Childhood Lasts Only a Few Years; Childhood Is Already a Lifetime — Manuel Marsol’s Astro
Later, the little alien landed. Perhaps it was thousands, tens of thousands of years ago. He witnessed a universe filled with void and abundance. He witnessed strange beings that no words could describe—so strange that even the word “strange” seemed far too ordinary. The beings and spaces there kept growing, like entangled, activated muscles expanding, knotting, and putting forth eyes. No one knew which part of the body was smoking. The breath it exhaled was solid. Mountains and waters softened. Caves had hooves. The skin of flames blew bubbles. What appeared on top could not simply be called horns. Soft white feet could, in an instant, extend black hooks that would kill you. I walked toward the little alien, as if passing through thousands and tens of thousands of years, so that we might meet each other.
Later, the little alien witnessed how life and death could exceed thousands and tens of thousands of years. The form of “I,” the narrator, disappeared, yet the narrative voice did not break off. The little alien woke at the moment when he thought he had lost me. He discovered that there was a universe larger than the universe: the questions he asked himself. Why is there always something, rather than nothing? What, after all, is the meaning of being alive? What will be the end of all things? What death brought the little alien to was not the end, but the starting point for investigating life. The starting point is this: no one knows the answer. One must remain perplexed, and continue the journey with that perplexity. The true space mission is not, in fact, to investigate physical outer space and its species, but to sound the interior world of one’s own existence.
Later, I was still telling my story, arriving at an eternal state beyond life and death. In a new form, I crossed time and space and came to the ear of you, the reader. I tell you: we are always revealed by one another. Through me, the little alien came to know friendship; through traveling far away, he came to know home; through death, he came to know life. And you—through Manuel Marsol’s Astro, you came to know a story of encounter and parting. You came to know pure love and pure pain. You came to know void and abundance. I hope you notice that the little alien and I also live beyond my narration. Our appearances, and the scenes we inhabit, are often filled with brilliant colors and abundant details, even with a three-dimensional texture that makes you want to reach out and touch them.
Later, perhaps you will remember that these colors, forms, and compositions are not unfamiliar to you. They all come from Manuel Marsol’s brush. In Astro, you see a pink creature passing through the body of a rock, and you remember, in Yōkai, the hand passing through a tree trunk, the head transformed as it passes through mountains. In Astro, you see the two of us, so tiny, existing lightly as dust within an enormous landscape, and you remember, in Ahab and the White Whale, the captain almost swallowed by the sea, crossing world after world larger than himself, so close that he cannot see the white whale always circling beside him.
Later, perhaps you will also remember that the deepest resonance between Astro and each of Manuel Marsol’s earlier works lies in its murkiness. Marsol still preserves the mystery that cannot be solved as mystery, just as I do not know what the little alien is thinking: “How would I know! I have only lived for a few hundred years! All I know is that the little alien Astro is my friend.” All reality is a vast mixture of atoms rearranged after the original Big Bang. My ignorance is the sacred boundary between the little alien and me, just as I defend his solitude. Ignorance is murkiness. It does not need to understand. It relies on my certainty. Even if I cannot understand completely, I am still certain of my love and acceptance for the little alien. True love and acceptance can sustain without understanding. The palms of our hands are the entire universe. As A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing says: “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. The atoms that make up your left hand may have come from a different star than the atoms that make up your right hand. This is the most poetic thing I know about physics: we are all stardust.”
Later, we finally realize: childhood lasts only a few years; childhood is already a lifetime. The beauty of the word “later” lies in this: something will arrive, and we, in this moment, know nothing of it. Astro unfolds a profound myth of “later”—we are caught in the present, living unknowingly inside the vow of an entire life, without needing to understand a single word of it.
Originally published in OKAPI Reading Life Journal.