OPENING SALVO // Eusocial Distancing
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
EXCERPT //
“A hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
Ever since reading these words by Elizabeth Kolbert in her book The Sixth Extinction in 2016, they have been spinning round and round in my head like a dark song lyric by Leonard Cohen or Neko Case. I find them strangely comforting. To know that you and everything you know and love will one day be gone is frightening to some, but it puts me in a mind of winter, like the poet Wallace Stevens’ snowman, who is so much part of his environment that he is barely distinguishable from it. He will certainly return back to the snowdust from which he came, but remains unperturbed, a state to which I aspire. Meditation helps. Not caring if people find you icy is a bonus.
I find Kolbert’s words reassuring in the way I find reassuring my dear friend and colleague Joshua Mehigan’s words at the end of his poem “Accepting the Disaster.” He writes, “...finally we accepted the disaster. / And crowds moved. Cities sang with grievances. / The luckiest suffered a hundred comeuppances. / Long wars were waged by secret caucuses. / Flesh-eating plants grew in the provinces. / The rich, sobbing, were dragged from their terraces. / The temples burned with heartfelt pointless promises. / And the round wind came across the dry plains daily.”
If you can concentrate on that “round wind,” the rest falls away: The boom and bust cycles of human frailty and valor, aggression and cooperation, sedition and salvation. Pestilence and famine. They all go on in the background, so much babble. Fortunes will be reversed. Institutions will fail. What polymath thinker Mark Moffett calls “The Human Swarm” will create new societies, thrive for a time, and then collapse. If your apocalypse is one election, one event in history, you may become distracted from what we can learn from these larger cycles, and how they might help us understand how to thwart the final doomsday that awaits us: The extinction of all human minds. Without coordination against existential threats, we are lost, and the great potential of the human race will have its light extinguished forever.
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