Creatures of the Inner Earth (28/12/2004)

My mum had a job getting creatures from the waters in the center of the earth up with a suction device which could catch them before they change and then taking them to be seen by people. This was in the days of John F Kennedy and the creatures were generally shrimps with a human like face or small marsupials. Once they emerged from the earth they would transform so it was important to have them in the holding device. In this, a tube, a small fish would be caught and as it furiously transformed, spiky green tendrils like a fir tree would spiral out, which if touched, were dangerously sharp.

I tried to do this and found the creatures hard to catch- when I failed they would wriggle away and melt in a watery goo. They I caught one and held them on a kind of platter, trying to rush in bringing them up- but as I left the door for the upper levels, some slivered off the plate and started to melt. They were leaving a terrible mess, so I wretched a not-so-good painting off the wall in an indented square frame, made by another inhabitant of this underground complex and tried to use it as a bowl. It wasn't deep enough, so I got another, yet failed and the shrimp, with their intelligent faces, left a gelatinous puddle of mess which would soon stink.

I asked mum- 'didn't you ever fail to keep hold of them' on the journey to the upper levels - and she says she didn't, implying all sorts of solutions were improvised to prevent dropping them.


Note- maybe this applies to the creative process, it's elements coming from 'the deep waters' and they being easy to drop if the appropriate sacrificial actions aren't made in time.