Noun is shortish, approximately 5’6", and skinny as a rail. He has slighty bugging, intense eyes, and disheveled brown hair, which is lately worn unkempt and matted, and has stubble lining his jaw. He is not at all attractive. (Think Tim Burton with a skinnier face and brown hair); however, he has the undeniable charisma of a train wreck. In terms of fashion, Noun prefers simple, workman-like affair, generally jeans and a t-shirt, with a multip-pocketted vest over both. He has a tangle of wire on his hip, which serves as a bag. Noun does not make eye contact. He carries himself with the air of one who is worried or paranoid, a shifty-eyed sort of fidgety nervousness. This is exascerbated by the fact that he always looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.
Noun is an artist. Rather, he considers himself to be a poet; he just happens to write poetry in three dimensions. Those of you whose characters pay attention to "news of the weird"-type items may remember that a few years back he was in the papers for stealing shopping carts and welding them into a large, mind-bending sculpture. You may also remember that he has been diagnosed as having a odd form of autism.
Noun doesn’t trust easilly, and is very obvious about this in his manner of acting and body language. He is also mute. He communicates through machine-assisted telapathy, by sending images to those he is "speaking" with. He also insists he communicates through his "poetry"; however, very few people are receiving on the wavelength he’s broadcasting at.
Pronoun is Noun’s voice. He is roughly one foot tall, and tends to ride on Noun’s shoulder. His face is a beautiful, expressive and very accurate wood-carving of Noun’s; the rest of his body is a collection of tubes and wire, very elongated and graceful. The effect is sort of somewhere between the art of Dave McKean and some sort of unfinished creature out of a Tool video. Pronoun’s arms from the elbow down and legs can split into two, and slide towards the middle of his body; his neck can recede on its shoulders. The end result is that he looks like a bizarre sort of art-deco man-spider, a form he takes very often, particularly when climbing. He is cheerful and a constant friend to Noun, though his personality is totally seperate from Noun’s. He is not manipulate by Noun - rather, he receives the visual data Noun gives him, and translates it into speech.
NO LONGER SECRET
tWhy was the universe created? How was it made? Why are we in it?
tMankind has been asking questions like these since he first left the ranks of the simple beasts. In learning to look ahead and plan for tomorrow, Man has learned the importance of the past. From there, it’s a small step to walk backwards and start asking the Big Questions.
tFor each question, there have been a thousand, a million answers. Over the millenia, these answers have been given, ranging in complexity from one-word witticisms to great works spanning multiple volumes and touching on every subject from ethics, to ontology, to dietary recommendations. A vast menagerie of characters have been variously credited and blamed, from squabbling deities to rainbow serpents to exploding impossibilities. Yet despite the incredible variety of these answers, there is one commonality between them: ultimately, every one of them is unfullfilling. So it must be, because generation after generation, age after age, the questions are still asked with very little variation.
tThis story is yet another answer. Note that it is not ‘‘The’’ Answer, only ‘‘an’’ answer, and really, only the beginning of one. The middle and the end is left as an exercise for the reader.
::* * *::
tIn the beginning was the Word, and for a time, It was happy. It lived in the center of the emptiness that would become our universe like a cherished child, the only thing that was in a vast rolling sea of that which was not. It was like a seed, but one without light or water, without soil or even a planet, without gravity to hold It in place and teach It which way was up, without time to separate growing from dying from all the infinite moments we call life. It was a seed that contained all those things, but It was a seed that did not know how to grow. Sitting in this ignorance, the Word became lonely, and yearned to become more.
tAs It yearned, It began to stretch and squirm, to bend, until at last, bound pointed at bound, It sat in self-contemplation, like an embryonic Oroborous. Suddenly, there was not one Word, but two Words: the original, and Its opposite.
tThe two Words examined each other closely and, finding that each was a perfect compliment of the other in every single way, they began to play together. As they tumbled and rolled, pirouetted, spun and danced through the vast undifferentiated nothingness, they began first to shine, then to swell, to grow, to change and multiply, becoming like a school of tiny, glittering fish, swimming in a vast grey ocean.
tAs the Words changed and grew, the universe took shape around them. First the big things, like light and time, mass and the four primary forces, then increasingly specific things, like the elements, the various stars and galaxies and all their attendant planets and moons and asteroids, and finally, at the very end, smallest of the small, the plants and animals and viruses and intelligent thinking gases. Each thing in this new universe, every force and fish, every increment of every measurable state, every subatomic particle, every form of snow, from the dry, silty type that happens when an atmosphere freezes, to the heavy, wet kind that makes the best snowmen, every that is, was and will be, had a whole legion of words to describe it. Each property and differentiation could be expressed both specifically and abstractly, with great precision or poetic vagueness, if one but knew the correct Divine Word.
tThese words soon took to organizing themselves, rank upon rank, into a Divine Grammar, each branch of the Grammar with its own leader. There was the Divine Verb, the Philosopher’s Stone, in charge of movement and change, conversion and dynamism. There was the Divine Conjunction, in charge of bringing together sometimes disparate elements and allowing them to coexist peacefully, which in turn wove the whole of the universe into one tightly interconnected web. And of course, there was the Divine Noun, in charge of all acts of creation, the expression of all being, of all essence.
tAt first, the Noun was happy, lost in the vast orgy of creation that is our universe, immersed in the simple joy of knowing its purpose and following its own nature. However, as time went on, it became more and more unhappy. You see, the Noun was cursed, as all great creators are cursed, and the Noun, greatest creator of all, was cursed all the moreso for Its abilities. It could look at a waterfall, for instance, and instantly tell the speed and temperature of the water or the height of the fall, could tell its history in intricate detail, could name the precise moment when a droplet that would grow to a roaring cataract first trickled down a hillside, could tell its meaning and purpose in the whole of the universe, could name every water molecule individually and command them to dance to Its will. And while this was all very edifying in its own fashion, the Noun could never experience the simple joy of the waterfall’s existence. It could never feel the cool of its spray on a summer day, It could never be soothed by the rhythm of its roar or feel the the awe and splendor of being in the presence of something so beautiful and pure. In short, the Noun could never see the totality of our universe as anything more than a very detailed and well-written novel.
