The Chicken, the Camel, and the Cow

The Chicken

You wake up, and you’re staring at the canopy of a rainforest, the bright morning sunlight filtering light green and yellow upon the damp forest floor. Brown-golden leaves, small and large, float down slowly, lightly spinning like synchronised swimmers across your eyes. The ground beneath you feels soft and cool, as faint sweet smells tickle your nostrils in the still air. The distant echo of a tree falling reverberates in the distance, the insistent drone of a multitude of insects fills your ears, and the birds are singing Hare Krishna.

You pick yourself up and dust off, blearily regaining your bearings. Yes, you really are in a rainforest. There’s the trees, endlessly, permanently, punctuating the landscape of even more trees and the columns of light from above shifting languidly, continuing on into the distance. You watch a caterpillar steal his way across the forest floor, arching his back upwards to push its head forwards, up and down, left to right, two solid motions, going at a blazing five centimetres a second. You wonder to yourself why other caterpillars do not adopt such an efficient and fast method of self-transportation. Why they insist on the all-to-common wave motion of the conventional caterpillar. Will evolution eventually favour these faster caterpillars? All these questions, like the blip of human life in eternity, fade into the ether as the enormity of existence takes over.

Gradually, the realisation dawns on you that you’re naked, which you’d think would soon register into slight alarm with the idea that you have no clue where you are, what you’re doing in a rainforest, or how you got there. But you feel calm and free, like the leaves that filter down from the heavens in their spinning elliptical trajectories. You think about how the leaves, once a vital part of a tree, will rot away, to form part of the soil that eventually helps to sustain the trees. You think about the caterpillar, munching away on the leaves, to become a butterfly that flutters from flower to flower, spreading the seeds of life.

And the birds. They’re still singing Hare Krishna, which slowly becomes louder in relation to the tropical insect drone. You take two steps forward, and find it becomes softer. Is the birdsong coming from a particular direction? Calmly, you turn around, padding your way over earth, grass and tree root towards the singing.

There is something strange going on here. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. The thought that some kind of trap awaits you crosses your mind. But the tune, and the birds’ performance of it, is so perfect that you tell yourself that if something were to happen, if your worst fears about being ambushed in the jungle were true, then it would be worth it just for being able to listen to the birdsong. In effect, it’s really a four note tune, sung by a multitude of birds in perfect unison. A choir of birds, all singing in a particular overtone. Some sing complicated variations of the four notes, others sing the basics, and some hum a sustained drone beneath the layers of chirping. The birdsong reverberates off the trees.

As you continue walking, the birdsong rises in volume, till you come to a ring of white and pink flowers, bordering a tiny flat clearing, whereupon a lone chicken stands cluelessly. The choir of birds has stopped, while a solo bird chitters away random rhythmic and melodic variations of the main tune. You look up and can just barely see a lightning blue and yellow bird near the canopy, spot-lit by a single beam of light in parallel with the tree trunks. It focuses into the clearing, directly onto the chicken, which attempts to cluck out a song in emulation of the heavenly one being sung above.

For the first time, you feel a light breeze brush across the forest floor and your body. A light rustle emanates from the forest floor, and you can hear the trees softly creaking. You think to yourself: What should I do with the chicken? Should I…chase it? Pick it up, and then pet it, comfort it, and feed it? Maybe I should eat it? Should I keep it, and find it a mate, so I could produce more chickens for food and companionship? That would mean I have to farm them, and thus enclose them within a fence. Maybe I should I ignore the chicken totally and find myself a loyal dog, or, if needing food, search for a bigger challenge in a goat, if at all possible? Could the chicken act as bait for bigger and better meaty treats?

You decide to catch the chicken first, and then decide what to do with it later. The chicken looks so dim, it doesn’t seem to understand the dilemma going through your head. You try and think about how you would go about killing the chicken, while at the same time fantasizing about picking it up, tickling it, petting it, and letting it roam wild, to return to you at night. Standing outside the ring of flowers, you try clucking at the chicken, hoping the chicken would come to you, but it doesn’t. It just stares back with that blank helpless look particular to flightless birds.

