This parable must be read in reverse. Not for the sake of novelty, but because its true order of meaning spirals backward, like DNA drawn from amber.
Damascus Dancings—prophet, performer, satirist, maybe saint—delivers a sermon of ruin and recombination. It is a theology for the Anthropocene: not apocalypse, but sediment. Not judgment, but transformation without memory.
Each dinosaur in this parable is a form of poiesis—of poem, body, system, or soul—that has been subjected to the twin violences of institutional capture and market reduction. Some are embalmed in professionalism. Some are melted down into Kroger’s bags. Some are fossilized, deactivated, left as tar.
And a few—by miracle, or glitch—are resurrected. Not by God, but by the same empire that killed them: a billionaire’s cinematic fantasy, a capitalist operator of necromantic recursion.
Not saved. Not preserved. Not reborn. Transformed.
And what is transformation in this world? A flickering between archive and algorithm. Between bone and polyethylene. Between child and grocery bag.
Read this parable with trembling. Not because it prophesies the end—but because it catalogues the ongoing dismemberment of sacred language in public. Because it dares to hold fossil and flame in one grammar. Because it names the child who asks the unanswerable question:
This is not nostalgia. This is archival metaphysics:
Poetry becomes not prayer, but branding.
Art becomes not testimony, but product.
Children become not lineage, but anecdote.
To understand this parable is to see how even your most sacred offerings may be flattened, recycled, rendered absurd—and still, somehow, carry the breath of the sacred.
"Ahypnah, the Awakened One"
image (c) 2015 R William Lundy
THE PARABLE OF THE TRANSFORMED DINOSAURS
from Human Testament, a ms in preparation for New Human Press
I liken the kingdom of heaven to a series of dinosaurs by the side of the highway.
A group of archaeologists looking for ways to make archaeology relevant successfully applied for large university grants to transform some of the dinosaurs into badly animated mechanical dinosaurs for an expensive, but ultimately irrelevant, walkthrough exhibit at the zoo.
Sanitation worker transformed some of the other dinosaurs by the side of the highway into plastic milk jugs and later recycled them into flimsy plastic Kroger's bags.
Some of the other dinosaurs fell into a tar pit.
And some of the dinosaurs were transformed into special, limited edition poems and sold for twenty dollars in your heart.
When Damascus Dancings had finished speaking, his disciples took him aside, and asked him to explain the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.
O, you foolish disciples! How long have I been with you, and yet you have need of me to explain the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.
Not always will I be with you, but still--come, and I will explain for you the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs transformed into a cheesy animatronics exhibit at the zoo by overzealous archaeologists with too much government money and not a clue about to how to make archaeology relevant are those who have transformed their poems into items on their C.V.
Their dinosaurs started off as real live dinosaurs by the side of the highway, but soon their desire for government money and archaeological relevance choked the real live dinosaurs and turned them into robots.
The dinosaurs transformed into plastic jugs and recycled into flimsy plastic Kroger's bags are those whose poems have been used up.
They loved their real live dinosaurs, but soon they got too broke and had to sell their expensive live dinosaurs for money.
Weep, weep for the sellers of dinosaurs, those who recycle their poems for a grocery bag.
The dinosaurs who fell into a tar pit are those whose poems were actual physical dinosaurs at one point in the past.
Their dinosaurs fell into a tar pit with all the other dinosaurs and went extinct from suffocation.
And also volcanic meteors.
And the dinosaurs transformed into special, limited edition poems and sold for twenty dollars are those whose poems are alive in their hearts.
Their dinosaurs started off as real live dinosaurs and went extinct from volcanic meteors like all the other dinosaurs, but then later in a major motion picture called Jurassic Park their DNA was extracted from mosquitoes caught in amber and recombined with the DNA of frogs and other amphibians and birds and resurrected by a quixotic billionaire who likes dinosaurs.
You, my disciples, are the transformed dinosaurs--the dinosaurs transformed into robots and bags and stuck in tar and the dinosaurs still alive in your heart.
Wherever a dinosaur lives, there my poem is alive.
Except a dinosaur falls into a tar pit, and die, its DNA cannot be extracted from petrified mosquitoes by quixotic billionaire dinosaur enthusiasts.
