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CHAPTER SIX
SALLIES INTO CREATION
AND BY THE CREATOR
THROUGH IT!
Words from the Creator to it ...
There is the fox for cunning, the greyhound for gaunt speed, the lion for regal bearing, the tiger for lithe ferocity, the goat for egregious antics, a dauntless spirit with minimal apparent wisdom, the horse for fearless speed and a tendency to faithfulness, the sloth for sloth, the ant for tireless and depersonalised seeming industry, the frog for being noisily ... around.
There is the bear for tiresome tirelessness, the polar bear for that elevated feeling of white and snow, and that dynamic temper, the badger for conscientious industry linked to extraordinary creativeness and dauntless persistence, the parrots for soaring brightness and incandescent feathery beauties, as if posing in a contest, the sparrow for artless willingness to take what offers without fuss.
There are the swallows for manoeuvres of flight and felicity of motion, picking off the not so obvious insects that burden the air with much industry and aesthetic lack of fuss, sweeping even while at ground level, invested with aerial aernonautics of lift. There is the penguin for an imposing front and great gregariousness, the peacock for self-conscious glory, the crow for devastating down-to-earth disregard of the core of seemliness, with its raucous cawing and willingness to appreciate the disgusting, the porcupine with its bristly defence and slow movement, the ape with its apishness, a mockery and a mocker, ambling without grace and any evident awareness of this, the gorilla with its ludicrous posturing and boasting, the ostrich with its blindness, self-imposed, the donkey with its amiable lack of wit, cloned to clown.
There is the locust with its swarming hordes as a substitute for being constructive, the war machine, the grass-hopper with its sudden jumps on the way to imparting destruction en masse to leave mess, the belligerence of corporicity.
There is no less the rabbit with its agile retreats and unsagacious sallies; the galah with its streaks of galvanised mirth and playful meanders, even willing to ascend in spiralling air current, and out at the top, renew at the bottom, the season's joker; the pig with its very clear skin and revolting ways, ready to be used for profit, the boar with his objections, ferocious for his kind, the dove with its inimitable peaceableness, the mouse with its persistence in moving at ground level to get what is going, the dog with its inherent tendency to faithfulness when not ferocious, the cat with its magnificent air of self-seeking as an art form, the eagle with a lofty assurance and piercing eye, the hawk with its single-minded predation, the whip-bird with its investigatory slashings of the atmosphere with arresting sound, the honey-eater with its sharpness of movement and intent like an avalanche in miniature, single-minded, applied and reactive.
There is the bat with its sophistication of apparatus and its mosquito quenching powers a marvel, diligent in small things and making a difference by agility in the air and disregard of the apparently impossible, while careless of its appearance, and not easy for co-operation.
At the other end of the scale, there is the whale with its gentle play and hard times with the octopus, an harassed giant, the porpoise with its intelligence and glorious agility, the snake with its abased hiddenness ready to abase what is lofty, the scorpion with its fixtures of disfavour, ready to inflict harm as a vocation, the white ant with its devastating persistence out of sight: and all these things have a message.
Within their panoramas of performance, there is now mockery of man's strutting, exposure of his deviousness, expression of his loftiness, derogation of his sloth, his greed, his cunning, his unillustrious devastations and massed group powers to inflict evil.
Now there is admiration for diligent industry, abhorrence of the disgustingly abased and abasing, laughter at grossness. Parodies of the great, are linked with elevation of the lowly; parades of the gifted come with animated versions of the feckless and the foolish, the predatory and the soulless. There is depiction of the diligently constructive and the recklessly destructive, the lazy, the inert, the callow, the cunning, the inherently dangerous and the merely negative.
Questions of direction, protection, motivation, elevation, the meaning of attainment and the means for it, are all given the forms of drama and the format of seasoned players, like those of some Shakespearian panoramic pageant, appareled to convince the watchful, instruct the ignorant and rebuke the mighty, with poems of tragedy and indifference, casualness and application.
