All-too-human

Standing in my kitchen, staring at the human navel.

A glass in my hand, blown by glass-blowers. Human effort. Or forged and shaped in silicon dioxide smelting furnaces. Made by human hands. Built by human hands. Conceived and drawn up by human minds. The very rationale for the effort human: economic gain, the control of human energy flows. Gold, silver, amber, amethyst, charms, wheat, grain. So the architect’s children can grow. So water can lighten the seeds. So his wife can have geraniums in her garden. Human garden, Nature in a matchbox: awnings, sun rooms, greenhouses. The seeds themselves human, bred for thousands of years: human ears of corn, fitting human hands, feeding human bowels, growing in pace with our yearning, our impatience for grain. Grain, now! Entire land masses human.

In the glass in my hand, I pour orange juice. Plucked by hands. Packaged by hands. Driven by hands skilled with machine-oxen. Pulp has been extracted. Vitamins added. Human pharmacies.

I stare at the kitchen counter, at the walls. Fruit flies dance around in the air. Human fruit flies. Scions of our garbage piles. Live in caves. Lights flicker on and off unpredictably. Instantaneously. Storms in the distance. Fly traps allow them to live out their lives within bottles. Live, feed, mate, fall to earth. Dirty water infused with fruit and fly corpses. Our human fruit, our human fly corpses. Fall apart to earth. Not the kitchen counter. Polypropylene I wager. Will persist for tens of thousands of years. Hidden power of covalent bonds unrolled in a sheet in a factory somewhere. Again: human factory, human architect, human tycoon’s hands at the wheel. Also own the foundries, the mills, the barges, the factory farms, the woodlots. Primate needs on a primate landscape.

No light from the outside sky penetrates the kitchen. Only the buzzing neon. Human vibrations unheard by human egos. Vibrations like the hippies talked about: ultrasonic, subsonic, supersonic. Sonograms by Google Earth telling us what the coral reefs look like. (Art for art’s sake, these coral reefs, these submerged bohemias. Colour, waves, shifting hues, shifting moods. Tropical fishes like Pollocks. Thick medium. Medium of the womb. Human womb. Amniotic fluid. Vague frissons running up and down necks. Back to the darkness).

I leave the kitchen in human shoes. Everywhere around me I hear the vibrations of sewing machines, or (rarely) the clack-clack of knitting needles. Penumbras out of time, hypnagogic intimations. The shriek of bandsaws, skillsaws, table saws, miter saws around my desk, my drawers, the bookcase. The sparking arcs of welding around my lamps. Kiln sounds around my mug.

The electronics I dare not probe. What shigawire monomolecular reels spun these out? What projected inadequacies of our informational, logocentric consciousness do these things serve to soothe? Human, all. But humanity that reeks of all-too-human contempt for the all-too-human. Humanity that would exsanguinate Thailand for Denmark’s sins. That destroyed the bikini atoll. Giving up the outer senses to cultivate the subtler senses of possibility. Visionaries. Artists. Giving up plebian happiness for aristocratic virtues. Ragnarok virtues. (The frost giants are the comets that populate the Oort cloud.)

And there, the inhuman meteor lurks. Its orbit unknown. An unknown unknown. The reason why nobody looks up at the night sky anymore, why we drown it out in orangy city hearthglows. Day-blue is human: it’s when we cloudwatch and see old kings, tree groves, plot arcs. Orange is warm to the eye’s touch. Black, however...

Consider: "The lamps keep swaying, fully unaware: / is our light lying? / Is night the only reality / thas endured through thousands of years?"