The Play of the Monster Makers

Sylvia Shawcross

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Some days the wind is soft like the fur of a kitten on your cheek, a purr, a whiskered whisper. On those days it carries the fluff of seeds over the tall grasses and lingers sometimes to stir the small creatures living there.

The creatures without curiosity who simply exist to slip, slide, slither, fly, hop in their stemmed forest eating and reproducing. We can be curious about them. We can look them up in books, put them under microscopes, dissect and diagram them. We can move on and feed them to fish or even ourselves. We can do many things with them because they are there and we are curious if not utilitarian beings.

We can follow the wind too if we choose to—the gentle rustle up to the sky, a waft over the hills and towns. Higher still we can follow the wind over the continents, across oceans. We can chart the wind, measure it, etch it on radar and predict its path and construct windmills that creak and ships that ride the currents. We can go higher still where there is no wind to speak of, just a vacancy of space wrapped around our small green planet where we can place satellites and ships and observatories.

We can do these things because we are a curious group who make things from what we’re given. And we marvel at the things we’ve made sometimes. Humans tinkering, learning, inventing over so much time. So much time. And yet, no time at all if you are the earth wearily watching.

At one point a human chipped at rocks and made tools even as they cowered in caves when the sky thundered and split open with fire. At another time the wheel was invented. Electricity lit up the dark nights. The atom was split. The building blocks of life deciphered. And all these inventions grew elaborate with the passage of generations. It is that way even still. Humans building their way to more and more convolution. Entropy maybe.

If you could stand there on that precipice of time and space and gaze down on this place it becomes a distant thing where the people layer and clot and clutter all those landscapes through time.

Some of those people rise to top of their generation because of what they accomplished, famous, notorious, important even. Most simply lived their lives in context to what they were given, a kind of background noise to the grand play of others. Many of the ones, who gain their moments of fame, swagger and strut and strive. Whatever they dream, they do. Whatever they want, they invent. Whatever they can imagine, they create.

And the days grow different than they used to be because what was good enough is no longer enough. In everything. They grew weary with their inventions. They lit up the sky with Starlink chained across the night and made nuclear weaponry and cloned sheep. All things must be and perhaps were made better. But the one thing that needed change, the last frontier was the very act of being human. Humans were simply not good enough. It was the very humanity of us all that hindered dreams. Most of all.

Surely we could want better, invent better, imagine perfection. For the human being? Surely. We are only constructed of DNA and besmirched with fallibility and imperfection, driven by passion and pretence and jealousy and fairy tales. Broken by disease and haunted by limitations. Oh, what could be! What could be! If only… If only we were better than human.

And so the humans remake themselves. Some of them do. The ones who have that privilege. They tinker, invent, imagine, create. Remaking the body, the psyche, the history, the purpose. The inside brought out. The outside brought in. They play God. Because are they not likened to God? Forming life from clay? The play of the monster makers. Are they not better than God? Removing suffering. Eliminating all those limitations? It is intelligent design to perfection. Who would not want this? What is the point of suffering? When we can be perfect.

And the days grow different than they used to be. It was ever thus. The tool maker turned to self. Now it is us to be harnessed.

But you see, for all the tinkering and promises, it is still only a human in a cave banging rocks. Those that strut and construct. Those that dream and create and recreate. Those that play their God-role did not make the heart of the flower that made the seed that wafts in the wind. And that will always be the source of the would-be-Gods fury and frustration. That will always be their undoing. That will always be their fallibility as humans.

The only true perfection made a flower.

Why there is something rather than nothing? They that would-be-Gods cannot answer. They bang the rocks and the sound echoes hollow through time. And the earth grows weary still with the watching.

Earworm (Oh, I know I’ve done it before, but I like it.):