Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;
As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,
A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
Wallace Stevens
1 comment:
It's like humans' expectations of extra-terrestrial life are so regressively, painfully and narcissitically anthropocentric, and yet their hopes for the existent Other are so ineffably transcendant, beyond all possible conception of humanness and its attendant fallibilities.
In all probability humans are just single-celled twits thinking of how to dream up multicellularity without having any conception of the idea, even less how to virtualise it...yet throwing random dreams into the cosmic ether hoping for an echo of wisdom....
...Alas, just a sub-frequency tuneless drone keeps boomeranging back on an infinite silent loop, signifying f@#*-all...
...so we persistently keep asking, varying our tone, syntax, language, mode...but articulating the same essential banal question hoping the receiver will be fooled into answering...
..well at least it keeps us entertained until we unceremoniously shuffle off..which is the most we can really hope for...
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