we’re all metacognitive creatures,
chimpanzees wearing sneakers,
having meltdowns in department stores
and being generally pretty cruel
to one another…
it’s our reasoning about ourselves
from a point of view beyond ourselves
that makes us feel so damn special…
we can think about thinking
and layer more layers of thought
on top of that — even our emotions
have subjects and objects
and entire narratives attached…
we cling to one another
and cling harder to the idea
of the other, even when expectations
don’t align with the tragic
realizations of true events…
we are so sophisticated
that we can actually model The Real
with mathematics and visual graphics
and yet our own eyes are just
juice-filled cameras, ocular meatballs
which resort to trickery to fool
our brains into seeing in 3D —
but we know the world isn’t as we see it,
and our place in it is one
of destroyers, not saviors…
even our closest relatives,
the chimps without sneakers
probably fear us so hard that they prefer
never to get near us, and yet we have
the hubris to think, someday,
we will use these tool-making hands
and these lie-telling hearts
to see without obscurity into
the sanctity of other minds and break
even the holy laws of Time
and travel into our own devastating
past to mess around with things
all over again and then build ships
that will fly to far-off places
with stars in our faces, to encounter
other sentient beings, more aliens
to be wasted, and we’ll probably force
them into doing all that we want
in the name of survival,
and all the while praising ourselves
for being so lucid and aware
and with it and totally freakin’
advanced, because we are the ‘I’
and the ‘Me’ and in first-person
we see ourselves in control
of not only our own wills but
of the will of the universe,
the pioneers of cognition,
the trailblazers of thought,
seeing the opportunity
in everything, and yet being
so completely blind
to all the suffering around us
Garbage Notes:
I was watching a show or something—I think it was one of those murder shows on Netflix. Anyway, that’s besides the point—but I remember one of the investigators being interviewed said something that stood out to me. He had quoted a sociologist named Edward O. Wilson who had an interesting take on our species. Wilson said something like, “Human beings have emotions that are Paleolithic, institutions that are Medieval, and yet we possess technology that is near god-like.”
Now, where am I going with this? It takes me to the first line of my poem. We are all metacognitive creatures, chimpanzees wearing sneakers.
I think this line echoes the irony that as intelligent as we are, with all that we’ve discovered, all the nuanced ways in which we live our lives, the ways in which we’ve advanced society in general—what does it amount to? We are still no more than a great ape wearing fancy footwear.
We have this amazing ability to create infinite levels of abstraction in our lives, in our art, in our narratives, in the way we describe reality itself. So much so that we now actually question whether reality is even real. I mean, there are legitimate scientists out there who have put together equations that lend credence to the theory that we are all living in a simulation.
It’s wild to me that the same exact creatures, with the same-sized skulls, filled with the same mushy-ass goo, who were sitting around the campfire millions of years ago, grunting, and just starting to figure out that it’s good to cook your meat before you chew it, are now capable of peeling back the layers of time and space, of traveling to other planets, of trying to read minds, of considering time travel even, and god knows what else.
Yet with all that said, we still act like fucking babies. We still hurt one another’s feelings. We still kill one another literally and figuratively all the time—we crush one another’s dreams. We deprive others of basic essentials needed to be happy. We are just fucking cruel. And that’s because as smart as we’ve become, we are still limited in our perspective. Our emotional hardware is still the same as those cavemen. And just a shade more mature than the chimpanzee or the gorilla.
I like the line, ‘we are the pioneers of cognition, the trailblazers of thought’. It’s something to be proud of, sure. Being the first creatures on earth to think certain thoughts, to invent such magnificent tools—the automobile, the plane, the internet, and the cell phone. And then of course we ruin it with the creation of social media and dumb AI and all the other things that seem on the face of it to be powerful tools for societal advancement, but somehow end up being shit because we’ve tapped more into the unhealthy aspects of it rather than the parts that can actually help us come together and grow as a civilization.
We have so much automation, and yet we still force most people to work pointless jobs that make them miserable and unhappy and barely provide them with enough income to sustain themselves.
We have the ability to talk to one another instantaneously across vast distances, and yet we are lonelier and more disconnected than ever.
We have secured immense material wealth and resources and yet most of the planet is still poor and struggling and dying.
We have scientists—biologists and psychologists—who have come to understand the immense intelligence and sentience of our fellow animals—and yet we are still responsible for the greatest era of extinction that this planet has ever seen.
When will it stop? When will the big brained metacognitive creatures finally figure it out? When will we reach a point in our history where Earth itself is no longer afraid of us?
I don’t know. I don’t have a single clue. But I think about this stuff a lot. And the questions and concerns go on—but, anyway, these are just some of the issues I was wrestling with at the core of this poem.
Franco Amati 2024
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I don't have a clue either and I think about it a lot too and perhaps that is why we are poets, making sense of what our "juice filled cameras" see by poetic means.
"our own eyes are just juice filled cameras"
Fabulous!