The Next World:

Here lies a newborn.

This newborn has no concept of history, but the pieces of history are embedded in every image his mind presents to him. He does not recognize what unravels before his eyes, whether opened or closed. Nothing has a name or a purpose.

Images from well-worn ancestral paths merge with what he perceives. There are no barriers between the world of ancestral dreams and what his forebears consider to be concrete, actual, and of the present.

The adult, who is assimilated to the surface reality we call “the world” trusts in her knowledge that what rests before her eyes are white impatiens, fully bloomed in a terra cotta flower pot. Beneath this object are the planks of a wooden deck painted a deep red. Several feet beyond, there lies a patch of lawn being doused by a sprinkler at intervals.

To the far right, a group of shade trees where the buzz of a cicada is traced rustles faintly. She knows that the sprinkler was bought at a nearby gardening supply outlet and that the cicada is an insect which sometimes does damage to certain kinds of foliage when depositing its larvae. Moreover, she is probably aware that, under rare circumstances, a cicada might accidentally sting a person, mistaking their arm for a sap-filled tree limb if allowed to rest on it for an extended amount of time.

Her eyes and mind identify these illusions from a life lived far away from the primordial storm that birthed her.

The newborn, without the ability to express such a concept, might fully understand that none of what he sees is real beyond his own perception. The universe at its most basic blackness is harnessed within his brain, and he is aware that before this darkness, and before his eyes looking inward, anything can happen.

The newborn hears the cicada’s drone and is transported through the current that made him along with the insect. They are one and the same, albeit of different physical manifestations. In a dream, the infant grows a long proboscis under the shell of his skull and injects it into various limbs for feeding. The sap, the blood of the universal body fills his veins. When he awakens, he wails into the ever-widening basin of the world before him, where everything is plumed in darkness.

The adult motions into the adjoining room to console this newborn where he lies. To her, it is a small nursery room and he lies safely nestled in a crib.

It is four AM.