The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

Digital Myths (Child of Eden)

The arc of light stretched from the twisted fog of the great sky to the thick, primordial oceans below, a spark that fused the long bleak past – all that dark space with all that cold, dead light – to the infinite possibility of a future where life would thrive. And life did thrive. An infant molecule. A bacterial monster no bigger than the unimagined idea of God in the void of time before humanity. Darwinian myths of the dominant and the extinct.

A mass of cellular embers like a stain of stars, burning bright and burning out, feeding all that comes after. The first crawl from the oceans to the land, the strain on the muscle, the tendons tightening, the warm sun branding the flesh, forever marking it, a searing benediction for the trajectory of that first spark, the arbitrary journey toward something called a “person” that thinks and creates and despairs. The point when that seared flesh gives way to the technological, the digital, the point when Man becomes machine, the point when a new Eden is born, a new myth of paradise, a new spark, a new vast ocean of possibility. There are myths within these myths. There is the myth of the first woman born of the digital ether, and the myth of the hacker that saves her from the modern bacterial monster, the virus composed of binary code and an insatiable will to replicate. There is the myth of the return of the first arc of light and the as of yet unknown future it suggests.