Dipping his fingers into chemical soups, glowing red, hissing sputtering erupting... A violent youth. He was a gravitational captive of the Sun. Come around, back to Papa. "The Solar System, our cosmic home, is an orderly community." Five periods of mass extinctions. Thrust up, worn down, again and again, grinding, crushing. A rigorous regimen; no one said growing up was easy. This was not America.
One such incident is recalled in memory. Struck by a massive planetesimal, he reacted by splashing matter into surrounding space. It took ten hours for her to solidify as a sphere, spinning out into a moon. Cooled off, relaxed into rhythm. Time slowed down. His rotation slowed, water dragging against ocean floors, she slowed him.
Gradually he settled, letting heavy things sink down and lighter matter float to the surface, some simulacrum of peace. Rains soaking into dry rock, or boiling and sent back to whence they came. Rains falling day and night for one hundred thousand years. "The Hadean stage." He thought it would never end. Something was around the corner.
Somewhere he thought he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. Emerged from hell, experimented with new media. Broad and colorful swaths of it, painting the horizons purple, green, yellow, draped across him like fine silks. That was before the oxygen catastrophe. Free oxygen, multiplying, killing instantaneously. Some ideas went into hiding underground, beneath the seas & untouched by oxygen, blue-green unconscious & eternal.
"Three billion years is a very long time." Taking the primitive & merging it to make complex structures, entranced by the dynamic world of ideas. All the while sediments were being washed into shallow spaces within him, underwater depressions being filled. There are artifacts from this period, imprints of the harder things; the soft things are lost to time & his own vague memory.
Imagination, a time wild wet and moist, fertile. Mosses, ferns, fishes, sluggish and awkward, fast streamlined swimmers. Some parts of him were yet locked in ice. He conceived eggs, seeds, a creative architect in cyclical progressions. Continents danced upon him with the theory that the artist's great work is himself. There was a general drying; hardier forms emerged, tough within the cool dry air. Later, flowers, fantastic and beautiful, a bit of whimsy.
She continued to influence him. (Today she is slowly spiraling away from him, in a widening path. Eventually she will appear motionless in the sky, and some will see her every night in the same place, while others will never see her at all.)
A crisis, obscure, a sort of self-contempt perhaps, scarification. Working on the sixth mass extinction, quicker than ever before... The artist burdened by his creations. Today he groans, doesn't want to get out of bed. Still too young to have creaky joints. Constantly reinventing himself, what does he want to be tomorrow? A threshold of new possibilities, once he cleans off the brushes, shakes the dust out of his hair, waits for a thrust of new inspiration.
(parts of this portrait of the artist as a young planet were stolen from History: Journey Through Time by Roy A. Gallant, part of the "Earthworks" series for young readers).