Helpless, however, this chicken is not. You try to chase after the bird, but it’s a fast runner, you keep finding yourself clutching at thin air as the chicken clucks itself away and around the circle. You think of the other animals in the rainforest staring at you, this new inexperienced animal chasing after a chicken. How do the other animals do it? It looks so easy on National Geographic. How do you capture a chicken? You just catch it! Easy as pie. Easy as pimento encrusted pretzel mini treats. You silently curse television as you make a desperate dive towards the bird, which screams and flies a foot in the air as you fall flat on your face.

Why won’t the chicken just come to me, you think to yourself. You’re not exactly a threat. In fact, all you want to do now is pet it. Midway through your in-jungle acrobatics you decide on becoming a vegetarian. Meat is just too difficult, and too cute. You stare back the chicken, clucking away, and turn over the look at the forest canopy. The bird is still going at it, but seems to have been joined by another one of the same plumage, singing the exact same song, harmonising perfectly with the first singer. You think of life as perfection, of creating perfection by changing perfection. The sun still filters down, the leaves still sail across the air, and the birds are still singing Hare Krishna. Suddenly, you hear a clucking next to your ear, as the chicken climbs up onto your chest and sits there, still clucking its imperfect imitation of the birdsong above.

As you lie in your sun-lit circle of flowers, you and your chicken, the forest opens up, the breeze comes through, and your brain, your skin, your ears, your eyes, sense it all, all of it, everything. You close your eyes, and chemicals are released in your brain, firing synapses, sending messages to your face, and tightening your cheek muscles, as a slow, weary and content grin crosses your face.

The Camel

George William Scott had seen mirages before. The scorching desert air bending light rays from the sky to imprint pools of shivering blue on the blinding sand. And right before him was a veritable sea of blue pools, just out of reach, just a few miles down, a direction to nowhere. He knew where he was, he was in the Sahara, in what the Berbers call a sand lake. All around him was sand, on dunes, on peaks, in valleys, blinking and reflecting yellow strobe at the blue sky. This much he was sure of. What George William Scott had trouble processing, however, was the camel standing to his right.

He reached out and touched it. It felt real. He poked it, and it made a braying sound between a burp and a fart. He leant on the camel and inspected it. It looked as camels do; one hump, long neck, furry hooves, mutated horse mouth, and eyes caught between evil and stupidity. The fur was warm, but everything else was warm. George wondered how the camel had just suddenly appeared next to him, practically silent till he had decided to poke it. Was this a good sign? That salvation was near? Or was he seeing, hearing and feeling things? George took a sip from his remaining water bottle as the camel, tiring of having George lean on it, stepped forward for George to fall into the sand.

As George struggled back up, he noticed the camel was still there, staring at him, a grotesque appendage rising from the desert sand. The gods of desolation deigned to provide a warm, sand filled breeze for our unfortunate traveller and his newfound companion, sapping water and blurring vision, while the camel shuffled and grunted. George took another sip of water and soldiered on to the next dune, taking care to avoid the wind-facing side, with the camel following.

George had been here before. As a child he had been involved in a minor air crash with his parents, leaving them stuck in the desert to be rescued three hours later by men in strange dresses in tanks. The impracticalities of his memory of the experience were not lost on George’s mind, as he pondered to himself if he really was in the Sahara before, or not. It could have been in the war, but his age when first stranded and stranded now did not match up to any form of desert fighting. But he had been here before, and George in his delirium knew for sure that he had seen this particular dune before, with its slowly drifting sand peeking out from the top and drifting down to his bare feet.

