The Land of Floating Blocks

I used to think that jumping from one platform to another was something I liked doing in video games, because it gave you such a beautiful sensation of movement. There were also the colors and the collectibles, the sound effects and the animations. But to actually do that and get away with it in reality was something totally unexpected. The Land of the Floating Blocks was literally that: a huge continent divided into at least forty sections, each a jigsaw piece missing its brothers, and on each block was an animal who looked vaguely amused holding a flag out to the human adventurers and parkour enthusiasts. And I was one of them when I began, but by the end of the enormous number of jumps I pulled, a part of me became less human, in the sense that I stopped existing as a human being who loved movement and more as movement embodied with human body parts. The final platform saw me become an animal myself, and once I landed I picked up the flag and waited for another participant to finish the game once and for all. 

The Fall

There was a little spot of green, and I sat me down there. The minute I did, it gave away under me and I fell down and kept falling. I fell asleep, to be woken up from time to time by others falling with me, who would wake up too and needed to talk. We talked about the most inane of things. The rocks and edges sticking out looked inviting, but no one grabbed them, since no one was panicked. (It's a good thing they didn't, for their arms would have been ripped off). So we fell and then forgot all about the fact that we had started falling at some time and after several years down the line, we thought this is how we'd always been: we'd been born, inexplicably, falling, and we'd die falling too. Then, a few heretics went ahead and postulated that there was something called 'a surface' on which we would someday land. Theories and tirades and diatribes raged while the same bland rocks and edges passed us by. Now we have two factions: the Surface Huggers and the Free Fallers. At least it makes falling that much more intriguing. Every day they come up with a new angle to the problem. I've never revealed that it is perhaps only I who remember that little spot of green which had given away under me.

On an Insect

In a remote province in what is now East Berlin, there is a tomb allegedly belonging to a humanoid praying mantis. The earliest actual record of this creature goes as far back as 100 AD, in a manuscript labelled Caudex Orantes Manteium, where it is implied amidst reams of unrelated verse that the Saviour was an insect, and that he will come again in the form of an insect and spread divine plague.

The Caudex Orantes Manteium was burned yesterday by a drunk sweeper in a museum in West Wales, after he broke into the display unit and tore it apart page by page. 

The Edge of the World

The thing about the edge of the world is that it's a misnomer. There is an edge, true, but exactly a 100 feet down there is also a giant, jutting rock. This extrusion is so far away from Earth's axial tug that walking down its length, naked, is a little like the proverbial snail on a razor's edge. The only problem with regard to you is simply that you are not a snail. The chill of outer space is a very tangible sensation, and the vertigo that ensues when you look down this edge is enough to allow even the most nonchalant extreme sportsman cause for distress. As if that is not enough, a recent nasty meteor shower has left its pock marked love throughout the surface of this rock. You are likely to stumble and fall, and that might take you several fathoms out.

One would think this would finish it all, that it would do for a fitting end to a lifetime spent within carefully wallpapered boxes with coffee dispensing machines giving you something to do when you're, well, you know, down. Which is most of the time. I wouldn't blame you: if anything, I blame the human mind. It is incapable of comparing two evils and choosing the lesser.

What I mean is, you stumbling and being carried away by solar tides is all well and fine if that was all there was to it. But you are not carried away. The edge of the world is a Escher print of edges cropping out alternately, each so jarringly out of alignment gravitationally that you will be pulled back, flung out, as you land on each edge. And this will happen all around the Earth. Bonk, bonk, bonk. Like a ball bouncing down a stair, only this is the most wildly disorienting stair you can ever choose to descend upon. If you survive the knocks meted out to you, you will be back where you began, ready to begin the entire process again.

The earth might not have had a contingent plan for spacecrafts leaving its surface, but it has no love lost for you and your need to escape individually. It's not letting you go that easy. No Sir.