The Butterfly and the Lake
A butterfly sits in a cradle of leaves, floating on water supporting its weight. With a bat of its wings — its colours revealed — it lifts itself up in response to the air. The same gust of wind that has given it fright with a ripple impresses itself on the lake, a movement that carries a message that comes from a foreign, intangible place.
In the scene aforementioned is formed a whole world. Infinity bounded, alive in its shores: there’s a reason the leaves didn’t sink to the grave and the butterfly chose it to make as its nest. And components of air, when hitting the water, imparted a force that gave it new form. The question is ‘why?’ but the answer is simple: the scene knows of no other way to progress.
The world of the butterfly, water and air could be pondered a lifetime of what it can tell us and armed with its secrets we venture abroad to a new place so different from there.
And so does the butterfly go with the wind, and so is it armed with the knowledge of home. Yet what does it find when it breaches the boundary binding the knowledge the butterfly has? There’s land, there are trees and these new things it sees are another whole lifetime of space to explore.
So now it must choose, the protagonist butterfly, whether to leave from its home that it still hasn’t fully discovered and still has infinity questions unanswered and still has a lifetime of secrets to find.
What if the trees that it sees — the providers of leaves at the core of its home on the lake — have a limit of what they can give to the butterfly, one that approaches so rapidly, dangerously, seemingly únknowablý uncontróllably waiting for just such conditions to be.
In the moment the butterfly — up to that point so content with the safety of lake and of leaf — has a tangible sense of what lays out beyond, the ‘out’ becomes threat to the ‘in’.
So it turns from its lake, to never return, in a journey to find how its parts make a whole. It is drawn by a force that implores it to seek. And each question an answer to find.
But each answer does not bring it any closer to fulfilment than the life it left behind. The strife it’s left to find can only wipe the latest memory of how it’s world was never quite as simple as it seemed.
A sense of panic rises when the more of what comprises the reality of lakes and butterflies reveals itself to be inherently unstable, the more it is exposed. For each answer brings another question, not the peace and reassurance that the butterfly was seeking when it left its home.
But it is too far now, it knows too much, a box of secrets spills itself across the cosmos, and down into the deepest understanding that the butterfly has, unleashed from false logic and sensation every corner is a demon, every straight line curved towards an inevitable paradox waiting to be discovered and collapsed and fixed and explained.
Comfort is naivety peace is nonexistent truth reigns the only way to avoid collapse is the only way to avoid death is to avoid ignorance is Power is to avoid death is nonexistent truth is ignorance is
peace
