Punchlines of a cosmic joke

Creating a world in which no one believes,

rational lunatics' febrile fervors, zeals

in proving, demonstrating, and suggesting

that sciences procure our self-transcendence,

technologies secure our vast cosmic claims,

mathematics corresponds to all that is real,

engineering solves all problems it creates—

equipped our poor humanity with the tools

and talents needed to dig a cosmic grave:

“we understand now all there's to know, except—”

—killing a world in which no one could believe.

 

What lived once in caves we did not excavate:

we want to know their words and thoughts, not their laughs,

their levities could undermine our prowess

for conquest, dominance, making our own rules—

the rowdiness and ribaldries the ancients

echoed loud somehow offend us as adults—

our pretence of maturity and wisdom

would buckle could we hear the ancients' laughter,

not that we could rebuke their laughing at or

with comic or ludic matters of their days—

no, we would have to think them laughing at us.

= = = = =

Physical pain is not in itself “what's wrong”—

it's the signal of what or where “what is wrong”.

“Congenital pain insensitivity”

names another thing—I almost never reacht

age three: a broken collarbone, third-degree

burn to the back of one hand, tore open one

leg with a belt buckle—no physical pain

through these misadventures. Began outgrowing

the condition within five years: following

a savage dog bite, I gave my mom good news

and, she said, profound relief—“I think it hurts”.

 

Polar bear rules dwindling iceberg by itself:

not a photograph—beheld with human eyes

seeing certain death occur in slow motion.

If that lord of its domain consents to starve,

so weak it scarcely croaks its own entrapment,

its mighty howling reduced to hoarse complaint,

what can any living man expect from life?

The bear knows better than most just how soft ice

has become, almost all of its hardness gone.

The bear floats to certain death at sea, starving:

he declines his majesty—why would I live? 

Comparatively egocentric postures

become at times indistinguishable from

narcissism or acute solipsism.

Gazing out through one's somatic confinement,

these hermetic states illumine “empathy”.

Rarely if ever attained, empathetic

states are projections of imagination:

they're not actual cognitive attainments

nor epistemic performances—they don't

cross impermeable psychic boundaries.

We do well to distrust “empathologies”.