called The Diversity Myth, an attack on multiculturalism. For The
Singularity loathes diversity.
In the politics of the Artificers, there could be no Inuit sculptor talking about Whitey on the moon. There would be no
Tukano woman entranced by the magnificence of meanings of
the jacaranda, no Dani men with their superb and curly penis
gourds and that Papuan ability to extemporize poems of their
lands, no Navajo, no Sámi, no Maori, no Mayan people of the
Zapatista Rebel Army, just one enormous statue of Columbus at
the Northwest Passage.
The worst scenarios of climate collapse evoke a world wasted,
what E. O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era, the Age of Loneliness,
when, as a result of the extinctions brought about by human
activities, the Earth will be barren of almost any life.
Postapocalyptic, it is horribly posthuman. This is a nightmare for
most of us, but an ambition for The Singularity.
The Singularity longs for transhumanism, a time when
humanity will become posthumanity. It is cruel, and it is unkind.
It’s also un-kind, not recognizing the kindness, the kinship of
the human to the natural world. It is a pitiless vision, and a
blinded one, for all true vision, as Marvell knew, depends on pity.
(“These weeping eyes, those seeing tears.”) In the pitilessness of
Guantánamo Bay, only saltwater and grace will transmute the
base metal into harmlessness and open water. In the oceans of
the human heart, it is pity which unrolls worlds.
The pastoral vision is as kind and necessary as water, the
water with which the lemon seedling was so carefully tended; the
waters within the human body, in about the same proportion as
the oceans are to dry land, the liquidity of all metaphor making
like things of the same kind. (These gentle puns of liking which
no artificial intelligence could ever know.) The kinship of the
human to the kind and wild world.
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
(Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”)
The mind has oceans and no artifice can copy its comprehension of this entire and laughing world, rude, splendid, ferocious,
wild, tender, and true. a
Listen to author Jay Griffiths read this article, and share your
thoughts about what she has written, at orionmagazine.org.
Be Here First
I don’t know my trees but I know my trees.
Their angling for what has spurned them;
their spitting and drooling, the battered
crocuses at their feet. We share the roofline,
the cesspool, I’m responsible for all that salt.
From my stone stoop I watch the lilac’s sun-
starved horizontal heroics, the still-naked
redbud shrugging off bitty unlit lights.
Neglect leans back on the lawn chair.
Must we dislike ourselves to change?
Sick of every other part of me, I approve
my hand slobbered by the horse’s jawing
a hacked apple. I say fear is behind our
everything. Or brazenness, which is just
a jacket fear puts on. The mare’s sudden
stillness says look: fox. The world as ever
offering now distraction, now danger.
But no. How much I owe the trees, the hissing
raccoon outsmarting my heart. The shed
moving towards ruin in its own slow time.
There’s something sprouting on the kitchen
table that’s not supposed to. Everything
eager, rude and alive. Not just the knotweed
but the crows’ hideous vowels; buds blasted
open or whipped young off the tree. Take your
pick: the ridge hurtling for the last rag of snow
or simply lifting off with the first smack of dawn.
—Ellen Doré Watson
