WEDNESDAY, AUG 1, 2018
The Conqueror Worm Updated
by Edgar A. Poe, 1843, updated 2018
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: PRESCIENCE, FROM THE WIRES, SYSTEMS SCIENCE
Abstract: E.A. Poe may have nothing to say to us modern know-a-lots, but voices from the past may not speak to those suffering from various hearing deficit disorders until dumbed down.
TUCSON (A-P) — From one who did not tell hu-mans what they wanted to hear though his art was compelling:
LO! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
[In our observable Cosmos of over 2 trillion galaxies, almost all complex societies fail.]
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
[Among those few who learned to live properly with the universe, some note the passings.]
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.
[We hu-mans are egoic mimes. Some see ourselves in the form of the gods of our imaginings (e.g. Jesus, Captains of Industry, Chairman Bro...), but we all prattle, preen, prance, and dance our merry dance of death in the midst of life as mere puppets of powerful and remorseless system dynamics that automatically thwarts all our attempts to stop it, given that we are subsystems within a hierarchy of systems (astro-physio-bio-socio-politico-economic) not only more complex than we know, but more than we can know. We can but iterate towards understanding the planet and ourselves, but no one in power does. Speak this truth to Power, starting with your own illusory egoic Self.]
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
[The hu-man predicament was exceptional in that, empowered by a planetary larder of fossil fuels, they developed a global complex society, grew exuberantly at the expense of surrounding life, and collapsed a planetary life-support system. The consumer society selected for a phantom of happiness/purpose that the consumer bots were conditioned to pursue by working to make ‘money’ they use to consume products produced by an economic system NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE. Our collective unintended Calhoun rat-like experiment on ourselves is having what should be expected outcomes as our empire-building socio-economic pathology makes for a world of pathologies (or what was merely a world of wounds as Aldo Leopold noted) filled by hu-man pathogens. As mistah Kurtz would agree: The horror! The horror!]
But see amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
[Agrarian societies, though most proved unsustainablly complex or were conquered, were scenic by comparison to the spawn and sprawl of the Industrial Revolution. Carcinogic growth consumes evermore until scarcity breeds conflict which increases scarcity in a downward spiral to the bottom. Hu-mans were a most promising species, hence the angels sobbed for what might have been.]
Out—out are the lights—out all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
[The Worm, having consumed it’s host, like a snake swallowing its tail, dies (heroically according to its last breath—“Victory is mine!” sayest the egoic Worm). Normal mass extinction events take only a few tens of millions of years for biodiversity to recover in a different form, but the angels go elsewhere as genetic recovery on Earth will take longer post-Anthropocene, and the memetic loss was one hundred percent. Out—out are the lights—out all for perhaps hundreds of millions of years, perhaps out until Sol novas. But there are billions of other planets where life may come to know itself, develop technology, and yet learn to live properly on its planet.]
