after B.C.Rowe.
OTIC MYTH
Otics live with extreme frustration,
close to despair:
their chief myths are of perfection.
Once upon a time, they say,
when the world was new,
it and everything in it was perfect,
which was a good way to be.
But there came imperfection
(for this they have various explanations
such as the bad influence of other, older worlds
which the world came to realise it was among)
and though the world and everything in it
resisted, one by one they all succumbed,
all except the original, the ur-otics:
they were the last to give up.
Their struggle was epic and celebrated in sagas
but even they could not hold out for ever;
the tension built and built and built until one terrible day
the ur-otics exploded, one after another, every one
into a different but prime number of individual otics.
And to this day each otic,
having a cell memory of that original perfect wholeness,
knows that happiness depends on the search
for the random but prime number minus one
with whom it must combine;
and since there are an infinite number of prime numbers
and some of them are very big indeed
an otic is likely to lead a life of fruitless searching
buoyed up only by the hope
that with the regularity of a monkey at a word-processor
even the largest prime will find itself,
producing a luminosity that can be seen
across galaxies.
Therefore on festivals and birthdays or at dinner parties do not give an otic
a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubic Cube -
that would be thoughtless;
but should you see an otic
paralysed by desperation
or attempting a tremulous happiness
whisper to it the name of the smallest prime
and you will make a friend.
OTIC REMAINS
If, returning from a period of holiday
or neglect, you should happen upon
a thicker than usual patina of dust
in your living room, say, or
on your patio what appears to be
dog-turd, do not curse:
it may just possibly be the mortal remains
of an otic. Be reverential; treat it
as you would wish your remains to be treated
should some abstracted otic
with poetry, perhaps, or love or shopping
on its mind, stumble across them.
Avoid, in this situation, at all costs, toilets
and rather than dustbins or the neighbour’s garden
seek holy rivers and ancient places
beloved of the gods. Dispose with reverence
of the dust or seeming fasces;
with a prayer send it on its way
downstream or under earth, remembering
that should you perhaps die marooned
on an alien planet, the being of an unknowable otherness
confronted by your final deposit
may be yourself.
OTIC GODS
The latest deity in the otic pantheon is Dolly the Cloned Sheep.
She, they say, incarnates perfection
holding out the hope and promise
of endless replication to that ineffable prime
wherein resides the original paradise.
Not all otics, of course, are believers: the agnostics amongst them
proclaim Dolly but a manufactured amalgam
of herbivorous tissue, and thus of little interest
except in a theoretical way, or to aficionados
of malt vinegar and mint leaves.
This polarity may be considered representative
of the diversity of the otic perspective,
a diversity which, however furiously debated
the individual viewpoints,
the otics hold dear. How like us
at our best they are.