Month: April 2025

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IN THE CELLAR WAS A PIG

Clear lines I am seeing black on murky grey. I was tossing in my bed seeking help about my family member who was struggling in their life. The woken lurking image seized its half moment and fumbled to the surface. It moved left to right across my view. I recognized it as a pig.

While I watched the walking pig I heard the exultant voice of a young woman saying “In the cellar. In the cellar.”

To the basement I went intrigued to put the authority of the dream to the test.

Would a pig rush out when I opened he door? I must have seen this as a real possibility because I braced myself with a smile, and was primed to step aside to let the animal burst past.

Nothing burst. I moved through the doorway warily disturbing clay dust, recognizing the boxes full of knick-knacks that were scattered, some with childrens’ treasures, or books waiting for a home.

My torch lit up the retreating gloom of concrete posts supporting the joists along the disappearing breadth of the house. There at eye height on one of the posts was indeed the pig.

Hanging there was our family’s crest of arms, made of pressed copper and wood that father had given me. I must have put it there while unpacking and forgotten all about it.

It featured the family name. It also carried the image of a wild boar, or pig as mother used to say contentiously with her rouged sidelong smile.

Underneath the boar which seemed to be walking just like the one in my dream, was our family’s motto in cursive script.

Dum Spero Spiro it read.

While I breathe I hope.

And so I had my answer.

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TIPPED THROUGH FINGERS

Water is tipped purposefully through fingers which try in the moment to direct it as best they can this way or that as it spills to the ground. It nonetheless then finds its own way trickling here and there, wanders ahead cannot be recaptured.

What exactly did the superintellect that tipped the water think would happen next?

The superintellect’s surge of abstract strength in that moment of creation, was at the limits of its power against an envisaged future that was bound to be chaotic.

In a hundred million years would come a moment that could not afford to fail.

The first coalescing galaxies had begun to adhere and form stars?

There was no carbon yet but the superintellect’s thin line of genius had exquisitely focussed, because events of increasingly exponential unlikelihood began to be caused, such as the triple alpha process in the helium furnace inside a newborn star, combined with an impossible but required resonance of the carbon-12 atom, which was indeed precisely achieved, and which produced suddenly a new element called carbon in massive quantity from helium although it had never before existed.

So what in fact had the superintellect done? In its trembling mind’s eye, it had dreamt of Niles and Amazons flowing from that meagre trickle, and once this happened, one more required miracle where a bald rock would became dislodged one hazy afternoon on the riverbank, but only because events had been prepared and smoothed for this circumstance all along the way.

Had enough been achieved that a tiny heartbeat would start deep within the dislodged rock? Yes it had. The rock proceeded to sit up crookedly, flip its lid begin to talk trying to figure something out, then look around for something to pick up.