FootprintsintheWind.com

Why do we think we alone, or even our species alone, need to carry our conversation?

:- Doug.

Call it A Speculation of Grandchildren, or, Bending the Arc of Humanicity.

:- Doug.

The last is also ambiguous, and I like that. Who is speculating, about what? Do the grandchildren speculate about us?

:- Doug.

That seems to be in the nature of an exploration, something even less defined and more ethereal, perhaps sidereal. Wander, wend, sift, circumambulate, track. Follow the evidence of elusive generations.

:- Doug.

A speculation of grandchildren

:- Doug.

You are encouraged
To read widely
And not only out of books
Then to write
And not only

:- Doug.

Say one thing per sentence. Here, strength.

:- Doug.

Goals ultimately become limits.

:- Doug.

We get alarmed at election results, thinking that so many minds and hearts are forever opposed. In truth, in humans change is innate. What we believed and what we thought we believed will tomorrow be swaying.

:- Doug.

It could be worse
Then I made this verse

:- Doug.

What if our message were transported in the manner of a virus, were in fact that of virus?

:- Doug.

What natural desires do people have to which our stories/messages/images might hitch themselves for a ride and expand their range? Sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control? Beauty, truth, goodness? Ecstasy: “[O]ne ecstatic, wayward pulse of life.” Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p 100?

:- Doug.

Meeting is changing.

:- Doug.

We must change. We must also bend change toward good.

:- Doug.

This all is evocative: man the changeling. It is what we are about, and we are about to change more quickly and dramatically, if science and technology advance their promise. This will not hold only good, but is wholly good. Can I say wholly, or better to say likely? The question is rather, What do we push for? Is there an edge, a disquiet here, a choking shiver? Then we must say it, say Wholly.

:- Doug.

Words creating worlds: what worlds would we make?

:- Doug.

Here a half step beyond the edge touched when I guessed that complexity, mixing, unfinishing, undefining, just these things make us human. Now I see a new humanity or at least quality arising: humanity the changing. And this we owe to those next and next, to the species, and to the all there is: to prod to goad them into changing.

:- Doug.

Humanity is made in the mouth, in the eyes, and above all in the ears—the thread running through them may be imagination, another word for which is spirit.

:- Doug.

Writers are prophets—speaking forth worlds: imaginers who create in their mouths.

:- Doug.

Homo mutabilis: How will our generations differ from us, and what can we do to encourage them?

:- Doug.

To send a message to another, especially across centuries, we must accept it will be a changeling. Meaning like beauty must turn to breathe.

:- Doug.

If the “colors and shapes of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive,” as Frederick Turner writes us, what do humans find attractive? Recall that a shiver and disquiet also propel us. What then? What flowers us?

:- Doug.

Is what defines our humanicity our undefinability, what limits us our illimitability? Inexpressible are we.

:- Doug.