I am your mother.
I call myself mother because that is how you usually think of me. With the
language that colours all your thoughts, you ascribe to me certain attributes,
almost a personality, even if in the back of your mind you think it's just a
metaphor. That is how it goes, is it not? The female provides the matter,
maternal; it is in the female that generation takes place while the male is the
efficient cause; the male gives form -- at least that's how some of your
past thinkers would have phrased it. In this language, I
have difficulty pinpointing who the father should be. Perhaps that sphere of
blazing primordial substance, from whom I was cast off, as some of you say, and
around whom I now twirl, like some forlorn lover who cannot forget? It
does not matter, neither he nor I, for it is just your language I am using, an
inadequate medium for this message. Finding the proper means to an end always
seemed so difficult for you, my children.
I am your mother, and I am in pain.
This is no longer the poignant pain of childbirth. Painful it is to see you
grow up and grow down, to see the wonderful and unique ability you have to
constantly reinvent yourself, yet maintain such a blind eye to the siblings
that sprung from my body too. Today you hardly ever think of them as your kin
anymore, but never forget that you were not the first, even if today you are
running dangerously close to being the last. Life comes from life. This
simple discovery marvelled and confounded you, forced you to cast more explanations and more hypotheses into that language
gift that distinguishes you. Many revolutions past others also came close
to the brink, and in fact, some of them went over. You do not know why they
perished, if it was a fatalistic catastrophe or simply part of a natural cycle.
Mayhaps they too had a choice to survive, as you do now, and they deserted that
choice. This does not matter either. What is clear is that I gave them a
fitting burial between the folds of my flesh; their bones and meat melted and
compressed by my loving embrace, for a mother cannot help but love her children,
and thus their bodies metamorphosed into this thick jet-black syrup that now runs
through my veins.
I am your mother, and you are burning my blood.
This blood in me I prepared just for you, precisely with someone of your keen
understanding in mind. I have been brewing, stirring, and concocting for so
long, willing to quench the thirst you would acquire when you came of age. I
knew that some day you would discover a method to move faster than all your
brethren, outrun them with wit regardless of the strength I could not
give you, and that this would require energy. I prepared this syrup for you to
suck at my teat, just for you, my little ones. It seems like it was just
yesterday when in your younger years you could not fathom a purpose for the dark
fluid that seeped through my open sores in a few scattered places. You dried
those sores almost at once, in the initial stages of your thirst, and now you
must look deeper in me to satisfy yourself. I give it willingly because I love
you. You are as much a part of me as I am a part of you. So stab and dig and
burn; take away my pain, do it again. For once all has been spent, once you
finish poisoning my skin and my breath with your fires, once you satisfy your
greed, what can be left but your regeneration or obliteration? Either is preferable to the pain.
I am your mother, and my weeping shall soon be redeemed.
You know as well as I that this cannot continue indefinitely. By your
reckoning, it will be but an instant of my lifetime before I am completely
dry, even with the discoveries of more of my arteries. What will come next?
You seem to have forgotten that the blood in me comes from the dead, and it is
also true that death comes from death. This is why you will so often exchange my blood for yours, in those struggles for domination you
engage with your closest relatives. This will come to pass, and I am eager to
see the end. Drain me. Do it now, do it quickly. I can barely endure this any
longer, this destruction of diversity, all that time and effort of motherhood
going to waste in such a brief spell because of your bloodlust. Drink up, give
power to your machines and use the rest to build everlasting synthetic refuse.
Take it from me who provides it only as a mother can, with tears in her eyes,
yet unable to deny it to her children. You are free to do as you wish, and may
you learn from your mistakes, if you survive them. I, for one, want it all to
happen. Draw all this death from out of me, make me forget, and soon I will
start to heal.
I am your mother, and I will survive with or without you.