Neon Disasters (Experimental Text)

I chose to experiment with multimodality. Before this text was written, I drew abstract shapes inside of a circle, intending to represent nothing. After its completion, I observed it from different rotations and found images from the shapes and colours. With those findings, I decided to write a narrative that followed along what I saw while rotating the circle anti-clockwise.

My writing process was a mixture of describing the first ideas that came to mind, while also trying to keep them consistent with each other. Because I wrote primarily from feeling, the imagery, world and narrative all became surreal and dream-like. I was especially fond of my use of personification of objects like the moon, the sun and the sky.

Despite the text’s surrealness and nonsensicality, it vaguely explores some of the consequences of curiosity and the unknown.

And then a rock from outer space struck the eye of the atmosphere. The sky cried until its colour faded from blue to pink – an uninviting kind of pink that the sky should never be the colour of. The world shook like zig-zags and spirals. 

On the sea, a yellow boat. All its sailors ever wanted was to find a secret in the great blue – a triangular door which led to a staircase descending to what they believed was a world of grey. But, the wails of the sky caused the waves to thrash about like an enraged mutt, and those poor sailors were led only farther from their treasure. They knew their fate, to be swallowed whole by the sea, and they knew there was nothing that could be done.

 

What was really beyond that triangular door, and what you’d arrive at, at the end of that spiraling staircase, was not a grey world. Instead you would find a city of rectangular, glassy buildings and floating geometric displays. Everything illuminated in the dark. A river flowed over the city’s rooftops and, from the tallest building, a waterfall poured down, continuing along the ground below. It was never known where the river ended, but a rumour went around among the yellow-hatted dwellers there that it spilled into the sky.

The water from the river became rain. Tonight’s rain turned to thick gunk, as if from sewage waste that glowed a yellowish green. It was something so repulsive that even the moon wanted to shield its bright face from the Earth until it was all over.

By the time the day began again, the land enjoyed its opportunity for peace, even if only for a moment. Lazy shores breathed calmly. Suddenly, there was a strange rectangular object in the sky, so big that it made the sun even feel afraid. Were space-faring tyrants going to reign terror on planet Earth?

Fortunately those space-farers, at least in intention, really did not reign terror on planet Earth. They did,  however, make its creatures afraid. These tall, purple-robed space-farers were holders of technology that warped reality itself, one of which had the ability to rotate the sky to appear diagonal, and another that could achieve telekinesis, even moving objects as gigantic as whole planets. These strangers had no mission; they only longed to explore. They parked their ship by the sea and stole an Earthling’s sailboat.

Those space-farers returned to space, along with their new boat, and viewed the Earth again in case they missed anything of value… They found a path to a strange world of grey through a mysterious door. Finally, with their strange technology, they launched their boat from outer space into the blue sea.

Those space-farers could never bring themselves to admit that the technology they possessed was something that their civilisation was not ready to use, but created anyway. In their denial, little did they know that it was not only them and their boat that was launched from the clouds in the process.

 The machine shook the sky and the sea, making them nauseous… The machine caused the sun to ripple, and it flung around objects from the black void like a toddler throwing a tantrum by his toybox. It was not until those space-farers were well in their voyage that they realised that their damage would last forever. Their machine had wobbled the cosmos. 

And then a purple rock from space struck the eye of the atmosphere.