Our planet Earth, Gaia in Greek, considered as a living being, regularly corresponds with another planet in the universe, Aurora Kepler 452 B in the constellation of the Swan. Gilles Voydeville makes us discover this magnificent interstellar correspondence.
Letter from the Pouloids on Kepler
Letter of April 2022 on Gaia the Earth
My dear Gaia
I receive news from you with such pleasure that I don’t know how to thank you for being so regular in your writings. I am delighted to have immersed you in the reminiscence of such delicately painted scenes while trying to transmit to you the little I know about the quantum world. While reading you, I dream of being able one day to contemplate the paintings of your old masters who know how to suggest with a brush stroke the character of their character, to use the paleness of a complexion above an over-embroidered collar to express naivety, or even, which is easier, to accompany an oblique look deep into a carnal throat. This makes me want to arouse pictorial vocations on my planet, a planet which until now has not been inclined to the practice of the arts and even less to the handling of the brush to illusion or to report the unsaid and to reveal the feelings just as elegantly as a good story and of course with more truth. For if the writer, by barely describing certain manners, wants to make us forget the dark side of his character – in the manner of a being of flesh who hides under false pretenses – the painter is obliged to present the whole aspect of his model, which allows the spectator to exercise his discernment to apprehend him with more elements than in a book.
Tender dear to devour
And then I must tell you that in your next paragraph, I was completely fascinated by the description of your bear when he licks his lips, taking his time to let nothing be lost of his theft but especially to perpetuate the delicious memory of the disemboweling of the hive. While this animal seems so well fed, I was concerned by your description of its suspicious eye, which I imagine to be glassy, focused on the horizon to covet tender flesh to be devoured and this, on foreign plains. Its appetite overrides the rules of nature that assign each predator a defined range that it must respect or else it will generate conflicts that can lead to the extinction of races. Remember my Big Five that I had to suppress with charming bacteria when they devoured everything…
So beware of this animal that transgresses the fundamental laws of the balance of a planet.
Because if these rules of nature oblige each one to respect his neighbor, they allow in return the same one to find the peace necessary to its blooming.
The hostility of his fellow creatures, the execration of his victims
But the winter is too long in your Great Russia and the boredom in the middle of your desolate plains must be deadly. And as this bear does not like to hibernate so much, for the idea he has of himself and to feed the little stories he tells himself, as well as for the big one he proudly hopes to illustrate, before he loses his strength, his power and while there is still time, he must act to live up to this image that gnaws at him and pushes him beyond reason. If he knew how his way will earn him for eternity – at least as long as you turn – the hostility of his fellow creatures and the execration of his victims, he would have been better inspired by jumping into a ravine.
A small jump for him, a great relief for the charming humanity….
Perhaps he would have done it if, in his youth, his mother had told him the story of Toffi the bear cub who one day escaped his mother’s surveillance. Toffi often looked at the sky and dreamed when he saw the swallows passing by. So much so that one day, in the fresh morning air, from the top of a rock, he jumped up to imitate the swallows. And if the juvenile plantigrade did not fly nor glide, by a chance that we would not wish to his emulator, he did not crash on the rocks of the Ural. No. He simply found himself dazed but unharmed, with his ass in a pond among white water lilies and abundant salmon.
People are often badly governed
Now, it is finished of the honor of this lout plantigrade who showed enough talent to reach the power but not enough to exercise it while making reign peace. Rare are your Charmings who join these two qualities, wrote your Châteaubriant, so made that the people are often badly governed. The memory of the great epic of this bear licked by hatred will join the black list of the dark memories left by all those who did not know how to watch themselves while they became powerful. The absence of constraint as well as the absence of counter-powers is a good indicator of the vices of the mind: it takes greatness not to give in to all their goads. Now the mere mention of the ursine’s shadow will mean Horror, Abjection and Cruelty.
His descendants, and those of his followers, will forever be stained by the darkness of his lies, the vileness of his thoughts and the purulence of his actions.
I also have another feeling: what you call the clergy – generous interpreters of the will of the creatures that inhabit your skies – is not totally alien to the behavior of this bear. I still find it hard to believe that these prelates believe in eternal life and redemption. Their behavior says just the opposite. In the name of an omniscient God, they serve mercantile interests, invasions and predations. If they believed for a moment in the omniscience and omnipotence with which they have endowed their gods, they would not be able to damn themselves. The conclusion can be read in the premises: they are without illusion as to the eternity of the soul and use the credulity of the Charmings to gorge themselves on your earth, while there is time.
