I think of a tetrapod slithering in and out of slime puddles across a great plantless terrain. Primordial soup wasteland existence, permanent orange sun, skies filled with fire and smoke plumes heralded by sulfuric hissing. Trilobytes lining coastlines unto seabeds with no space between each other. They harvest detritus more bountiful than they will ever know again.
A world of singular entities, few enough to count on hand. Hostile, alien, miasmic. Bare ingredients laid out haphazardly, a premammalian cruelty dimension where violence occurs slowly, automatically, and undeterred because nothing alive has yet developed the sensation of pain.
Color does not exist. All things merely processed in vague gradients of light and darkness. Sound is a dull vibration, a rented half-sense shared with touch. This is a realm in which distinction has little to no usecase. No emotions, no fear, simply dull attraction towards sustenance. Reproduction is paired with suicide, carried out with the ease of breathing.
Piles of flesh, chitin, and gastrodermis growing and decaying in waveform rhythm across Pangean globeocean. Seamats of great algean civilization worship the sun in perpetuity. A gray sun, a merciless sun feeds them. They persist for multimillenia in purgatoric stability. A single spore of mutation wipes out the red ocean and replaces it with orange. A new dynasty of color begins.
Bastard insect turboviolence existence drags in oceanic forebearers. Fungal spores burrow their way into the cranial membranes of hive creatures, seeding their future corpses like landmines for language and concept to erupt. They enclose and hide in solitude through turbulent ice age cycles. They know what will become of this, they have mastered time in both directions.
I think about primordial existence, digested life cycles and alien cross contamination marking the chaotic indignance of precursive reality before God chose to fully pay attention. Upon which, He spun the globe in quick bursts, flinging biospheres into suffocated dead matter to orbit earth until it settled into faint rings. Corpses to be burnt away by solar winds.
The residue of this existence remains deeply buried in the subconscious. It lurks like a great reptilian, lodged deeply between the creases of brainfold. Pure gray matter thoughts, lowest voltage synapse, one sided neurons casting signals out into the ether. You hear faint whispers of it when you bite into warm flesh or witness your own blood. You feel it coursing through your nerves like a great dynamo of zen nervousness, tensing and glazing your eyes into thoughtlessness as you struggle to shit or work the body into exhaustion.
I think about Namacalathus. A great looming tower in the face of its forebearers. Tendrilled calcite withstanding the undertow, not out of defiance, not even understanding necessity of survival. Simply purely growing, existing, and evolving along cause-effect. Experiencing something akin to boredom or curiosity distilled down to its barest engine. Its erection a horn of Gabriel to the occupants of nonexistant bliss. An apocalypse to empty equilibrium. Ghosts cried in terror as vessels for their possession opened up onto the earth, threatening to trap them for eons in an all too familiar promise of tumultuousness. They recoiled in fear the day that slime chose constitution.
You can touch this world briefly. It demands a great rejection of all stimulus or reason, one so unsustainable you only can feel it for moments. Serial killers feel it when slicing open hitchhikers' torsos from groin to chin. Drug addicts are haunted by it when they sneak into the afterlife without a ticket. Babies occupy it in patches until they form memory, cooing and crying at its presence in equal measure.
You have known this world in glimpses, begging for you to steer your vehicle into oncoming traffic or dragging you forward during crippling hangovers. It is a world fully utilizing the third dimension, omnidirectional movement in fluidic membrane. Womblike ocean survival, avoidant of great cannibalistic worms and gnawing parasite cells. Dancing around the threat of being dissolved into RNA residue, just long enough to split and multiply.
I think about methane creatures and sponges that just recently learned to move, shuffling slowly towards ocean vents to fellate them totally and starve their neighbors from warmth or nutrients. Suckling from earth's tit, her murderous magmatic milk.
It is an alien world. It is a world beyond time, reason, or consistency. It is a non-Euclidian world. If you were to enter such a place with one friend to accompany you, the moment their presence escaped your field of view, they would be gone. You turn around to find them and the landscape shifts immediately. Each time you close your eyes, you are in a new place. This is the primordial world, hundreds of millions of years collapsed into a five minute prologue. A collision between dreamstate and reality.
I think about the Coelacanth and its reminder that all of earth's secrets hide under its crust, never dying, only sleeping. Dragons and manticores once roamed the earth and they had dreams like people do. They would tense in their sleep remembering the creatures of primordial existence. Grandfather to the grandfather to the grandfather of their grandfather. Precursors beyond their natural instinct of terror and ferocity. When they too were folded under the earth, they nudged away from the shadowed corner where these creatures lie. Not out of fear but of discomfort, knowing they were the leftovers of something even more incomprehensible. A souvenir existence, retired as sludge. The direct descendants of fire, lighting, water, and wind.