Book of Lamentations

Draft First Stab in progress...

Lamentations

Hubris

Call me Icarus

Last child in a line of genius
Clever beyond all reckoning
What lay beyond our grasp?

With our toys and our baubles
With our comforts and pastimes
With our palaces and plazas

In our thousand thousand thousands

We heeded not wisdom nor the wise

We elevated the unwise to power

We followed them unwisely

We took without consent

We killed the inconvenient

We killed those with whom we disagreed

We trampled our world under
Spread our careless poisons

On the winds
On the waters
On the lands

We cut the forests
We paved the fields
We soured the oceans
We torched the sky

Ravenous

Gluttonous
We ate the world

In bites scarce tasted

Insatiable

And fouled our nest with shit

What profit that we gained the world?

What profit that we lost our way?

What profit that we lost our world?

In trade for a handful of shine

In trade for unearned ease

In trade for our world brought low

Our reach too long

Our vision too short

Mastery

We created wonders

We walked among them

We flew the sky and walked the moon

We saw with our own eyes the deeps of the sea

Our voices carried around the world

Our fields fed multitudes

We created minds in our own image

We lit starfire on earth

Our fingers shaped the very script of life

Our eyes saw to the dawn of time

We lit the night till stars were dim

We built high and wide and long

Our music was sublime and our art

Our beauties shimmered

We thought deeply

We understood much

Loud proclaimed we

LOOK UPON OUR WORKS

Are we not the pinnacle?

The fruition of all time?

Growth

Ancients before us warned of growth

Who themselves had risen and fell

That which grows doubles

Then doubles again

And again

Slow at first

Then runs away

Growth seduces
Slow at first
Loves promise and first kiss
Easing higher
Soon doubling in ardor
Loves passion pulsing in embrace
But doubling again
Become ravenous
Love turned jealous
Possessive
We are murdered
By a passion not love

The human world is bounded

And growth unchecked is fatal

The lure of knowledge 

The lure of ease

The lure of wealth

The lure of power

Gratified

Growth unchecked seduces

Slow at first like loves promise

Quickening like loves passion
Ravenous like loves jealous rage

But neither love nor love gone bad

We lie murdered in our sleep

You who come after

You who come after

We bid you find a wiser way

Than the death we followed

Beware our gifts

Use them sparingly

Your eyes lifted to the long horizon

Bargains with gain are bad bargains

With short term gain

But long term ruin

No entity thrives

That trades gain for loss

Yet gain is subtle

Yours is bound with that of others

Friends and family

And strangers alike

Take what you need and no more

Lift others up

Teach them wisdom

Teach them knowledge

Teach them to value wisdom

Above knowledge

Above gain

Lest you follow us in pride

Lest you follow us in unchecked growth

Lest you follow us in ruin

We were warned

Will you be warned?

Will you be wise where we were not?

Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias
Painting by Julie Krizan

I consider the poem, Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley to be a good contender for inclusion in this project. 

Ozymandias 

-- As mis-remembered from age 10, with apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley


I met a traveler from an antique land, who said:
 
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
stand in the desert.

Near them on the sand
Half sunk a shatter'd visage lies
Whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip
And sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet remain
Stamped on these lifeless things;

The hand that mocked,
The heart that fed.  

And on the pedestal these words appear:
 
My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings!          
LOOK upon my works, ye Mighty,
and DESPAIR!

.
.
.

Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck,
Boundless and bare
The lone and level sands 

stretch far away.

The Ozymandian Moment

Long before I first looked up to mark the falling sky, this poem seized me, and clung tight.

It's one of only a handful of poems I've ever memorized, and the only one before I was ten. Before I ever knew the term, it whispered to me of TEOTWAWKIs past. Urgent and unforeseen. It invoked a horrified fascination that has never left me.

I've wondered since; am I prone to apocalyptic thinking - and was therefore drawn to the poem and all the rest? Or did it 'imprint' me with apocalyptic vision - an organizing principle by which I order a deluge of factoids?

Or is it just obvious?

From Ugo Bardi's post, The Seneca Effect

Lucius Anneaus Seneca wrote, "The path of increase is slow, but the road to ruin is swift."

Ugo Bardi calls this the Seneca Effect. The Seneca Curve resembles the familiar Bell Curve, but has a decisively abrupt drop trailing its apex. Bardi calls this the Seneca Cliff.

In Ozymandian terms, the Seneca Curve has three sections.

• The Rise of Humankind;
• The Ozymandian Moment;
• The Colossal Wreck.

The Rise of Humankind is familiar to us all, taught as the 'inevitable, upward march of Progress'. The vast superiority of our species over all others. Of the Present over the Past.

Oh sure, it's had its ups-and-downs. Quibbling episodes of rapaciousness, inquisition, war, genocide and terrarism [sic]. But it's all been in good fun, and ya can't make omelets without busting eggs.

Overall, we've mounted the heights.

Our Present justifies our Past.

The Ozymandian Moment is the peak of the curve. We can see further than ever before; our powers at their zenith. We entertain the smug notion that we have arrived. That we possess all knowledge and wisdom. That the future is but the mere elaboration of detail; the tying up of loose ends. The consolidation of gains.

And clearly, we can extrapolate ever upwards. Progress and Growth forever and ever, amen!

And then... the Colossal Wreck.


*****

I believe that our Ozymandian Moment lingers, but is almost past. That our Colossal Wreck will be global in scale, with lone and leveled sands - in a manner of speaking - to mark our passing.

Will there still be human travelers to wonder at our shatter'd visage? Our vast and trunkless legs of stone? I hope so.

And I wish them brighter prospects than our own.

Apologies to Pat Oliphant

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagen

Pale Blue Dot

Earth seen from 4 thousand thousand thousand miles distant

NASA 30 year anniversary
of VOYAGER photo, re-imaged

 

Look again at that dot.

That's here. That's home. That's us.

On it everyone you love, 

everyone you know, 

everyone you ever heard of, 

every human being who ever was, 

lived out their lives. 

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, 

thousands of confident religions, 

ideologies, 

and economic doctrines.

Every hunter and forager, 

every hero and coward, 

every creator and destroyer of civilization, 

every king and peasant, 

every young couple in love, 

every mother and father, 

every hopeful child, 

every inventor and explorer, 

every teacher of morals, 

every corrupt politician, 

every "superstar," 

every "supreme leader," 

every saint and sinner 

in the history of our species lived there--

on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 

Think of the rivers of blood spilled 

by all those generals and emperors 

so that, 

in glory and triumph, 

they could become 

the momentary masters 

of a fraction of a dot. 

Think of the endless cruelties 

visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel 

on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 

how frequent their misunderstandings, 

how eager they are to kill one another, 

how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, 

our imagined self-importance, 

the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, 

are challenged by this point of pale light. 

Our planet is a lonely speck 

in the great enveloping cosmic dark. 

In our obscurity, 

in all this vastness, 

there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere 

to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. 

There is nowhere else, 

at least in the near future, 

to which our species could migrate. 

Visit, yes. 

Settle, not yet. 

Like it or not, for the moment 

the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said 

that astronomy is humbling 

and a character-building experience. 

There is perhaps 

no better demonstration 

of the folly of human conceits 

than this distant image 

of our tiny world. 

To me, 

it underscores our responsibility 

to deal more kindly with one another, 

and to preserve and cherish 

this pale blue dot, 

the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Lightly edited for translation from prose to poem... DZ