Peacocks Paradise

Sylvia Shawcross

Come with me now down this path. It is a path soft with the fallen frailties of the forest, rusted leaves and bits of seeds and twisted twigs. I brought you here to see something, down there at the end of the path where the canopy of trees opens to an awakening sky and a green field silvered tender by an early frost waits for us. Not anxiously but patiently. It is what is there I want to show you.

But take your time because the essence of these ancient woods is sacred sweet and nourishes the starved as if the travellers there were its own children loved into its soul’s own expanse. It will only reluctantly give you back to the fields and you can sometimes still taste its longing for you when you emerge, a swift reaching caught in your peripheral vision like a stray tear or a ghost remembering.

Do you see him? He is standing there regally in the clipped and tidy grasses as if he were a King. But he is not a king from here. He is far from home, a scatterling from another place brought simply to stay here because he is regal and exotic and splendidly ornate. Ocean teal Iridescent in the rising of the sun and his tail lifted to a spread of jewelled spectacle.

They say he is proud but he is not. He is simply splendid and exotic and ornate and he does not know his own beauty except to ply it now and then in ecstatic courtship or display. He does not know that he is unlikely.

But why did I bring you here to show you this? You have seen peacocks before. But not this one in this field in this light and in this way. It is not often we can find such an ordering of beauty in a silver field. It reminds you of the Creator God whatever and whoever you might conceive that to be.

This bird, this sky, this vulnerable field of early frost. It is all unlikely. But there it is.

But I could have brought you elsewhere. A different place…. Oh, let’s go there. Just for a minute. In our pursuit of the unlikely.

This path is stony and twiggy as it leads to the river. It’s usually smudged with humidity here in this particular place and the sky is wretchedly heavily blue but we could be further north where the wilds are truly wild and there are bad-tempered winds. It doesn’t matter.

For now we are simply by a riffled-pool in a stream that leads to the gravelly river where the air is still. We are not here to see the river though. Rivers are just rivers really. We are here by a stream to watch under the great draping tree with its roots partially shading the haze mirrored water.

There is a creature there and he is absolutely absurd. He is unlikely. Extremely ridiculously outrageously unlikely. Whereas the peacock can catch your breath with awe, the platypus expels it in guffaw. The poor damn platypus. Are we to love him less for he is foolish? Are we not to marvel at a mammal laying eggs with a venomous horny spur on his ankle and splayed legs and rudimentary ribs on his neck vertebrae and a beak for a mouth and a beaver’s tail?

I suspect the Creator God was having a bad hair day that day. It was either that or He/She/It etc. left drunken scientists in charge. Or a committee. A platypus could most definitely have been created by committee. Things designed by committee are always absurd. But that is not the point.

The point is the Creator God (whatever whoever you conceive Him/Her/It/They/Zer/Zim/Cis/Grr/2SLGBTQ+ or minus etc… to be) made both the peacock and the platypus and here we are… looking for peacocks in a platypuses’ world.

Now you might think this has nothing whatsoever to do with anything and of course you’d be right. My point would be that at least the majority of us are looking for peacocks in a platypuses’ world rather than actually thinking we are the peacocks. Our world leaders think they are peacocks. The poor damn bastards. They each and every one think they are what we’re looking for and of course, they are not. But that’s not really the metaphor.

The metaphor (if that is what this might be) is that we had a world that was kind of muddling along and then the leaders and scientists and banksters and those technotypes arrived to design a peacock utopia that is turning into a platypus dystopia. We are living in a world now designed by committee and pompous peacocks.

But they’re not peacocks. They just think they are. They’re not even an organized committee. They’re kind of a new world order cult or something living in a Bankster’s Paradise. We have got to stop feeding them so they can moult back into the human-like creatures they actually might be. But that’s not the point either come to think of it.

The point would be that we must love the peacock and the platypus equally but do we have to love those that just think they’re peacocks? (We don’t have to worry about world leaders pretending to be platypuses because who the hell would pretend to be a platypus anyway? Even they aren’t that delusional.)

Did I say that was the point? Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not the point.

The point is that scientists mucking about measuring everything that has no business being measured and fiddlefarting with DNA and trying to recreate human existence with artificial intelligence think they are Creator Gods and are working together with their cult fake-peacock leaders. It is inevitable we’re going to end up in this platypus dystopia without a hope in hell. So get out there and protest something. Anything. There’s lots to choose from. Maybe next week we’ll discuss how to choose your mission while living in a platypuses’ dystopia.

Here’s an earworm. Maybe it means something. I don’t know anymore since I had to devolve my rhetoric there for something to do and to annoy all those obsessed with every jot and tittle and grasshopper spittle.