All flesh is a dinosaur. A volcanic meteor falls and covers the sun in volcanic ash and makes all the plants die, and the dinosaurs die, too, except for certain deep aquatic species of scary snaggletooth water dinosaur which swims around way under the sea until the ash is gone, and sometimes bites your feet.
But except for those dinosaurs, all dinosaurs are grass--clothed in dinosaur glory, withered in the space of a day.
Does the grass outlast its cloth of ashes, or a dinosaur, its tar pit?
Indeed, I say to you: both dinosaur and tar pit, the grass and its cloth of ashes--even the quixotic billionaire and scary deep sea dinosaur--all is ash, all, a passing moment; soon petrified, soon broken; the transformed and recycled, the professionalized and cashless; sellers of dinosaurs and buyers of dinosaurs; old women, little children, young mothers and fathers gone too soon, lives recycled into flimsy bags.
The child fetched me a grocery bag. What is the grocery bag? he asked.
What answer could I give?
Should I speak of the hints of the dead old mothers, the children and fathers gone too soon? Should I say the bag is a dinosaur, the extracted reclaimed polymer of transformed brontosaurus?
This bag is very flimsy to come from the brontosaurus' thick neck, thin to derive from the scary aquatic dinosaur, substanceless to fare from its snaggled teeth.
Or then again, this bag is colorless and wan to come from the dark full hair of mothers, wrinkled to consist in a child's smooth hands.
Perhaps the bag is a tar pit, the post-manufactured remainder of past dinosaur extinctions, a plasticity of death, the transformation of their transforming, given over again to groceries.
The women and men and sons and daughters, the gray old mothers and fathers; overzealous architects, ancient dinosaurs and cheesy robots; weird genetically-engineered shemale toad velociraptors accidentally switching genders to breed more velociraptors and eviscerate quixotic billionaires;
Bag and ashes, tar pit and bones, all flesh, the grass, all clothed in the glory of a day; soon arriving, soon fading; the cycle of day and night, the turning leaves, the passing seasons;
Root & ozone, surrounding void & sun, prickling stars & Milky Way, vast circuits of matter in fractal arrangements, the splash of light, the nothingness--the black matter and antimatter and quotidian void of vacuum--even death will die, in time come after dinosaurs.
You say that I have been gone from you for a decade, and soon will leave you again.
I say to you, what do ten years measure?
Does a brontosaurus change in a day?
No--a brontosaurus lives a long time.
Not many brontosauruses, not many plastic bags; not many shemale velociraptors, not many petrified tar pits; very few turns of season, not many prickling stars, not a single Milky Way can be measured by a decade.
(But perhaps a child gone too soon, perhaps a young mother or father)
And yet how many blades of grass, whole armies of numberless glory?
Ten years is many lifetimes, when in the space of a day, I die ten times.
I have been as the dinosaur, and I have been as the grass.
I pulled my glory around me, I shot up in the dust of the field.
Light crowned me, a king among kings, priest to a nation of priestly stalks.
All the air & the rain & the thick black soil, the bones of brontosauruses & mulchy decay of faded mothers; the sun itself, the twisting earth skittering on its axis of seasons--all the handiwork of the Lord, his own strong invisible fingers, attended me in my glory.
& in the space of a day, my glory left, the Lord blew over the fields, the armies faded, my own blue crown gone brown.
Drooping, embrittled & weary, low--the earth shut its face, and served my fading.
Here and gone, fodder for dinosaurs, the transformed handful of old mother's hair.
& even the fading was not unlovely;
& too I have been as the dinosaur, a creature of stolid aeons.
How many decades passed while I watched?
Not many, too many--
Dinosaurs becoming grasses, transformed grasses becoming a dinosaur;
Countless thousands of dyings & livings, whole armies of fading away, unchanging;
The blade of grass bears witness: the decades & centuries shoot up & decay; an aeon is an inconstant thing, brontosauruses yield to the lily's glory;
The millennia are a wine of dandelions, distilled from petrified splendor; thousands of gone decades;
Whole tender dinosaurs lost to time. Flesh is grass, the grass is flesh, and I have died too many times:
I am no more, I never was.
(And for a dinosaur not to have existed is different than any had supposed--way luckier.)
(c) 2014 lee sharks, property of planet mars
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