Letter from an Elder

Dear Humans,

Hi, hi. It’s Ned, again. Seems to be just me, these days. Haven’t heard from Francesca, or anyone else. What did we use to say, “dance like no one is watching”? So here’s a little soft-shoe—the truth can’t hurt us now. How sad that we once thought it could; told early enough it might have saved us.

Or maybe we have been saved, too soon to tell. Obviously I miss the technology and the speed, traveling and inventions, the way teenagers were finding simple cures for quickly mutating viral diseases. I miss that direction, sure. I miss movies and weddings, office-pals, my grandma, my kids, buying what I wanted. I even miss saving up to buy what I wanted. I miss anticipation, goals. Interminable dance recitals that no one watched because they were recording them on devices.

We were quite literally gunning for our own extinction, it now seems obvious. If not by pandemic, or self-inflicted extreme climate events, or border/nation hysteria, gleefully murderous cops and presidents and dictators, the infinite variations of pollution and cruelty and deliberate ignorance—we threw children in prison, we let them be sold—and who was “we”? we wonder, now that we are no longer us.

But nothing dehumanized us like the guns. The endless guns in anybody’s hands were always someone else’s fault. Every trigger finger pointed at someone else, in a war against someone else. We hated anyone we thought wasn’t like us, but of course we were all like us. We hated ourselves. We chose evil, elected it, protected it, let it maim the animals, steal the land, drop the bombs, poison the water, terrorize the children, fund the greedy, and squander every last chance.

We let guns kill our children on a daily basis. Who are we to say the Octopodes did anything worse? They’re an ink species. They overwrote us. They dissembled our guns by dissolving our systems in the middle of our own shoot-out. What we thought was gun smoke was ink cloud. The writing was never on the wall, it was in the water. Our names, like Keats’s, writ there.

Of course they’ll never understand us. Have we ever understood us? We were the humans, a bafflement of evolution: most species evolve to live; we devolved to evil. Most infinitesimal specks get squashed by a much bigger foot, and maybe we’re not the only dot of a species to die of its own self-hatred, but we are rare. We were rare. The lovely planet may be salvaged with our extinction—I won’t live to know, but it would be some last light.

I cling to this because to hope for this earth to go on after we’re gone is the only kind of love left—the last good human piece of us. That some of our ether, soul, spirit, wishes, vibrations might linger here. That some form of hope can stay, with or without us.

And if not, maybe the Octopodes will care to find some form to remember us by. In case that is the case, I am collecting fragments—scraps I find here and there in script or print, among the debris, mostly anonymous ephemera and some poetry, which surprises me. I didn’t think we wrote poetry much anymore.

I remain available, for now, at my new address.

Ned Grimley-Groves

(formerly of New Hampshire)

Salinization Pod #11298 N.E.