Art - The Absurd

A small teacup faces me. It’s empty.

It rests on a table that is sparsely adorned, all but a white table-runner streaming across its center and falling off the sides limply. I pick up the teacup, spit inside it and place it on the table-runner.

Wispy silhouettes slowly begin to emerge out of thin air and occupy the remaining seats around me. I watch as the three pale bodies twist and stretch under the skylight until they’ve attained solid form, only after some labored breathing picking up their own cups and repeating what I did a few seconds ago.

“Thank you for coming,” I speak eventually, eyeing the spatter inside my cup. “I’ve been excited about this planet. It looks like I’m blue today.”

“I’m silver,” the figure to my right shows us her cup, swirling thin sparkling liquid as she demonstrates her release.

“Gold.”

“Green.”

There is a moment of silence that follows, and I look kindly at all three sets of eyes on me. “I can’t wait to see what we create today. Any questions before we start?”

Pausing for a few seconds, I gaze at the wise faces around the table and hold my breath. Noting their eagerness to begin, I jerk the table-runner off the table, causing all four cups to crash to the ground.

There is an explosion.

The cups burst into a myriad of colors. Orange streamers and bright blue sequins shoot to the sky, purple hues spiraling through pink coils, bubbles of yellows, reds and greens popping as they collide with sheets of deep crimson, magenta, gold.

It’s a spectacle.

And nothing that any of the celestials have quite seen before.

Slowly, from the center of the magical chaos, a slippery globe rises into the spotlight cast by the skylight.

I watch with awe as the globe’s surface, a rippling canvas of bluish-green shimmer, pixelates in and out of detail: oceans fading between turquoise and navy meeting veins of silver rivers tracing intricate patterns, meandering like the brushstrokes of a master painter. Green carpets erupt where the blues disappear, and tiny mountains speckle the fringe of these patches.

I breathe, both in terror and wonder, as I prod the globe to spin some more and let us soak in its details. “What do you all think?”

“It’s different. It’s… magnificent.”

“It is different,” the eldest of us four speaks slowly. “Creatures roam the land. Their grace is matched only by the rhythm of their footsteps. Wings, gills, feathers, skin. Fish. Birds. Rhinos. There is life.”

We gasp at the elder's words. At our own creation.

Above us, the skylight pulses heat and a slow, astral music. It is time for the naming.

Three of us turn to the elder who just spoke, and we all bow our heads respectfully.

“This planet,” the wrinkled figure chants, “shall be in an eternal dance of cosmic romance. Its rugged forms will hold whispers. Ancient tales echoing through seas and valleys.

In the vast cosmic symphony,

behold our celestial jewel,

Earth.”