Remnants of an Old World
Culture
One hundred thousand years of humankind,
all there is to show is culture.
Imagine a great blaze, wholly destructive and cleansing of humankind.
Its fixtures – monuments, homes, schools, languages – our culture, sterilized.
Like a phoenix, we rise again as children.
We become, again, the cosmic infant, intelligent ape.
What must, or might not, re-form staggers:
music, justice, medicine, shame in nakedness.
All that makes us human:
technology, religion, education, nations.
We are not a species, but a series of thoughts structured and un-structured:
cuisine, art, commerce, history,
the fruits of wars, the big questions,
landing on the moon, introspection, meditation,
family, everything beautiful made or considered,
your life and mine.
If all were wiped away, we are left with a shadow of a shadow.
Epigenetic tags and inborn propensities;
immunities, diseases, and primal urges;
all atop a rotting planet
When I am wiped away, weight what’s left.
The home I built or bought, exhalations,
my trash, my shit, my corpse in a coffin of razed trees in a hole dug on my behalf:
vapor, thin air.
More, or less, than my children and their children, their excrement and ambition –
and so forth, is it a matter of degree?
Instead, consider:
truth discovered, distilled, debunked;
beauty formed or reflected, my barb in the hearts of family, friends, and near-strangers;
good works and bad, causes patronized and ignored, philosophy espoused;
my bank account, my enemies, this elegy and exaltation, photographs of my cat;
jokes devised, minds swayed, recipes, songs, sorry crafts, the way I laughed.
All are air too, but thicker, heavier.
Culture is the triumph of consciousness.
In humankind it found its vessel, and humanity its paint.
The universe experiences itself, makes art of it, pushes and experiments, takes note.
It creates sacred wisdom, but not the wisdom of scarred grey men with silver tongues.
The wisdom is of second self, collective self, and is strong, deep, old.
We can only live a good life in the context of it, as an ant can only in its colony.
Culture is a superorganism, in a sense.
Indeed, alive, and not incorporeal like a ghost or rumor.
It can die and avoids death, but if it perishes no requiem could be sung except unknowingly by the wind and water.
It goes through periods of feeding and slumber.
It can change, and in fact must evolve.
It engineers outwardly: environment, social intercourse, expansion into new territory.
It is the expansive mycelium underground, and we are the fruiting mushroom emerging temporarily from the muck to joyfully release spores before rotting.
We profit from it, and it reproduces through us.
We are it and it is us, both apart and a part.
We call it Humanity, but that falls short –
for that second-us, super-us includes those animals, plants, germs, mountains, oceans, objects, concepts that which we love, hate, destroy, and cherish.
Culture is bigger, it swallows all.
Its memes are more powerful than Kings, though we create them.
Ideas, fears, dreams, traditions pass through fleshy ether –
viral electricity with no natural end except that of the universe
(should Culture not escape that unfathomable end).
What’s a hundred thousand years in light of thirteen billion past and future?
A blink, a breath, a birth.
A trillion – more – bodies piled:
human, apen, piscine, entomological, microbial.
Fertilizer for it, for that seed.
The sprout peaks from the litter of decay.
It is just beginning, the beginning of the beginning.
Another trillion more lives and what can it grow to?
Clair de Lune to a caveman is the result.
An incomprehensive destiny, as a sperm cannot comprehend a woman let alone the world.
That sprout, that cradled baby, wholly incomprehensible and gigantic to one human needs each.
Indeed, we each are its parent, in a small way, providing a nutritious meal and perhaps a lesson.
We should be proud knowing this child will, or may, one day
grow and play in the vast cosmic cul de sac.
Perhaps It, We, will meet friends, enemies, or those without such concepts –
or We will have outgrown them too.
And so, I’ll nurture It the best I can.
Pour my life into it, one pen-full at a time.
