Round 2: Translating the Story

The story:

One body, focused decidedly on the future and all that waits ahead, is rocketing through the infinitude of time and space. It passes between places, absorbing, questioning, wonderingl; it is on a search for something phantasmal, at the edge of perception, that it cannot wholly conceive.

This flying body crosses a threshold, entering foreign territory. The foreign is a strange place, a landscape of open earth, devoid of any apparent activity. But there is a sense of life to the landscape. The flying body decides to investigate.

flittering above the ground, it notices another body, anchored to a landscape so tightly that the line between what is body and what is landscape is indiscernible. The passing body sees this anchoring in relation to its own freedom, and feels the need to break the anchored free. It races heroically forward.

Without questioning, the floating body grabs hold of the anchored and wrenches heavenward, trying to tear it from its earthly binding. The earthen body gives slightly, the line between body and earth cracking, splitting, leaving a rift between body and scape. But the foreign body cannot displace the earthen body entirely. The earthen body is clinging by its roots to the ground. It does not have any desire to be removed.

The foreign body, disbelieving, does not understand this. Why do you not wish to be freed from your earthen bondage? it asks. You seem poor in your condition.

The earthen body turns to the foreigner, and then looks around to the landscape. Why would I want to leave this earth which feeds me, and which I care for?

The foreign body wonders at this question, reflecting on all it knew of the universe. The connection between earth and body seemed faintly familiar, yet irreconcilably distant. But the foreign body returned to thoughts of the future, and told the earthen body of things which had happened in far-off places, things which were yet to come.

The earthen body listens, but can not take it all in at once. This foreigner speaks in the tongues of lore: of infinite expanses, limitless towers, bottomless pits. These things are impossible. How can this foreigner be? Why does he seek to rob me of place?

Then the earthen body notices it, just a glimmer of something familiar: the husks of roots, trailing behind the foreigner’s shifty movements. But the roots are frail and hollow, atrophied after eons of neglect. The earthen body, deeply saddened, says: Look! You, too, had roots which once nurtured you. You were a part of the earth once, but now, you can no longer be one with your home, your beginning. You are forever a wanderer.

The foreign body glances back and sees. So I did, it says, recognizing the empty husks overshadowed by agglomerations upon agglomerations of collected experience. I do not recall ever being concerned with home, a place to return to, it thinks. It has thought only of the ever-fleeting destination.

The earthen body then says, I cannot leave my land, for it is all that I know, and that which I hold sacred. Everything I believe is based on this land. To abandon this would be to lose it. To lose would be to lose myself. I cannot allow for this.

The foreign body deliberates for a moment, and looks over its vast accumulations. I have far more than I need, doubles and triples of some things. It chose several of them, things which it recognized as both personally significant, as well as intellectually informative and stimulating, and, breaking them off, gives them them to the earthen body. With these things, it thinks, the earthen body can break free of its own accord.

The earthen body accepts the gifts, and arranges them in the rift. Though foreign and unfamiliar, these are tools with which it can protect and reinforce its roots.

I have left you with things that inspire, structure, support, enable, things which you may use to your own ends, whether as I have used them or as you find new uses for. But these things are also a set of instructions, coded, so that when you learn to read them, you will have the option of ascending if that day's need arises.

The foreign body then remembers its journey into the sky, but thinking of its journey no longer as a quest for destination, but rather as a series of traces and mementos which had come to be the very definition of the flying body.

The earthen body watches as the flying body vanishes into space.

End Story.

Here is a breakdown of Actors, Actions, and Conditions

Actors first: Flying Body, Earthen Body, landscape (solid), sky(other, unknown condition), knowledge(information), awareness(learning), the rift (void)

Actions/conditions: Flying, Grounding (anchoring), questioning beginnings, creating the void, filling the void

What is the spatial translation of this story?

What is the processional (make 3) translation?

What is the social organization drawn up by this story?