I have a horizontal crack in my baby fingernail under which a blackish green dendritic mould is beginning to grow.  Lovely.  The single cell, the first algae, photosynthesis, the origin of life.   Soon I should have tadpoles evolving into amphibians and small fish.  I will patiently await the first true vertebrae to venture forth into the sunlight from my cracked cuticle.  New life, the infection of primordial ooze.

Consciousness, the fruit of self-awareness, that which separates what we know we are from everything else which is, has been, or ever will be.  All of what we are, meat animated by electricity that is perishable.  We know this.  We know consciousness will not continue, that we will end.

Therefore we seek to create something which will remain beyond us, something of substance, a pyramid, a painting, an idea, children.  Because of our fear of dying, and our inability to know when, we must leave our explanation of what we were in all of this to those who will follow, because we believe that we were important enough to matter.

How arrogant and preposterous, I know, but humans are frail creatures.  Fear of death is the author of religion.  People may have faith in a life everlasting, but that faith does not make it true.  Even though that belief offers comfort, so does ignorance.  It is exactly the clear know- ledge that life will not last and the anger we feel at that knowledge, which causes us to create.  To create is to love ourselves, to be- lieve that our explanation to others of what this life means to us, validates our reason for having been here in the first place.

So we sculpt, we paint, we compose, we procreate, because in the end we know we will die.  Before life was the absence of life.  Before light there was darkness.  Death is the origin of life.  The fruit that rots leaves it's seeds to spring up through it's putrid flesh.  Life emerges again from death.  Our creations reach out through time to those whom we hope will acknowledge our ability to explain who we were and what we thought of the pain in this dreadful life, by what we left behind.  We are compelled to create by the certain and painful knowledge that sooner or later we will be dead.  We are perhaps the only creatures alive who know we are alive, and who know that we we will not be alive forever.

When you find a fish who can sing, a cockroach who can compose a poem, a chicken who carves marble, a rhinoceros who can tell you his name, or a lizard who accumulates culture, only then will I believe that I am not alone.  Man is the defect.  Mankind's conscious- ness and self-awareness are the fruits of the culmina- tion of evolution and the reason through which mankind believes that life must end with man. We attempt to destroy all life through our frustration to describe what this consciousness represents to us and how self awareness separates us from everything else which lives.

Life is in perfect harmony. Mankind is out of joint.

Mankind shall one day perish and then shall begin again the origin of life, without man.  But there will be nobody here to remember mankind's legacy.  No reason to create, no self-awareness to explain, but for a blackish green dendritic mould, living underneath a broken fingernail, struggling to understand, the origin of life.