The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 1

PART I:

PAST TENSE

“We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.”  Felix Adler

Chapter 1

In my dreams, I see it happen from beginning to end – the fall of man. Night after night, a blinding flash shatters the sanctuary of my sleep, scorching skin through the silhouetted bones of fingers flung in front of my face. A few ponderous seconds later, the mother of all booms rolls in sonic waves across the heavens, as if Atlas had struck his huge gong inside my head. Stars are flung in every direction and scatter like burning pool balls into dark pockets of the universe. The fiery tail of a comet sears my vision in a blaze of stellar white heat.

When my sight is restored, the violent drama has subsided. In its place is nothing - a calm, still vacuum. With a twinkle, a lone star reveals itself at the centre of the void like a diamond hung in the coal-black emptiness. Around it orbits a second speck of light - a planet. In a perfectly choreographed routine practiced night after night on natural history channels everywhere, hot gases cool; the planet’s crust coalesces and great bodies of water gather in the depressions.

Snapshot: a bubble rises to the surface of this murky, prehistoric soup from somewhere deep within. For a second it bobs on the undulating surface of the gloop, an oily sheen refracting rainbows of colour across its taut, perfectly geometric skin. Then it pops without a sound. Life is born.

Back to my godlike seat in the heavens… An eternity passes quietly and my orbit slowly deteriorates as traces of vegetation spread across the Earth’s surface many miles below. Sedately at first, I drift through the outer atmosphere. The greenery thickens inexorably - like great tendrils of an invading creeper - around the waistline of the Earth. My descent accelerates and I spiral out of the sky – an errant parachutist, spinning and flipping head over heels as the verdant carpet rushes ever closer. With a crash, I burst through a canopy of dense foliage and tumble into the embrace of the lush forest below.

The subsequent vision unfolds slowly, an old silent movie juddering in monochrome. Close up, the jungle is thriving; teeming with life. Through the fringes of ferns, I watch as muscular lizard-men slither out of the mire, their rippled rubbery bodies held out of the grime on bent elbows. Each one coughs and splutters like a chronic chain-smoker grappling with their first lungful of air. On escaping the marshy waters, the creatures shed their shimmering skins and stand upright on the quivering legs of newborn foals.

A thick fog descends and a Hammond hum lends an ominous drone. The stooped figures hobble in packs between ghostly tree trunk totems. Long arms drag dead branches behind the chattering of growing human intelligence and barked speech, cutting an oily black wake through the thick forest underbelly. In the space of a few flickering frames the now-hairy humans learn to make marks on the landscape.

For a fleeting celluloid moment, a poised Britt Eckland - her heaving modesty protected by torn shreds of furred skin - seeks shelter from the savage elements within the gaping mouth of a cavern. Through craft and guile, the rocky refuge is transformed into something more; a place that provides comfort. Caves lead to huts, fashioned first from straw, twigs and then bricks. The simple homes are huddled protectively in a circle. At their centre, a campfire flickers erratically, and throws smoky yellowed light over the surroundings. As the flames curl and lick at the edges of the scene, a tall dark figure casts a long, lupine shadow over the little community of dwellings, and the vision fades to black.

I return to a worm’s eye view. The Roman army march past me atop their new, straight roads. Sandaled feet pound the dirt relentlessly into an artificial, man-made substance. The passing faces blur from one tramping soldier to the next. In its scale and repetition the army is hypnotic, and the footage increases in speed, becomes synchronised. En-masse, these organised individuals are a coordinated collective – forming dizzying patterns and oscillating geometries. From afar, I watch as the orderly civilisation spreads like mould over a ripe peach in a jerky time-delay animation. Then with a flash, the crucifix of Christianity flares up on a blood-red skyline and the clock is reset.

Fast forward to the Nineteenth Century, and vast Victorian furnaces are lit to fuel the Industrial Revolution. As technological progress sweeps Britain into a frenzy of change, workers migrate across the landscape like droves of rats swarming towards towns and cities in search of scraps. Beneath each heaving conurbation, the waters inevitably become clogged and poisoned. London stands at the epicentre. The city’s titanic population of six and a half million residents live in a quagmire of their own making. While sanitation and medicine struggle to reverse the rabid spread of sickness and rampant disease, inhabitants are bedazzled and bewitched by marvels such as electric lighting, a transatlantic telephone network, and an extensive underground railway.

Creaking ships and soot-blackened trains speed the web of human endeavour ever further afield, and the rot accelerates dramatically. Great frames of steel rise from the ruined remains of tenements and terraces. In the dim glow of a setting sun, every new home burns with artificial illumination. A clumsy cartooned animation of the planet revolving at night shows pinpricks of light spring up as the inhabitation spreads. The bright pixels coalesce into searing scabs of light each a city wide, and Britain is consumed by the human infestation.

To herald the final act, mass-produced automobiles roll synchronised off the production line with a brash fanfare. In the background, the oil fields pump in time with my heartbeat which quickens, aroused by the pelvic pendulum of vast, pounding hammers. A middle class urban population take to their vehicles and scatter like ants back across the countryside, each seizing a tiny plot of green to make their own. Independence and greed loom hand in hand; dark anvil-shaped storm clouds gathered on the not-so-distant horizon.

Footage from the Great Wars flickers across my vision; tanks grind cumbersome over green fields made brown, traced with barbwire and lit by flares. They bob like giant ducks in the peaks and troughs of a slurry of dirt and bodies. The images shift gear again, and assume a sickening inevitability. Each scene judders, moving too quickly to comprehend. The H bomb cleanses. Cesarian sections. Personal computers. The Internet… A kaleidoscope of developmental successes cascades in a frenzy of human growth. Mcdonalds, Ford, Apple, Coke; logos and products flash onto my retina with a strobe-like pulse. As the fever consuming the Western world heightens, languages are subsumed; garbled snippets of dialogue in broken regional dialects blend into a juggernaut of information until all that remains is a buzzing white haze, accompanied by the high pitched whining monotone of a test signal.

I wake.