ALEXANDER
WOLFE
Musing The Second
I am asked, by those to whom I am introducing the Voices for the first time, if I have a “favorite,” or if the Voices have ever done anything that has upset me, or other questions of that nature. They generally mean well, and questions are always accepted and wanted, that's how we learn after all, but it can make me sad occasionally too, because it seems like a great misunderstanding of what exactly we're doing here. It's nobody's fault, it's simply my life's work, and so I tend to be very prideful about it, to a fault occasionally.
My duty, our duty really but my duty especially, is not to enjoy the Voices. It's not to be entertained by what's happening on that distant “Other Earth”. These are people, and they are being given to us naked and shivering and in pain. This is the hardest thing to get through to so many people, because so many people still see this as nothing more than entertainment. A joke, or a story, or an art piece or something like that. Something to fill the day, when in reality it is our path to the future. Our only path to the future.
Are these stories entertaining? Yes, they can be. Humans are always moved by stories, whether they are being told or lived in front of us. The important thing is the ability to see beneath that top layer and to realize that what we are being shown, essentially, is life. Humanity is being given the chance to look at itself in a fun-house mirror, only instead of making us fat or tall or whatever, it's showing us what might've happened. What still might happen, in it's own way. Humanity finally paved it's own road to hell with good intention and innovation, and something out there, in space and time and everything else, is giving us the chance to see and learn from it.
The Voices are people, and we should not forget that.
We gather to train our hearts and minds on PEOPLE.
PEOPLE call and we hear them.
PEOPLE are hurt and we accept their pain.
HUMANITY is at its end, and we will carry it on in our memory.
As people we spend so much of our lifetime looking for things. Always peeking under the rock, or opening another book, or trekking through a cave. Not individuals, you understand, they are lazy most of the time, but the species as a whole. I wonder quite often if that's the thing that sets us apart from other life. Honest curiosity, without the possibility of gain besides knowledge. A beast left alone will not seek out a cave randomly and map it out and squeeze through holes so tight that if the Earth shifted a centimeter they would be trapped forever. The animals may inhabit this place, yes, but they do it out of necessity and not curiosity. They may need food or water or shelter or something like that, but it's always a physical need, and not our need. Our need is the need to know.
It's impossible, I think, to contemplate the Voices without also contemplating what we might become, if we heed their words. Much like imagining colors that haven't been seen before, it seems like a fool's errand, suitable only for meditation in a Buddhist Temple, but like those colors, it still exists. The amount of color cones in a species of shrimp in the ocean is something like double the number we have. It can see guess and shades that our finest painters and most maniacal psychedelic drug abusers could only dream of, but they still exist. Likewise, our transformation as a species is not only a pipe dream, but a solid and possible reality.
If asked for my two cents on it, which I grant I may not be, I would at least hope that we get to bring with us the knowledge of our past. It would be a great shame to lose our art and technology, the things we created in our infancy, just because we've advanced beyond. Somehow though, I doubt that we'd lose anything. The Voices are something of a parent to us, I think, and most parents I know tend to keep their children's drawings, for both of them to look back on, smile, and exclaim, "look how far you've come!" I hope so, at least. I don't have all the answers, I've just spent more time wrestling with the questions.