NATURE
“I think we have to make a decision about our nature, our human nature” Carla declared.
“What do you mean?” I said, figuratively holding the door for her, and motioning her to go ahead, knowing she had much more to say.
“Well, who are we and where do we want to go?” she asked/explained, intoned with exasperation. “I mean, we're mature enough as a species that I think we need to spell it out, be direct and transparent, and plan for some things, and not just keep wingin' it, fumbling disoriented from one accident to the next.”
Carla had a way of sounding pained and amused at the same time. I think she has expectations, high expectations, ones she knows can't be met and so chooses to reside in a place just outside reality and resignation, on the stoop, refusing herself the mental and emotional shelter we all build for ourselves.
“Yeah, I'd agree” I admitted, nodding in approval.
She went on, “I mean, big things, like: is Earth our permanent home, sacred ground, our Eden and Heaven; or have we been stranded on a kind of hell-world, one that's been trying to kill us, itself on the edge of a dying universe, one ripping itself apart until there will be a nothing, all orders of magnitude darker and more desolate than the traverseless void we see today?”
Carla was a helpless dichotomist, you see. If she was standing in front of a zebra and it was licking her face she'd tell you there was no zebra, that all she saw were stripes, black and white. I blamed the school system, with it's curriculum of division and dissection. Twenty years is a lot of scaffolding and programming to undo, so much that you don't just shake it off but have to want to tear it down.
I stoked her further, not wanting the fire to go out. “Aren't you paraphrasing Alan Watts? Or maybe it's Terrence McKenna? Asimov? Regardless, surely this life thing is gestalt, messy, both/and. No?”
“I think I'm paraphrasing anyone who's given any thought to the state of things.”
“Indeed” I loudly agreed with almost a giggle and in a tone slightly too comical, one that exposed my delight.
Carla continued, “I mean, you know, we have here a choice. The choice is: do we finally yield to the more-than-humaness of our technology and construct fleets of the twenty-first century equivalent of a schooner (something organic, self-assembling, and the size of, I don't know, maybe Saskatchewan), packed with neo-hard tack and synthetic ultra-tortoises, to ply the slippery vacuum between Third Rock and Alpha Centauri?”
“Or?” (Surely this was a duality and there was flipside on the tip of her tongue.)
“Or is our nature and destiny far humbler? Is the former not so much, at its soul, about adventure, discovery, and survival as it is just pure exploitation and megalomania? Can we simply and happily build for ourselves a global sanctuary? Or, perhaps, undo ourselves, back to something sustainable?”
I cut her off, knowing there was more coming. “Well, again, I think it's both/and. Right from the start, our species podded off into little groups and dispersed into the misty unknown. We invented new games and tricks, and survived by mixing things up, changing our locations and our diets and our associations and, thereby, our minds... Humans are a panoply, a palimpsest, an interference pattern in the present: a kind of living hologram coalesced upon a membrane made up of the dreams and skeletons of a thousand generations past, and out of the photonic figments of what we might one day become.” I was on a roll and wasn't going to stop there. “That's our nature. And if there's any doubt, you can see it everywhere you care to look, really. It's in all our languages – which is to say that it's coded into our minds, what we think and what we're able to think, and thus into our identity and our orientations – and even chemically, right down in our DNA!” I demanded, as though it was self-evident.
Carla cocked her head and opened her eyes, in a questioning but agreeable sort of way, as if permitting me to continue.
“Our DNA is nothing like a clean blueprint, or a recipe book, or a page of JAVA script, right? Carl Zimmer explains this brilliantly. He says our DNA is a total fucking mess: there are chunks of Neanderthal in there and segments of ancient viruses, that pandemic your great-great-great-grandmother survived... And it's a work-in-progress, changing all the time. We are the earth, the mud, our ancestors, the future. But it's more than that, too. Don't be confused by the futurists and fortunetellers! The Singularity – that event-horizon our species slips over with the arrival of artificial general super-intelligent and our inevitable merging with such technology – isn't some far off event. And it's not in the near future either. No, it's already happened: slowly, gradually, somewhere between 2004 and 2012. Is there any doubt? Most of us have already grafted silicon and lithium onto ourselves. Haven't we? Sneakily, we did it without any scalpels, without any connective wires, without interfacing our grey matter with fiber-optic mycelial nu-neurons. You know this. We've all experienced it: you leave the house without your phone and have a wisp of panic as you feel yourself rendered fundamentally disabled, deprived of seven-eighths of what you consider to be your full capacity. And that's the signal you've already slipped beyond the threshold and they have you. You know this. Even your subconscious nervous system flips out and exhibits phenomena like phantom phone vibrations on your upper thigh. You go to do things you've become fully accustomed to doing, things you feel you “should” or "must" be able to do, but that the biology you inherited simply can't manage on its own. And these abilities are not mere animal reflexes but feats of pure impossibility that, back just one generation of your own species, no one could have even comprehended. Right? I mean, sure, the mother ship hasn't landed yet. Fine. But is there any doubt we've invited ten thousand little Trojan horses through the gate, and have fallen in love with every one?”
“Totally.” Carla nodded and laughed, upset and amused and skeptical all at once. She then responded with what seemed to me like a tangent. “Well, you know, as individuals we've all been too willing to be led, taught bullshit, when what's really out there, what's really going to get you somewhere, really blow your mind, isn't some regurgitation of previously archived conclusions but, actually, real lived experience.”
“I swear to Zeus you're, verbatim, channelling McKenna” I suggested laughingly.
“No doubt I am. And is there any doubt the world is far weirder than even the maddest among us suppose?”
“There, you did it again!”
“It's the Bohemianism, just as McKenna posited, I tell you. You know it just won't die. It's been with us forever, just always been there. It was there long before Burning Man, before rave; back before punk and rock and roll, before jazz; before Impressionism or Romanticism. There's just always been this strain of semi-pseudo-dissent: the lifeline of sanity.”
“Agreed.”
“And you see it emerge every time the vast and suffocating bastions of bullshittery soften some. From there the Bohemian offers itself up as an alternative.”
“For sure.”
“I just don't think institutions, bureaucracy, empires, dynastic families are up to the task. You know? I think, better we should, as we always have, tend to our little gardens and form ourselves brotherhoods and sisterhoods and brother-sisterhoods of affinity and joy and realize that transformation is the task of a lifetime. Our lifetime.”
“Beautiful.”
“This is the anguish of the ancestors", she said as she clenched and held up her fist, looking off into the distance. "This is the sacred trust handed us that must not, cannot, be betrayed." She opened her fist, still in the air, and rotated her palm to the sky. As she did I was beginning to think she was rehearsing a play. She continued, "The pogroms, and invasions, and atrocities", she clenched and pumped her fist, "conducted across all time", her hand flung open as she slashed her arm through the air, "can only be redeemed if we," she said, as she slapped her palm into her chest, "the living who reside on the wavefront (your hologram: that raw cresting of this genetic-synthetic experience) do not drop the ball!", she declared as she drove her fist into the table with a great crashing BANG! "All our ancestors," she warned, nearly yelling, "like our very great-grandchildren, seven generations out, are watching to see how we do.”
Carla slammed her hands to the table, kicked her chair back as she stood up and declared "Well, I gotta pee!" before marching out of the room.
“Right,” I said to the remaining absence.
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