The first cause, infinite and unknowable, is revealed within the recesses of our consciousness in this irreconcilable and illuminated divorce of self and other. The tear lights at the edge of the black hole, the rest spilling out into the expanse of what is seen and yet to be seen. This is our home, this is the reach of our perception. That perception is prostheticized with curved glass and mirror and the captures of wavelengths yet to be received. Our ancestors looked to these same death fires; we too are cave dwellers. Our drawings made in and for the cave will be studied with aging precision.

We The Species are still new to this fresh paint of life coated on top of rock and buried unborn fire. We dig and discover various mass extinction events. Our fortune will be inherited before our project is complete, our project of taming Eden turned into an unending harvest. We are our own magistrate, self-flagellating to gods of commerce and conquest. Our colonizing ideologies are ripe with dangerous and terrorizing confidence.

And even back in the way back whens, in the age of rust and pages, infestation and rough hands, theirs was already just a memory of trees and the birds that nested upon them. They built Babelian machinery, charted a path across the earth, dragging stones and leaving scars and signposts. We inherited their lust for disruptive symmetry, for lawns, and spa memberships. We now cheer on the jockeying space-faring billionaires, sending crude renderings of their boot straps to our tailors, asking for costumes of make believe, for looking to the moons and Mars and the new currency of ether. 

This is not an inherited wisdom. It is not a compounding of progress. We distrust this all out purchase of innovation. We are sick from its bounty. When will we reverse engineer this trajectory of psychological and ecological erosion? When will we allow the toppling of our own imaginations? Allow for the terraforming of suburbs, the grace of the return of the megafauna, the overdue relapse into precognition. May we be humbled by the expansiveness of our unknowing, despite our being forever more always on the other side of silence.