okay i did not think this through
hey folks i have two stories for you today on the theme things to hold close the first one is about
a secret i found in an old wikipedia article i hope you'll stick around for both enjoy the show
You won’t find my favourite poem in a book, or a journal, or a magazine.
Nowadays, you won’t find it anywhere - it doesn’t exist anymore,
at least not as I first found it. That’s because the poem was part of a Wikipedia
article - specifically, the one for “Fermi Paradox”. The scientific question that asks,
“If the universe is so big and so old, why haven’t we found life on other planets?”
The nature of Wikipedia means this poem has been worn away over the years,
replaced one line at a time, until unrecognisable.
I happened across the poem in 2016, in the brief moment it was intact. It caught my eye right away,
so I took a screenshot, that's been sitting on my desktop ever since. As far as I know,
I’m the only person who ever took note of this poem - no other copies seem to exist
outside the WayBack Machine - but it’s too good to keep a secret any longer. Here it is.
Hypothetical explanations for the paradox: Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent
No other intelligent species have arisen Intelligent alien species lack advanced technology
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
Periodic extinction by natural events Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument
Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time
It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy
Human beings have not existed long enough Humans are not listening properly
Civilizations broadcast detectable radio signals only for a brief period of time
They tend to alienate themselves
Everyone is listening, no one is transmitting Earth is deliberately not contacted
Earth is purposely isolated It is dangerous to communicate
They are here undetected They are here unacknowledged
Now, you might be thinking: Lily, you’re pulling your usual schtick again.
This isn’t a poem, it’s a table of contents. If that’s you, hear me out! Reading this as a
poem isn’t some arbitrary choice I’m making. It practically begs for it.
You’ve got a bunch of short lines, each with its own idea.
It’s kind of implicitly broken into stanzas. What really gets me, though, is the tone of the thing.
It's subtle, but the tone is totally different from what you’d usually find on Wikipedia.
You probably know that Wikipedia strives to be a neutral source without any one perspective.
And nine times out of ten, this is a good rule to have: you don’t want a record of war
written from the viewpoint of the aggressors, or a startup’s page written by its founders.
If you encourage that, you end up with a platform full of distortions and half-truths.
But you might not know just how far they take this commitment. Contributors can’t
use first-person pronouns like “I” or “we”, even when a statement applies to every possible reader;
the whole human species. Contributors can't describe humans by saying,
“We live on planet earth”, they have to say
“They live on planet earth”, as if the writer is a detached observer, and not… you know, a human.
In the case of the Fermi paradox, this “no perspective” thing runs up against its limits.
I mean, it’s an article about how earth might be the only source of life in the universe. Obviously
a human wrote it. But still, the article uses this distant, detached third-person language.
It feels kind of dishonest, actually. In describing it so plainly, the editors are
dodging what makes the Fermi paradox so famous in the first place. I mean, we have thousands
of unsolved questions in science, and nearly none this famous. This one is the exception,
not because it’s more important than the rest, but because it’s a question
every person has asked themself before: “Why am I alone? Will I be alone forever?”
Not many scientific ideas translate so naturally into human terms. You don’t need a background in
anything to understand why no life existing outside of earth
is a terrifying proposition. The Fermi paradox taps into an anxiety we as humans share - we
need there to be something out there, and if there isn’t, we need to make sense of that.
Maybe science can help us reconcile this existential horror. We steel ourselves
and approach the paradox head-on. We state our theories coldly, in as few words as possible:
“Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent No other intelligent species have arisen”
We try to sound detached as we throw these ideas out there. Nothing is tentative in the phrasing,
it’s not “life may be rare”, it’s “life is rare”. It’s almost convincing at first,
but then the lines just… keep coming. Another idea, then another, then another,
nearly 20 in all. It becomes clear that despite our cool disposition,
we’re grasping at straws here, desperate for an answer but not even close.
And sure, any of these lines could prove to be true, but I didn’t come to this page for
the right answer, anyway - I came to find one that made sense to me, that gelled with my view
of the world. I wonder if the people who wrote this article found comfort in speculation, too.
I think they must have, because each line has unspoken implications about
us, the human species. They reflect our anxiety around this a much smaller kind of loneliness:
“Humans are not listening properly” means “Humans are not listening properly”, but it also means
“I’m too different to connect with the people around me”. “Earth is deliberately not contacted”
means “Earth is deliberately not contacted”, but it also means, “I’m scared it’s my fault”.
Am I overthinking this? I mean, it’s me, so a little, yeah. This passage obviously wasn’t
meant to be read as deeply as I’m reading it. A table of contents is a utilitarian thing, to be
skimmed on the way to something more important. I don’t think that means it’s not a poem, though.
