#*dives into independence's cockpit and flies the fuck away to become an abstract concept*

[sleepymarmot]

We head out into space, ready for anything, which is to say, for solitude, arduous work, self-sacrifice, and death. Out of modesty we don’t say it aloud, but from time to time we think about how magnificent we are. In the meantime—in the meantime, we’re not trying to conquer the universe; all we want is to expand Earth to its limits. Some planets are said to be as hot and dry as the Sahara, others as icy as the poles or tropical as the Brazilian jungle. We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Yet on the other side there’s something we refuse to accept, that we fend off; though after all, from Earth we didn’t bring merely a distillation of virtues, the heroic figure of Humankind! We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth—the part of it we pass over in silence—we’re unable to come to terms with it!

Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961), trans. Bill Johnston (2011)

For my entire life, I pursued the perfection of form. I captured light, turned block into figure, bent the shape of noise until it was song. With each new creation, I thought that I was reflecting some deeper truth. I put those panes of Glass above Sculpture City not only to capture the energy of the sun, not only to showcase the brilliance of our art, but because I thought: ‘Here, this is the best monument I can make to color itself.’ I thought that what great artists, what great minds, did was to reach past the shadows of the material world and to the light of the real. The eternal. The universal. To symmetry, and composition, and rhythm, and harmony. These things that exist beyond the minds of humans. And these great people, I thought they dragged the universal, the real, back to the material world, to grace us all with beauty and clarity.

And then, after I deposed the tyrant king, I learned everything he had kept from us. About our history, about these, Divines of yours. They were impressive, truly, they opened my eyes and lifted my ambition. Why stop at a monument to color, or at trying to capture movement, when I could aim higher? Memorious, Anticipation, Grace, Liberty, Composure, Determination, Valor. Independence. There are so many things to aspire to, so many things to create. [...]

I have spoken to those who have no interest in words, and they have told me the truth. [...] The Iconoclasts have shown me my error. Beauty is not a thing that a person can simply retrieve from the realm of the ideal and use for their own ends. Your Divines do not reflect truth. They corrupt it. So long as you build them with you at the center, you hold them back. So long as we design them, so long as we are even considered in their design, we hold them back. For all of their beauty, for all of their impossibility, for all of their power, we could only have ever made them look like us.

Austin Walker, Friends at the Table: Twilight Mirage 24: godspeed, glory Pt. 3 (2017)