“This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.” (Shakespeare)
Prospero’s admission is ours: we’re creators of monsters.
Still, it took longer perhaps than it should have, our
self-destruction. We’d been trying for so long. Typical,
you say when I mention it: typical of humanity, to
not even get that part right. In Nepal I watched
climbers prepare to conquer the world’s highest peak,
eager to leave garbage and bodies behind if need be.
You laughed. We are outdoing ourselves here, you said;
the mountain has always been there—only humans
felt the need to subdue it and are shocked when we
cannot. We shouldn’t be surprised: the animals
have always known. They feel cold, wind, merciless
heat with no complaint. They watch us running
too fast, running too late, running out of everything:
clean water, forests, fossil fuels. Compassion. And even
nature, red in tooth and claw, looks on in horror at
our gleeful self-destruction. A wolf will chew off a leg
caught in a trap to free itself, the courage of survival: it
knows. Violence is familiar, expected, understood. But
never embraced. We’re the only ones who love it. We revel
in war, in rape, in torture, in death. We know our way
around the badlands, dark spaces lonely, abandoned,
on the margins: places where we sense harm has been
done, where anguish is trapped. We have trapped it
there, violated bodies dumped without ceremony,
screams echoing through forests whose creatures look
on in bewilderment, and I have to wonder what they
think of us all, of our violence, of our greed, their
wisdom greater than ours, honed by centuries of life
in a world now being destroyed by our upstart race. Why
they never rose up against us, when they still could, to
save the world, to save themselves:
I have questions to ask the coyotes.