Painting by artist Wild Grace, from her Everpresent series.
El poeta Mike Mahoney continua exponiendo su constelación de ideas escritas en respuesta a La chispa azul libro compuesto por nuestro socio JP Kruse. Para mas información sobre La chispa azul por favor, visiten la pagina siguiente: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark
Poet Mike Mahoney continues to expound his constellation of ideas written in response to The Blue Spark by JP Kruse. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: http://www.swamplanternbooks.com/books/the-blue-spark
As i loaf in my apartment, letting my mind loose to roam and explore the deep annals and chasms of the past, of the planet’s history and of our brief time upon its surface, it strikes me to imagine how our story would look to us if we were to see it projected onto another animal?
If we were to see the entire tale of our monkey species, the evolution of thousands of cultural narratives, tools and abilities, the evolution of our consciousness through a few thousand years of myth and history, put onto another animal on another planet earth without us?
If our whole evolution and history, from the origins of our imagination on to present day, were mainlined through our third eye and played out like a brief movie for us to watch?
How would we perceive it, looking onto a freshly discovered planet, strikingly similar in size and age, in ecosystemic diversity and chemical make-up to our own, if to our astonished gaze, we discovered an ant, a lowly insect, was undergoing all the processes of imagination and self-reflection present in our own species over the past few million years?
And if, looking through our high-powered and digitally-enhanced telescopes across time & space at this Earth-like jewel of a planet, we could perceive in a type of time-lapse reverie the couple-million-years long development of this ant species – from a primitive creature with a hive-minded mentality slowly dabbling with the taming of fire, then more quickly with the discoveries of art, language and the wheel, more intensely with agriculture and numbers, speeding up all the while and all the way up to the construction of a globe-girdling sprawl of electronics and technological cities similar to our own, a grid of virtual realities connected by pollution and ideology – with say a few hundred years passing every 10 seconds – what would we understand then?
How many times watching it through our monitors and computers screens would it take for our minds to light up into starry exclamation points of jubilant comprehension?
What patterns would we see there?
What future would we see?
In watching the first stirrings of ant-mind painting its dreams onto the walls of underground caves and tunnels, would resonance fill our thoughts as we gradually recognized ourselves in this meta-view of projected self-reflection?
And then would shock paint our faces as those newly minded ants quickly spread out over the entire planet, devouring the earth and taming her plant life and forests into agriculture and suburbs?
Taming the fauna into extinction?
Taming their own minds into ant-culture?
Into eastern and western strands of ant-culture with assorted types and dotted tribes of archaic memory-holders of the "Old Ways" spread throughout the dwindling wilderness areas of this alien, ant-sick planet?
Would we watch with horror as the ants exponentially multiplied within a few a generations, (only a minute or two to us watching from our privileged time-lapse point-of-view), into a gross imbalance of overpopulation so dramatic the world buckled under the weight of sustaining them?
What realizations and emotions would bubble up inside us as an enormous amount of energy from the planet’s incredibly wide spectrum of species withdrew from its vast diversity, from the millions of branches of its tree of life, down to just one twig of an insect: the ant?
After hours and hours of watching them live balanced within their world's harmonious and complexly integrated systems of developing life, diversity and health, only to see them turn left into abstract symbolism and its resulting societies and cultures, its inevitable technologies with globe-orbiting satellites and blood-spilling shames of war and ‘religion’ within the span of a few minutes, would we be appalled?
Nauseated?
Terrified?
Would we try and reach out to warn them when we saw the blood of their planet spilling into its oceans and clouding out its skies while fueling their culture?
Try and make them see they're living amidst the 6th great extinction event of their planet?
Would we put the fucking pieces together finally, and see in them a mirror of ourselves?
And if we did, would we change the way we think?
The way we live?
Or even the way we dream?
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