“Life’s just around the bend, my friend…”
I am sitting in class learning about posthumanism when the thought strikes me; the universe is deeper than I would ever understand. The feeling I felt after that thought was eerily similar to fear, but not quite. Not quite causing me to shake in my boots but more filling me with awe. It was a complicated feeling, one that can only be felt and not written down.
I wonder what the universe thinks about the things that I have been “going through”. The experiences, the things I let myself feel and say and do. How minute they must be. I spend all my time so covered and shaded by my own wants and needs and desires I do not focus on the life I exist in, the body I have, the environment I roam. I blink and two days have passed because I shield myself beneath things so inconsequential to me today AND tomorrow. This is a realization that stopped me right in my tracks and filled me with a sad sort of gnawing sense of sorrow. I need to let go, live and observe.
Because there is more beyond this.
My one desire is to be a better person to myself and fully actualize my existence in who I am meant to be. But I am a victim, a slave to cowardice. I let myself suffer and rot, instead of suffer and grow. There is not a conceivable life without suffering and gloom but to sit in it, to live in it is as convenient as it is a shame.
Learning about posthumanism actualized the reality that this whole world and each individual reality is all a game of perception. We do not exist in the same two worlds simply and complicatedly because of that fact. What then is the real world? The world we see, the world we live in, the realities we exist in are conceived by us and they might not be what the true world is. The only way to find that out, is to eradicate all humans from the planet and give it time. Give the Earth time to recover, to rejuvenate, to heal. THEN we can see what the world truly is.
I think we take it for granted this world. We behave like we possess it, like we own it. My land, my minerals, my cave, my, my, when does it ever belong to what it actually belongs to? we claim and take and still do not treat with respect. We spit and scorn and only do the right things when it benefits us. We only love the earth when it makes us fulfilled. And I effectively expressed that in a poem I wrote about the ocean for this class. I kept in mind that whenever the ocean is written on, it is written either in this beautiful light or in this angry, sort of monstrous light. But to me, the ocean is sad. Wanting. Waiting. Blue all over and alone. Deeper that we would ever understand and/or fanthom. And we poison it, we degrade it, we detest it, but we turn around and appreciate it, oh, we love it on a hot summer day. We do not consider that the ocean remains the ocean summer, winter, fall and spring. It was a sad poem, and may very well be a reflection of all I have been feeling in recent times but I could hear the waves and feel the current as I scribbled on that piece of paper.
I could feel the ocean.
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear it does it still make a sound?
I want to answer this question philosophically and intellectually, but the truth is I do not know. It is a combination of yes and no fighting for the spot at the same time, leaving me unable to choose.
If I say yes, the logical and calculating part of me spikes. How do I know for certain, how CAN I know? If I am there the whole purpose of the experiment is defeated but I can’t say no, because if I do, I am stripping the tree of its magnitude and ability. I am tying its whole life, its whole existence to humanity. Someone has to be there, anyone, for its existence, its strength to be validated. And OH what torture it is to be tied to someone else.
Post-humanistically though, the answer is yes. Because there is no logical part of this world and even if there was, what is to say that the logicalities of humans govern that of the trees? So, thinking retrospectively, the answer is yes. Because I need to -WE need to- realize that there is a separate existence beyond me, beyond humanity that I cannot interfere and/or understand, despite my attempts to.
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“ The Ocean
I am blue all over, the silence is not loud enough to drown out my cries
the sun is not hot enough to warm up my insides,
I am alone.
You mistake me for hope, associate me with good times,
but my depth is filled with histories that cannot be washed with time,
my existence has buried lives, my surface filled with lies,
I get darker as you go deeper, dangers they only rise.
I am blue all over,
I envy the blue of the sky,
I envy its beauty and respect, you exalt it high,
I am scorned and poisoned
Only loved on cold summer nights,
I am blue all over- stuck unable to fly”
