Programming cultural DNA

The troglodyte tree emerged from its cave exactly when three lights lit the evening sky on the New Moon that fell before the birth-month of mother owl. Just a hatchling of course, in her first month, and a growth to maturity away from motherhood—but she arrived in the world as an archetype of herself. The tree prepared nesting branches, anticipating need layered behind an urge, urgently rooting its words to the future. A dance of hikers climbed out of the wadi, cars lost in gloom when the sunset faded, but they failed to notice the rhymed shout of the waddling crow or the emergent present of a deciduous hermit. Shadows slid like blackhole-mercury over rocks to escape the leaden footfalls, but caught the corners of eyes just enough to pull at small fears caught in past anxiety. Branches snapped in bushes to the counter-rhythm of hikers’ hearts as the circadian cycle wheeled around the corner into mythic headlamps. The schism parts a sea of rock that waved out from the mud under great heat and pressure, a rift that shifts semantic considerations into syntactic synapses sparkling with possibility. The owl mother raises her brood in the arms of the old woman while the dark ink-stains test the psychological nature of night in Rorschach irregularity. The hikers dream strange narratives disrupted by correspondence to rather than with, while the flight of lava spans only a second of memory, seconded by the sergeant-at-arms who grew tired of standing at attention. The rhetor no longer senses anything and begins to tongue language into a frenzy of aurora borealis framed by a moonless expanse above a dwindling plain, matted with a white foam of stars. Thus, a scroll, parchment from a cracked amphora, unrolls a story about raptor rapture, tree delight, and generations of sublime song—a cultural blueprint that makes us (again).