Uncle Xi
My dear Gaia, I would not like these events to reach the ears of my famous Utula. She would undoubtedly find inspiration there. This bear would become the most wonderful of beings and in the pandemonium of her thoughts would take a beautiful place, right next to that of Uncle Xi who, although he has not done any memorable feats lately, still keeps his preference. If you have portrayed him well in the past, I think he is waiting for his time to satisfy his appetites and extend his glory to a large island, Taiwan, which once escaped the power of the Middle Kingdom. This unreasonable maneuver deprives Taiwan of the power of thought of its matrix and the joys of living together in a harmony unmatched on the rest of your planet… This cannot last…
Uncle Sam
To balance my reflections, the evocation of this uncle calls for another, that of Uncle Sam. Because since the elections on your American continent, you don’t talk to me much about the whimsical buffalo who lost them. This one, I remember, did not respect the duties of the leader of the herd when he trampled with rage the laws of the great plains of the American West and incited his fellow men to devastate the fields of truth. When I see that the three greatest military powers on your planet were ruled by such phenomena, I am surprised that, during their reign, you did not face a world conflict. But if it didn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.
The present situation is perhaps more dangerous…
For if the bear feared the rebuffs of the buffalo that he knew was capable of anything – no one has forgotten that he did not hesitate to have his wild hordes trample the white house he had lived in for five years – this bear obviously takes his successor for a goat, a goat, a sheep still attached to the stake of the right and honest statements. The plump animal is not so much afraid of force as of unpredictability. What could be more worrying than a being crazy enough not to react logically: you stroke it, it licks you, you prick it, it lies down, you feed it, it charges you. While the goat, who thinks he’s an eagle, rambles all over the world that he won’t go to the rescue of the sheep of the vast plains of Europe, he hopes that his horns will make the plantigrade think. The plantigrade is indeed thinking, but rather about the good story he is going to tell her soon so that her horns don’t go under the branches anymore… A fable big enough for the beetle to believe, mean enough to scare him but cryptic enough so that he doesn’t discover the truth until a little late… All this so that he covers himself with ridicule and stutters with fear when he springs from his den to cut up these lambs of milk that he will taste with the cruelty and the delight of the beings without faith nor hope to seduce by beautiful actions of which they are incapable, but by the only exercise of this bestial force which betrays the destitution of the charm and the absence of smoothness of spirit.
When you think about it, two charming beings are better respected if they are crazy than if they are straight.
My sky is becoming more clement
Ah, I have to change the subject because I have to give you some news about my creatures. For some time now, you have noticed that our seasons coincide but as my ellipse around my star is a little larger, this will not last. At the moment, as with you, my northern hemisphere is coming out of winter but it is still cold.
The silver sixpedes are happy to see the end of the winter season coming, which exposes them to the covetousness of the chilly Ovoids. With spring their coats become less thick and lose the famous shine that makes them so attractive. Moreover, my sky becomes more clement and it is no longer necessary to dress in a warm way to support my climate in the north. So the frolicking of the sixpedes resumes at the edges of the forests, their jumps draw again graceful features, their capers furry volutes and their spring loves, under the roars of the males and the complaints of the females, swirls of interlacing thighs and jigs.
Bursts of light
At the end of a long hibernation, after having opened their eyes with their four eyelids closed, my unicorns dare to fly out of their suspended caves again. They hover in the firmament, beat the air frantically to get back to the zenith and suddenly dive as if they wanted to catch a worm that would venture out of the ground to watch the primroses bloom. The morning rays reflect from their little horns to the petals of my Sablant roses, on the corollas of my Vanilla daffodils and in the pistils of my Pascuale pansies. Between the wisteria, everything is scattered in golden spots that make you think that everything is here like in the land of Cocagne. And one can even see on the stamens of the follies of Grandeur, flashes of light which, while rattling, go up in sprays and frighten my birds which fly away.
“Work makes you free”.
Since you always bring me a little bit of the life of your Charmings, I’ll give you a brief glimpse of the life of my Ovoids. Except for some researchers and a few workers who are starting to manufacture – is this the beginning of a societal evolution? – most of my Ovoids are vegetating at all costs. This state gives them time to think of nothing and emptiness is a companion of joy and fullness. I have the impression that they do not know boredom and do not need to work or distract themselves in other ways.
And that doesn’t make them melancholy.
They do not care for a perpetual occupation that your Charmings have found in work. Before its meaning was hijacked by famous torturers, “Work makes you free” wrote your Heinrich Beta. I think that it frees your Charmings from the anguish linked to their finitude but that it alienates them because it has become necessary and obligatory. So much so that you wrote to me that those who refuse it or lose it, are excluded from consideration. While the ovoid race dominates my planet just as your charming race does, it differs from yours because it indulges in inaction, intellectual vacuity and imposes neither work nor amusement.
It must be said that here everyone is fed by his pouloid whose month it is.
Is it the search for food that requires action, i.e. hunting, gathering or any other manufacturing action that initiated the work on your land? No doubt, but the existential anguish of your Charmings did the rest to set up this work as a sacrosanct activity of life and survival and consideration.
Apart from this change of season, there is nothing new under my tropics or under my poles which are less torrid and less icy than under your sky. I embrace you with all the mouths of my rivers that make me luscious mouths, I embrace you with all my aurora borealis that make me twirling ribbons of celebration and I embrace you in the radiant arms of the light that you perceive from my star.
Your Aurora