He saw the camel behind him stop suddenly. George drained what was left of his water bottle and wondered why he was still walking, why he was in the desert, and why he was leading the camel, which itself led to a multitude of other questions involving the existence of the camel. George knew that only he could answer such questions, being the only person he could ask. Is this what happens in real life? Are we fooling ourselves into thinking that the questions that drive us and keep us alive are answerable through discussion, through imparted experiences of others? Everything we see and feel in life is a distortion of everything else, and when we share it, we distort it some more, Chinese whispers across the dunes.

George fell back and landed on the side of the camel, which had in the meantime sat down, a cushion for our wearied desert trekker. But we always need someone to rely on, thought George, as he patted the camel and the silver tap sticking out of its hump. Life by yourself is a desert, and if you fail to discuss the impossible with someone else, you will fall into the hot soup. George did not want to move anymore, and he waited for death to arrive as he slowly baked in the sun, while the camel tried to make the silver tap sticking out of its hump attract his attention.

There is a long and illustrious history of stories involving animals that talk, generally called fables, with morals and all. This camel did not talk, but it did shift uncomfortably, and the main character did not listen, and continued on his own private monologue, looking out onto the dunes that rise, and fall, and rise again, like gigantic waves in a storm, captured still in an oil painting.

The desert, through George’s dehydrated state, began to take on the magical properties of poetry. The mirages still shivered and shimmered in the distance, the sky retained its blinding blue and the beige of the sand, like a rising tide, slowly covered George’s ankles. George shifted his feet, watching the sand move along with his toes, and then turned his attention to the horizon, with the mirages, forever existing, forever unreachable. Is life all about the chasing of images till we die, he thought to himself, or is life about the contentment of never reaching the mirages, till we die without ever moving?

For the first time, George noticed the small traces of life in the desert, a beetle scurried across the hot sand, a tiny breeze started a barely audible rustle of a bush, and the camel stabbed a silver tap in its hump painfully into George’s hip. George stared dumbly at the tap, gradually re-discovering the camel’s existence. He remembered the face, that stupid-looking face, the hoarse sounds, the evil fur, and the smell like a dying horse. And now he’s looking at a tap.

Or maybe some of the mirages are not actually mirages? Could they actually signify water? It only takes one out of a million mirages to be worth the walk, and if I die, then I will die trying. But then, there’s this tap. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes salvation needs to come to you. I can look for my water, but chasing it results in failure. I have to want something, and need it, and I have to go for it, but directly running after something will only cause it to flee. And here I am, almost dead, after an eternity of chasing illusions, with a tap in a camel that just came out of nowhere.

George, half dazed expression on his face, reached for the tap, and twisted the handle. The camel grunted, the hump rumbled, and the tap released a steady stream of sand. George stared in a mixture of disbelief and amazement, and knelt by the camel, body hung up by his shoulders, as the tap gushed out its torrent of sand that engulfed our lone desert traveller, dehydrated, dead still, and limp. Near the end, George stared up at the perfect blue sky, empty and blinding, as the sand began to submerge his face, as his nostrils, taking their last breath, flared sand into the air, and the heat robbed him of his very last ounce of moisture, leaving him a dried shell of a life that once lived.

How did I even get here?

The Cow

I’m a floating speck of something in a black and white void, caught in a shattered chessboard while the pieces move in inexplicable orbits. I’d close my eyes, but that just makes the outlines brighter. When I move, particles of dust splatter about, and it feels like disconnects are forming where my body used to be. Flashes of dark blue and green flutter in the distance, together with a low rumble that seems to come from far away, but from everywhere at the same time. The pieces of white and black disintegrate into tiny particles, and join with me into a silent, calm, whirlwind as everything sublimes into monochromatic stripes that tremble with the rumbles from everywhere.

The rumbles, like waterfalls of cinder, slowly distinguish themselves into some kind of rhythm, rising in volume at some points, going softer in others. With this, the stripes begin to throb, and soon separate themselves into particles and triangles, alternating between black and white, permanently in opposition. I find myself spinning in more chaos, with the only constant being a small white square in the centre of my vision, growing minutely, slowly consuming the monochromatic storm around it, till it eventually reaches me and all goes white.