In my video on AI-generated art, I said, to me, art is mostly about framing. If you can find
beauty in something, and the language of art helps you understand it better, why not call it art?
It feels unlikely that we’re all alone in this universe, but so far, all signs point
in that direction. And if that’s the case, if earth holds the only life that exists anywhere…
all of this is so rare, dude.
Humans, and everything we've created, are a blip in the universe. We’ll be gone in a millisecond,
whether by sudden extinction or incremental replacement. If there’s meaning out there to find,
I think we should try to find it.
Those candies on the floor are art because they make us think about love. This Wikipedia table
of contents is a poem because it shows us humanity peeking through the cracks of an inhuman machine.
If you’re willing to look, signs of life are everywhere.
The field across from my grandmother’s house is bursting with wild thyme.
Hundreds of threads, all tangled in each other, sprawl from the tree line
up to the curb. Tiny purple flowers sprout from the tips. Walking through
the field smells like the dried herb times a hundred, and the stuff’s unbelievably tasty.
I never paid it much attention until the year she died.
From my point of view, her death was so sudden I had trouble making sense of it.
I had all these burning questions I assumed were being deliberately withheld from me: why didn’t I
know she was sick? Why weren’t we invited to the funeral? But thinking about the likely answers
made me too angry to even hold a conversation. I spent the year as a live wire glowing with rage.
In the following months, I grew sick of sitting alone with my thoughts for eight hours a day,
so I quit my video job, and picked up two part-time jobs instead - one as a cook,
the other as a church janitor. I figured physical labor would give me a chance to work out my
frustrations. A couple days a week, I'd pop my earbuds in, blast Car Seat Headrest or something
equally embarrassing, scrub a toilet bowl with inordinate force, and quietly seethe to myself.
It felt awful and looked stupid - I lost a fingertip to a potato-slicing incident, and
more than once, inadvertently made chlorine gas in the church bathroom.
A few months after my grandmother died, we made the seven-hour trek to her
hometown, and spent a week in a little cabin by the river. The town is home to about 500
people year-round, so as you can imagine, there’s not much to do but
hang out. And while a week of board games and campfires usually sounds great,
that year, the concept was agonizing. A week in town meant a week with the relatives I blamed for
this searing anger. If I sat still, my grief would burn a hole clean through me. I had to get moving.
So I went outside. I walked into the thyme field across from her house,
brought myself to the ground, and got to work.
I brushed aside the dandelions and the clover to get to the good stuff:
the delicate threads of fresh thyme, fragrant and damp with dew. One by one, I plucked them from
the soil, examined them for leaves, and dropped them into an overturned baseball cap at my side.
My mom and partner watched from a picnic bench at the edge of the woods, probably a little confused.
Fair enough. But I hadn’t stopped to question what I was doing. I was totally engrossed
in this task. The world dropped away; it was just my hands, the occasional spider,
and the earth. I picked through the ground-cover for hours, hunched over,
my face eight inches from the ground, until my back couldn’t take it anymore.
My whole body ached, and the mosquitos had absolutely devoured me, so I called it a day.
But as we left, I noticed this stillness inside me that had been missing for a while.
I had no idea why I felt better - I hadn’t answered one of my questions - but I wasn't
in a position to second-guess; over months of helpless thrashing,
this intricate little task was the only thing that brought relief.
When I got back to the cabin, I laid the herbs to dry in a bright windowsill
and actually slept through the night. The next day, I went back for more,
and the day after that, too. And I actually have every year since.
It’s still hard to talk about my grandmother. I worry the wound is too raw for my family.
So in place of commiseration or self-pity, picking thyme has become my own private grief ritual.
And the weird thing is, it's so random! We never talked about the field,
we never spent time there together. But for whatever reason, it helps.
If you’re stuck in a rut, and nothing else is working, maybe give it a shot.
Stick your face in the dirt. Get eaten alive. Remind your body there are other sources of pain.
Even if it doesn’t do much for you, fresh thyme goes with everything.
do you know maurice sendak the author who wrote where the wild things are?
i feel kind of silly even asking that because he was so ubiquitous in my childhood
i devoured anything with his name on it sendak had a pretty unique take on the world especially for a
picture book author he didn't think childhood was this thing to be cherished and protected
actually he thought it was a kind of disgusting time brash and dirty and traumatic in sendak's
books monsters gnash their terrible teeth and men bake boys into cake and kids live in the actual
garbage and all of it is so much fun it's such a brave approach to writing especially for kids
there is power to find here there is release we can't run from the ugliness in the world but we
can learn to find whimsy in it i learned a lot of this from the documentary tell them anything you
want which is a little portrait of sendak in his late 70s it's honestly a great watch sendak was
really funny and it's directed by spike jones of all people do you have any advice for young people
quit this life as soon as possible get out get out i feel like more people should know about
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