These are scattered like seed for a vast and varied garden, to make a testimony not to be forgotten. If creation with its wit, wisdom, flights of wonder and glorious aesthetics, intense variety and vast dedication to kind with sub-varieties of the specific thrown in like so many evening gowns, fur coats, summer shirts and warm underwear all in so many drawers, each in different sites in the wardrobe, is on the one hand a pageant of wonder, a display of magnificence, an investment in wisdom, a paradigm of utter brilliance of method and fascinating accomplishment in myriads of results, an odyssey of invention and a flourish of technicalities beyond man as the sky beyond the earth for height; yet on the other, it is a display page for advertising to the wise, the follies of flesh, the misconceptions of mere speed or power, the dangers to life as sophisticated as misled, of passion in its persistence, as sudden for the unwary as death by adder.
It showers in unmitigated profusion its message of vast creativity to the uttermost point, the noble, the ignoble, the industriously proficient with care, the horrendously prodigal with indifference, the subtle selfish, the grossly greedy all outlined. There is the exploitative, as in those which use aphids strung up for milk, there is the haunt of horror, the spider for the pit, the epitome of dark places where evil lurks and traps operate. It spares nothing. It observes everything. It warns all. It provides for all. It minimises nothing; it looks all things in the face, daring in artifice, ruthless in making manifest the truth, in warning man who thinks, in cautioning the coward who blinks as much as the fool who refusing to think, is made subservient to devious processes through impetuous indifference.
While the pageantries of Shakespeare in literature, of landscapes of a soaring inventory of intensity, of flowers with profusions of sheer aesthetic bliss, of dimensions of grandeur in the stars above and deserts of desolation in the deprived below all co-exist, it is not hard to ponder the two major thrusts. There is the good and the evil, the great and the devastating, the wise and the foolish, the exuberantly given and the cuttingly unshriven, the gift in its soaring scope and the curse in its vast impact.
You see the elements of Eden and the paradigms of the curse. You see what can be and has been, and you see what is and where it is going. You see man the mocker, mocked. You see God the giver, unremitting in truth and glorious in intensity.
You look up and find the Author of the stars, not among them.
I for my part, as a mini-derivative-creator, am not a grammatical particle in my work either, nor is this difficult to understand; for if I were, I could not write and there would be nothing to investigate among these myriad symbols, insignificant in themselves, but arising to act only when in a system with reagents to receive likewise geared, whether directly by intelligence to find out the meaning, or indirectly through intelligence to react to it as if they did, but do not need to do so, since the intelligence of another has fashioned the interface with the output, and the receptors with the input, so that all works with the smooth certitudes of wisdom's outlets.
You look with your programmed eyes, result of a thousand retypings of the creative mode for their formation from the zygote, over thousands of years, and your symbol-interpreting craniation and discursive spirit, and find the words that stand up. Words you say, words ? We have moved here from those of programmatic brilliance to keep re-drafting for each generation the human body, to those addressed to the mind that inhabits it and the spirit which surveys through its earthly reciprocities and elevating vision.
Those words, they are the biblical, with no equal or visible competition to the slightest degree - just as no scientist has on show some other life which he has created from scratch to match our own, being not like a child compared an adult, but rather like an infant compared with a superb genius, in capacity relative to what is inherent in our own construction, in its wit, symbolic understanding of that domain and spiritual liberty to imitate the pig or the fox, the ant or the beaver, the peacock or the greyhound, the ape or the donkey or to seek where wisdom lies, rest in realism, in reality.
What words alone fit this mould ?
It is the Bible*1, with its verbal panorama which does so, exposing the foolish, inviting the wise, inciting the straying, arresting the donkeys, giving scope for the beavers, rebuke to the gorillas, exposure to the swine. It calls for redress, to escape the curse and find the maestro of creation, the Lord of glory and the diffuser of glory, the Redeemer for heaven or earth (Colossians 1:19ff.). It gives meat to the wise and milk for the babes, it calls to the fool and embroils the savvy sinner. Repent! it cries (Mark 1:14-15), the the fashioner of life cries, Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy laden (Matthew 11:28-30).
Receive! it invites (John 1:12, Proverbs 1). Believe in Me (John 6:47), it calls with caressing; receive life by redemption from sin, it offers (I John 1:12-14, Romans 3:23-25). I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked! He announces (Ezekiel 33:11), but that he should TURN from his evil way. TURN, TURN! He cries.
See also on these topics, the next Chapter.
NOTE
See for example:
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,