As you know, Stil doesn’t speak. He understands language a little, but he forgets the words quickly. He thinks in visions and images. When he reaches out with his mind, he experiences the universe in a way that no human can. His vision is not colored by words. Words are convenient and powerful among humans. Spek is a master of them. But words name things, and in naming them, change the way they appear. Stil can see the Real because he has no words.
So when Stil was standing in the water, reaching out to the sky while Big Head’s person-like creatures were trampling Gen’s grove, what did he see? How did he stop the trampling? When Hawk flew from Stil’s shoulder to Spek’s, what message did she convey without words? This is the story of Stil’s vision, the battle of Gen’s grove from a different perspective.
Stil knew from the image Hawk saw that the Big Head army was traveling to Gen’s grove and that the nature of Big Head and the nature of Gen would clash. Generally, the universe doesn’t care about clashes between life forms or their beliefs. The universe just is. It turns according to its own laws. It has no love or mercy, nor hate either. A beautiful day or a dreadful disaster for humans is just the universe turning. It doesn’t care.
Stil is more like the universe than human. He shouldn’t care what happens, but he does. He has friends. He is an in-between creature, human and not.
Stil stepped into the water and opened his arms. He reached out with his mind and stopped the person-creatures from moving. That was easy for him because the person-creatures were just parts of Big Head, not fully developed beings with independent wills. Then he reached out to the local universe to see what could be done. Hawk settled on his shoulder.
The sun blazed at the center of the planetary system. The world moved around it, keeping one face toward it and one face away. Farther out, other planets turned. Gravitational bonds flexed and pulled, plucking vibrations, humming and singing, a celestial music that Stil could feel. Stil’s consciousness pulled far away from the grove and the battle. He could see that his world was a new world, experimenting with lifeforms, largely empty, but full of potential while the whole system turned in a vast circular dance. But there was a dancer out of step. He saw a big rock on a path that was going to hit the world, not immediately, and not for a while, but a big change was coming. Stil shouldn’t care, but somehow he felt fear and sadness. He had friends. And he rather liked his world.
What could he do? Change the path of the rock? That would require tremendous energy and skill. Move the world? Even harder. Protect his friends? What would naturally happen is that the world, new as it was, would start over with its life experiments. Stil would have to think.
Stil noticed Fals approaching with the green flags. Stil did not like Fals because Fals deflected thought even further away from the real universe with representations, words, false beliefs, and distorted images. How could a flag change reality? However, Fals seemed to have solved the conflict, at least for the moment, while Stil’s attention was elsewhere. Fals had a kind of power among creatures, at least language-using ones.
Stil sent Hawk to Spek. He sent something of the vision of the universe, but he left out the path of the big rock. His human side did not want Spek and Gen to be afraid. He did not quite understand this feeling. In the scope of the universe, Spek and Gen were quite insignificant. But perhaps the thoughts and feelings of local lifeforms were important in some way. He would find out.
Mythopoetic Imagining 