philosophies, even when others' ideas (or, often enough, our own) glaringly contradicted them. We were made to carefully quarantine our beliefs from reason, and then live for them, die for them, kill for them.
Which all seemed to be leading me into an intimidating direction. Because if this were right, then that meant that everyone's beliefs, especially ones that had been held over a long period of time and had been constantly recalled, reinforced, and re-established, could only be, at best, fairly questionable. How much certainty could really be left in the Elders' doctrines, after having been rationalized and re-rationalized thousands of times over? Hadn't they said that veracity - that path that I was supposedly walking along - was the undying dedication to truth, a devotion to upholding the accuracy of our reality? Yet, how could anyone profess to be doing this, when the 'upholding' was the very thing that corroded the accuracy?
I was finally starting to understand. The one greatest lie that we can ever tell ourselves is that we're not lying to ourselves. Because we are. We do. Everyday. The Elders didn't have the truth about what we are; in the same way that none of us does. It was just that I had chosen to believe them, that I had searched high and low for things that would support what they said, and then revisited the contradictions in my mind until I had chiselled them down into something dismissible. And, now that I was seeing that their 'far-sighted' and 'advanced' ideas were just as lazy as everyone else's, I was forced to think back to some of the contradictions that I'd so carefully dismissed.
And as I did this, I quickly found that the weakest parts of their arguments always stemmed from the same thing, which was that they insisted on blanketing every part of every person as fundamentally malevolent. I had personally witnessed enough on the ship to know otherwise, to know that there were other things woven into that malevolence as well. As much as it might be true that we all had the capacity to be vindictive and pitiless, what Onni had taught me was that, from time to time, we also had the ability to be somewhat kind.
And as soon as I could admit to this, I found that it was possible to imagine someone like Onni in every depraved situation throughout history. For every stoning, I was suddenly sure that there were the people who would push to get to within throwing distance, the swirling crowd that would close in behind them, the people in the back who wanted nothing to do with it, and someone else who might have snuck the 'target' a sip of water during the night. For every genocide, I'm sure there were the set of ruthless organizers, the executioners, the compliant mass, and a tiny group of people that hid the persecuted, or even helped them to escape. And I understood that the existence of these individuals would be hard to prove, as I'm sure that historians, like all people, had a tendency to string the past together through its wounds. I understood that if we pressed our ears up against the doors of our race, that only the bellowing echoes of destruction would be heard - but I also understood that this wasn't because the screams were alone in there, it was because the kindnesses were being whispered.
Which, I realized, was something that Kara had always known. I remembered what she had said when I showed her the paintings, that they were about how we are worse than we think we are, and better. (I still find it amazing that she figured this all out long before I'd recognized that there was something that
needed
figuring out. She'd even tried to pass her understanding down to me; but, unfortunately, I was incapable of holding onto it at the time. Which is the problem with wise words: they can only be as wise as the people taking them in. They are unable to teach us anything, endow us with anything, they merely outline things that we've always known in some distant and murky way - and if we don't know them, or aren't ready to see them, no matter how concise or poignant those words are, their insight simply slides over our skin and dissolves around us like fog.) And what Kara had understood was that there is nothing more naďve than cynicism, that the notion of our being 'all bad' is just as crude and one-dimensional as the notion that we are 'all good'. She had come to recognize that pessimism is the act of blinding ourselves from the beauty in everything, and optimism the act of blinding ourselves from the ugliness; but that, regardless, they are both rooted in laziness. And it's crazy to think that, in the end, if there was anyone on the island who was 'as close to the truth as we could get', it was her, one of the few people who would live their entire existence without ever knowing anything about the lies she was raised in.
A bird fluttered into one of the fruit trees and I looked up to see if it was the raven again; but it wasn't. I couldn't say how long I'd been there, mesmerized, staring at the feather in my hand, moving it in and out of the light, carving something in the air in front of me that seemed to make sudden and perfect sense.