White flips to black, and black flips to white, and I begin to pull away to see rows upon rows of white rectangles alternating with black moving upwards, similar to a railway line. It is now completely silent. The triangles, unlike the rectangles, stay with me, lightly bobbing and spinning in set positions forming a kind of cocoon. I still have no body. And I can’t tell if I’m moving with the triangles, or if the rectangles are moving upwards, or downwards, or sideways, seeing as I cant tell what’s upright either.

All around me, past the lights, past the triangles, through patches of black and within circles of white, the green and blue flashes have subsumed into gridlines, curving elegantly like sine waves. It all looks mathematical: Triangles, lines, sine waves, black and white, and blue and green. White particles floating in blackness attach themselves to the skeletal framework, as the blackness resolves into more triangles as the white reforms into the same, swallowing the rectangles and moving steadily to attach together, forming little spikes frozen in time and space.

By now, the green and blue have disappeared, and all I see is black and white again. I can only see white movement against the black patches, and black movement against the white patches. The particles have come in again, and almost act as glue for the spikes as more triangles accumulate around them; black particles swim towards white spikes, and then white triangles attach themselves to the spikes as the white particles all but disappear, leaving behind a seamless white surface. Between the spikes, the remaining white and black particles flow together in a grey river, gradually slowing down into an almost-stationary glacier, a surface between the white spikes, short and minute, gigantic and towering, that jut obtusely out of the landscape, as plumes of black particles shoot up above to create a black sky, embellished by smaller plumes of white ones diving into the glacier in contrasting spirals of white.

The rumbling starts again, this time louder than ever before, causing tiny ripples to appear in the glacier, changing the flow of the plumes of particles, and causing the spikes to morph in place, commencing a slow dance in the world, in time to the steady rises and falls in the volume and attack of the rumbling. From behind the largest spike in the distance, a swarm of aqua blue triangles rush towards me, enveloping me briefly and painlessly, forming a humanoid body of perpendicularly arranged jagged shapes to call my own. My new body, much like the landscape, morphs and vibrates within its humanoid shape in rhythm to the rest of the world.

It dawns on me that the rumbling sounds that have been a constant since the beginning, and providing the rhythm for everything in this world, have been coming from the direction of the tallest spike. My interest piqued, I half-walk, half-float above angular white peaks and plumes of white particles towards the origin of the rumblings.

Floating closer, I notice tiny green cubes and triangles dancing in the air, held up by absolutely nothing, an atmosphere of clarity. I try to touch one but simply float through, and as the rumblings rise in volume with proximity, I see even more of them, finding myself floating through a veritable jungle of green shapes. And then, suddenly, the air becomes clear again.

I’m standing in a grey, rippling clearing, surrounded by a soft, swaying wall of green, and a world’s worth of paper-thin peaks and valleys. Before me, a shimmering quadruped of emerald green shuffles across the lightly heaving grey surface. Like me, the quadruped is made up of triangles, that morph and vibrate in time its own rumbling. The differences lie in the colour, emerald green, and its emanation of light.

The quadruped positively shines green, glimmering as it shuffles across the ground, head down, angles attacking the surface and consuming up portions of the ground, producing the rumbling sound i’d been hearing since the beginning. The quadruped constantly shoots out from any angle of its body a green triangle or cube, and occasionally a grouping of blue triangles that float upwards briefly before speeding off to some unknown destination in the distance.

I watch the quadruped for a good long while, and then observe my surroundings change, as other blue-polygon beings float about, and the green figures disperse further out into the world. I lie down and stare at the black sky and the plumes of white particles, as one, three, five, seven, of them stop and hang still in the air to sparkle like diamonds in the twilight. I close my eyes and breath in, and out, and in, and out, letting myself melt into the crunching insistent rhythm of the earth.

- Andrew Cheah, July 2008