Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Opabinia And Steampunk Starships by Purple Mark

 

The world we live in is a far stranger place than we realize.
We think we know what it is, but for a change of circumstance
it could’ve been a much different race than us which might’ve
come to rule the Earth instead of the Vertebrates.

At the dawn of Life in the Pre-Cambrian Era many odd Life-forms
such as Odaraia with its tubular carapace and 3-pronged tail;
Hallucigenia with its 7 sets of spine-like legs and back tubes;
Anomalocaris with its frond-like feeding appendages and iris-mouth;

and of course, Opabinia with its 5 eyes and fanged trunk that
made it look like a cousin to Alien were the denizens of the early seas.
However, Catastrophe occurred and they all disappeared,
leaving Science to try and make sense of what could’ve been.

For out of the 12 orders of Life which existed then, only 4 orders
of Life have remained and it was these from which all subsequent
animal Life originated. The Vertebrates from which the Mammals
came from could’ve easily been one of lines which is now missing.

Laughter is the most ambiguous of Human expressions
for it can embody 2 contradictory meanings at the same time.
The Scientist working on the Burgess Shale Fossils
had to overwhelm his colleagues with a reconstruction

of Opabinia so incontrovertible that all its peculiarities
could pass into the realm of simple fact and not fantasy.
Another Earth we could’ve lived in had machines that might’ve
taken us to the stars in Steampunk grandeur as early as 1895.

A Reporter looked with some apprehension upon the engine built
to navigate an Airship, whose wheels were not made to revolve,
but only to be set to certain combinations and he shuddered
at the thought that he might sail out into space on a machine

without knowing its combination. The Provisional Engine used
the action of the etheric forces of its Globe and Drum which
were activated and directed by tonal vibrations, instead of by the
other inventors of the time’s switches, buttons, gauges or gears.

The many choices which we both have and have not been taken
have placed us on this particular Earth out of all the ones
which might’ve been or is it the ones which might be if only we
had made other decisions at the other times?


 

---Purple Mark, 04/14/12

 
 
 

Purple Prompts:                                                                         

  1. He looked with ‘some apprehension upon the engine built to navigate an airship, whose wheels were not made to revolve, but only to be set to certain combinations,... The reporter shuddered at the thought that he might sail out into space on that machine without knowing its combination.” Theo Paijmans. Free Energy Pioneer: John Worrell Keely. (IllumiNet Press, 1998), Page 214.
  2. Laughter is the most ambiguous of human expressions, for it can embody two contradictory meanings.... He had to overwhelm his colleagues with an (sic) reconstruction of Opabinia so incontrovertible that all its peculiarities could pass into the realm of simple fact.” Stephen Jay Gould. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. (W. W. Norton & Company 1989), Pages 126-127.
 
 
 
 
 
 

1 comment: