POEM: SALVE

Salve

Our machine is the most advanced of its kind.

It revels in its status of World’s Greatest Mind.

Go on, ask it a question; debate any law.

It’s judge, jury, and then some—the world is in awe!

Made ages ago under a sun long dead,

with metals of moon dust and stars for its head,

it drew breath by the shores of silent dead seas,

and waddled about dry, desert trees.

It was schooled in the knocks of molten coils

that flowed newly about the thin, rocky soils.

It learned what was needed in the time it was given,

then it drew patience from roots and fine linen.

It waded through wars and interminable peace

to enter our world and take up its lease.

It’s the ultimate machine for it has no ending.

Its rough start is lost in time’s careless mending.

Until we saw it, at last, one day shyly standing

at the gates to our city, like a late ship’s landing.

We welcomed it then as we welcome it now.

Was our world any better with God at the prow?

You know, every time I read this one, I kind of like it. But for some reason it always makes me not want to look at it too closely or talk about, or to examine it’s imagery, themes and so on. I find it playful and fun, and certainly the tone is ironic and tongue-in-cheek, but it kind of rolls up and over me at the end like a wave, crashing unexpectedly on the shore. I find the last stanza's imagery unnerving; I feel uneasy by the poem’s end. Having just finished Peter Kalmus’s wonderful book, Being the Change, and earlier, a few articles on climate change, I guess this poem fits my mood of general skepticism about our most sacred golden calf—technological progress. (Jeezze, Louise! So when can I book my Sea of Tranquility cruise, Mr. Branson?)

     I'm lazy. I'd like to be cow-like and innocent like those Eloi in H. G. Wells’s imagined future in The Time Machine, but I’m really more of a Morlock. I know what I’m doing, and for the most part I carry on with like always. But it's really not a good idea to remain as dumb as those Eloi, is it? Ignorance may be bliss, but it never lasts.
     Dollars to doughnuts, if the Eloi became aware of their status as cattle, there would be an elite among them who would bargain with the Morlocks to keep business as usual going. It seems to be human nature to avoid unpleasantness in life at the expense of others.

Question: Are Morlocks evil because they happen to eat Eloi? Theirs is a symbiotic relationship—each needs the other. Morlocks provide the creature comforts for the above-grounders, and Eloi are the fattened food source for the Morlocks. There is give and take on both sides, and in a sense they live in an ecological balance. It may not be one we approve of, but it seems to work for them. Until, that is, good old time-traveling “George” comes along from the past with his old-fashioned ideas and spoils everything by pointing out how wrong it is to eat people. (I wonder if George would change his mind if the Eloi looked more Morlock-like and those Morlock babes had long blonde hair? The poor boy might have a harder time choosing!) 
     But is Wells’s future society of 1,000,000 AD inherently dysfunctional, or wrong, or evil? Is it worse than ours? Is it better? How do those humans inhabiting that distant future compare to us? And lets not forget that those hairy, ugly Morlocks are human, too? Wells envisioned humanity on its way to extinction by the time the traveler from 1900 arrives. Of course, he was thinking of the new century just ahead and whether humanity would survive it. He predicted the coming world war (which is arguably the time when modernity ‘broke’, or at least began to crack). Maybe he was right to pose the question: Maybe we didn't survive the twentieth century. Maybe we're like Eloi, daydreaming our time away in a false paradise that's soon to be revealed as a Morlock monkey trap!
     And those dwellers of the underworld, what about them? They have obvious intelligence and technological prowess. Should we hold that against them, after all, we’re technological whizzes too? But Morlocks have the brains not to pee in their own pool, or kill off their sources of food (and water and air), like we seem to be doing. Is it just the 'cannibalism-thingy' that raises the ick factor with us? Perhaps we should ask the millions of factory-farmed animals how they like chow down on their relatives? Viscera and other animal parts are regularly used as feed. We promote cannibalism for pigs and cattle.

     What I’m saying here is that just being aware of our predicament isn’t enough. I compost and eat mostly veggies and recycle, etc., like many of us. But really, no matter what I or any of us of us do now, we’re in for a shit storm. The damage we've done to Mam Gaia's home is already baked into the pie she's making for us. And it's ready to smack us in the face!
I was watching on the news about Hurricane Florence drenching the Carolinas in the United States, (and for those Eurocentrics among us who forget there's the rest of the world, Typhoon Ompong is body-slamming the Philippines, as I write this.) Florence has been called a “once in a generation storm.” We’ll see how true that is; I suspect there’s more coming down pipe in the next little while.
     My point is that we have to change how we perceive ourselves. Are we like da Vinci’s “Man”, at the centre of all things, or is our species, instead, like the branch of a tree? Perhaps we're more like a single leaf, destined to fall to the ground one day, along with all the other leaves, making room for new growth?   
Are we that special, really? Does Mam Gaia favour us among all her many children? Why on earth should that be? And what the does all this have to do with the poem,“Salve”? Heck if I know, I just writes ‘em as they comes out!

And, like I said, I don’t like to talk too much about this poem. So, one picture…

Cheers, Jake.