Throwback Thursday: ‘Advent’ by Michael Kamakana

When the aliens came it was not what we expected. We did not even realize that human history had come to an end. We wanted to believe that the aliens were just a new aspect of our human world. We wanted to believe that whatever was to happen, we humans were the central protagonists. We were shocked but quickly adjusted to this advent, even as we necessarily saw it as a radical change in our human story with unsuspected new characters.

In our sense of history the aliens were long expected. We wondered how anyone could have ever imagined persisting secrecy, could have ever imagined this advent would not change everything in our human story. We could think in terms of narratives. We could imagine what we could not before imagine. We were ready for this adventure. We had seen the movies. We were ready to reset or adjust to this new feature of our human lives. We thought that somehow we would continue, that no matter how the aliens were disposed to us, we adaptable humans would find common qualities, find logic, find love, find hatred, find some meaning to this encounter.

We were proud, we were fearful, we were tentative, we thought ourselves at the beginning of a wondrous new history and not simply at the end of human history. Some people were happily amazed, though this reaction did not long persist. Some people were immediately fearful. Some people were joyous. Some people were in dislocating shock and unable to react either way. Some people were ecstatic to be visited by elder beings of another evolution that knew so many, many, magical tec.

We had in those first days, first months, first years, many and often conflicting idea of what did they want, what did we want, what did this all mean. Some people saw the aliens as aliens. Some people who were religious claimed these aliens were actually gods or emissaries or potentates or facilitators of their god or gods. Some people who were atheists claimed this was proof that the universe, if not the world, was a natural creation. Some people lost their faith, some people gained a new faith. Some people tried to form a religion around the aliens but there was nothing we could call miracle, judgment, grace, damnation —– in fact, nothing humans had previously called religious. Some people said we defined religious experience, religious sentiment, too narrowly and typically in our post-industrial way. Some people said we were lucky to see the inevitable triumph of the true spiritual world, the true church, the last church.

Some people saw great promise in the aliens, some great fear. Our merely human leaders could only hold their breath, hold it long and longer, until finally collapsing with piercing mental anguish. Some people lost their minds and acted out their madness. Some people insisted they were now possessed by these aliens, excusing fantastic and horrific crimes, revealing by their acts just how alien were these others.

We were all human now, truly. We were ready to discover just how human we all were and what that status meant. We were human, but no one knew that when the aliens came our proud claims, our human insistence, our human naming was no longer ours to make. We humans perhaps all wanted the same things, food for our families, shelter from the rain or snow or burning sun and scouring sandstorms, care for our elders, a future for our children.