tAnd so the Noun devised a plan to end is unhappiness. A simple plan, it should be noted, for the Noun was pragmatic, a pragmatism born from knowing the whole of creation as closely as a mother knows her new-born child. It would, the Noun decided, simply run away, and the whole of Divine Noundom, from time to disinguenuineness to the specific shade of a lover’s eyes in the last ray of a cool summer’s dusk, would have to get along as best they could. It would leave it all behind and become a part of Its own creation.
tAnd this is precisely what It did.
::* * *::
The character was born Russell Tanner Miner in rural West Virginia, on December 17th, 2278. He grew up in a Sixteener congregation that existed as an insular fringe community. Details on the community itself are still being discussed between myself and Curtis; however, the community would have been poor to the point of destitute, would have accepted what technology they could afford, would have been very insular and thus largely self-regulated, and would have refused any medical attention for religious reasons.
At the age of 14, Russ more or less volluntarilly accepted his salvation. The minister of the congregation laid hands on him and commanded that he should be filled with the Holy Spirit. At this point, Russ was possessed by a portion of the Logos, specifically the part of the divine grammar dealing with being and essence.
At this point, Russ began to babble incoherantly. This was at first considered normal, as speaking in tongues is considered by the Pentacostal church to be a sign of the believer’s baptism in spirit. However, as he spoke, things began to change. Windows shattered, the snakes all turned to ash, the building around them began to twist, and those in witness heard a loud multi-phonic roaring sound in place of Russ’s voice.
It was decided by the community that the minister had, in fact, been working for the Devil, and had put the Devil into Russ. Thus it was unanimously decided that Russ and the minister would both be hung.
The minister was hung first, successfully. However, when it came time to hang Russ, he began to cry, which came through as a high-pitched warbling keening noise. As he was pushed forward, his noose became a snake, and he fell to the ground, sustaining only minor injuries. (The snake is presumed to have survived as well, as no sign of it was found.) As he struck the ground, he let out a cry, at which dozens of birds burst from the tree which had been disgnated for the lynching. Witnesses swear that the birds were, variously, either doves or crows, depending on their disposition towards Russ. In actuality, they were largely sparrows and swallows, aside from 15 robins, 17 orioles, 3 woodpeckers, and one resplendent quetzal, which was later found dead in a city and presumed to have escaped from a zoo.
Russ was able to escape at this point, aided by the terror in those who were in attendance. Through his own power and hitchiking, he eventually made it to a city, where he lived homeless for a time. He very soon started to fasion bizarre sculptures out of any handy materials, an attempt by the divine grammarto realize multi-dimensional universal concepts in three-dimensions. By selling some of these as artwork and doing odd-jobs and menial labor, Russ was able to eventually able to afford a small apartment and accumulate more supplies for his "artwork". However, he never spoke again, continuing to do so to this day. His memory of his previous life and the events leading up to his presence in the city are largely missing, as his mind struggles to deal with the presence of the universal grammar. Having forgotten his name, he took the name Noun and has used it since.
His sculptures became larger and more complex, showing up in local papers. Finally, he gained some notereity in "news of the weird"-type publications and human interest sections for stealing the shopping carts of a nearby grocery store, cutting them apart, and assembling them into a large tangled mass in the store’s parking lot overnight. He was arrested and, when it was discovered he couldn’t talk, he was sent to a doctor, who then sent him to a psychiatrist after verifying that all his vocal bits seemed to be in place and ready for use. The psychiatrist then diagnosed Noun as having a rare and unusual syndrome, probably a form autism, and Noun was therefore aquitted of charges, the court considering him to not be mentally competetant enough to stand trial for his actions. He was placed in a halfway house and was released after a year, with the stipulation that he be observed and receive regular checkups from a social worker. He refused most of the resulting medical care, and was eventually dropped from the system, as he was deemed to not be a danger to himself or those around him.
Noun managed to parlay his fifteen minutes of fame into the founding of an actual art studio, which to this day is his sole occupation.
Noun has very poor memory, and almost no memory of his past. Occasionally, things that happened to him previously will come back to him for a while, but these memories tend to be disjointed and fleeting. He continues to be distrustful of religion and religious figures, as well as modern medicine, and does his best to avoid both; however, he will accept medicine if the choice is between that and dying. His artwork tends to be sculptures arranged in tangled, mind-bending ways, which are then affixed with paintings, drawings or designs that add to the illusion of imposible depths and dimensions. Any attempt to communicate in a non-verbal but linguistic manner results in one of these sculptures, even an act as simple as writing his name. Noun can, however, communicate through something like the Zodiac telepathic system, by focusing his thoughts into single images. It should be noted that any images created in this manner are unusually vivid. Noun can, by a similar process, produce more mainstream artwork, with results similarly vivid and real-looking. If he chose to carve an apple from a block of wood, for instance, and then paint it, he could turn out something that would be nearly indistinguishable from an apple.
Noun has an intuitive ability with pattern recognition, particularly mult-dimensional pattern recognition. He can, to a certain very limited extent, understand things in more than three dimensions. For instance, he may be able to focus on a hypercube and perceive it as a cube; however, he’s not able to see through time or anything crazy. Similarly, his may be of interest to topologists. Lately, he has been experimenting with virtual reality.