Inuksuks do not point the way as much as state: "I am here!" Their arms,
stonily outspread as they are, do not necessarily indicate East and West, or
point the way back South; the lone statuette is merely a marker upon a way ~
and that way is yours. You took the path that brought you upon it. And in the
traceless deep of snow, or the hardly discernible shift of the shale, the
solitary figure stands out across the way as a reminder that somehow someone
was here before you ~ or how else do you think it got built?
Is
there any thought we can have that does not find its origin in that which went
before? Even The Tower of Babel did not rob mankind of a similarity of
contentions, albeit guised differently; man is meaning-making, and man is
empirical and abstract and self-referenced. Ontological, factually-experiential,
and solipsistic. Every language has big words. And in every culture, much like
that of Ozymandias, there is an instinctual sense that it too someday will have
little but the crumbling edifices of its heritage to indicate it once was
there. We shall have been silenced. And like the many crude Inuksuks of old, the
statues we come upon or leave behind may be reduced to acid-eaten
malformations, eventually, but someone else will surely come along and know
that we too have tread upon this planet, and have left our mark.
The
prognosis is not good. There are very many articles that have surpassed ‘The
Silent Spring’and
that point out that we are overpopulating, overindulging, and over-producing
such that our natural resources cannot, and won't, sustain us. And the immolation rate,
given the clearly observable death of trees and the acidification of the ocean,
is in chronological terms drastically alarming; but in the day to day of our
regular existence we are adjusting as readily as does the frog adjust to the
rise in temperature in the pot on the stove, not realizing it will trap him
when it boils.
As a panacea, 'The
Singularity' is advanced in order that Biology may marry with Technology such
that we become a global organism that, as a computerized consciousness, can
make a lake and a forest out of a desert. One for all and all for one. Yet
movies like 'Her' and the fascinating opportunities in 'Transcendence' serve to
threaten mankind, rather than excite, entice, or invigorate him toward impelling
us all to lose our individual ego and gather together in a complete sensibility
about the balance of man in nature. That 'I' may no longer desire an 'other',
another 'thing', or even want my own brain is too much for the individual to bear
~ and we will fight off any overt or recognizable intermarriage between our
species and the machines, let alone its offspring! Or will we?
The
future is upon us as surely as the energy increased around that frog is intensified.
We are, item by item, whether technological or not, being subjected to the
choices of others so much so that 'they' affect us all, and the individual,
even if wanting escape to the hermit-like hopes of the family in The Mosquito
Coast, or rendered as alone as Noah and his offspring on a dry mountaintop, is
already subject to the effect of the flood of mankind’s makings upon the whole.
Or
are we Inuksuks, with no purpose other than to be a landmark to those who may
feel lost?
And thank to my scientific friend, Justin Neway, Ph.D., here's a most empirical essay about the topic:
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