an Earthanity • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	preface: being of the play

	an Earthanity gary e. davis	December 19, 2020

I daydream, therefore I’m that free.

Casual tourist, my story may be long.

In any event, being in time: Some daze goes by. A postcard from a century ago turns up in someone’s late summer mail of 2020, like a forgotten love letter
in an old paperback of a deceased’s library sold to a used books store.

Remember our café plays those days of Literary-theoretical importance, Kathryne?

Now, laughter becomes medicine against a December day returning year after year.

So here we are: a fifth of the way through another century, unique in its way.

Who’s to be, when one exclaims “God be with us” among neighbors in some daze against good sense?

So another season of plague invites words of uncanniness, defensive pretense, resignation, and echoes of all the intelligence that becomes part of the winds.

So much flowering is never seen. But the plague year makes martyrs of otherwise little known, easily forotten lives that were sacred in their own ways, warranting
a monument to the unknown, the unlucky, the complacent.

Reason to live!—thus to take care: There will be café plays again, as if life is your talk show, striving for depth. You can be a theater of truth.

Reason to live!: letting innate curiosity play freely—like: Why is the perfected intelligence of a housefly complacent about the quickness of your swat?
Our best robotics can’t match it.

Days go by, calling for reliable intuition and thankfulness.

Days go by, reflecting the singularity of a still flowering life.

Even a life of four score and six years can begin to blog.

Selecting flowers can be versatile.

Selecting flowers, voicing one’s play of being, as if only fiction can make sense
of idiopathic life.

One flies. One strives to keep others alive.

We’re the Anthropocene! Or maybe not (if you’re into conceptual scientificity).
But fossils tell the fate of flowering life. And 16 million tons of microplastic on ocean floors tell the story of human complacency.

The Amazon mirrors a dismal future of Our exploiting and destroying nature
on an unprecedented scale: Our heirs could live poor, nasty, brutish, and
short lives in an empty world.

So, the horizon call of being born again is about at least “a revolution in education and work.”

Future shock is to be forever, as our form of life seems on the way to post-humanity: “Drug reverses age-related mental decline within days.”
“Scientists…restore age-related vision loss through epigenetic reprogramming.”
So, can one learn to love flowering for, say, 150 years?

A.I. may conquer pathogenic social networking to vastly advance democratic trending toward making Earthanity more literally a global village of humanity (humanistic, humanitarian, and humane worldliness of being). So, can one learn
to love being planetary?

“Starman just made another flyby of Mars in [an Elon Musk] Roadster.”
His daddy’s girlfriend, Grimes, wants you to get more sleep.

Perseverence lands on Mars mid-February. Scientists say they’ve found a way
to make oxygen on the planet. Welcome a permanent season of terraforming imaginability (preferrably better than warlordy nostalgia for monarchal conflict).

Apparently, the evolving global commonwealth will speak largely English—not “globlish,” please. (In Beijing, the Chinese Constitution is carved into the Supreme Court’s courtyard stone walls in English.)

We want
good
social ecology.

Does futural gravity of desire for ecologically flourishing humanity call
for conceptions of ecopsychality, for sustainably belonging in the ecogeny
of Our evolving?

A valid conception of wholly flourishing life calls for mindfulness devoted
to prospects for ecologically flourishing humanity.

The necessary belonging together in the same planetary promise of the distantly unborn calls for conceiving empathic care’s horizon now to self-identify with
the ecogenic interest of humanity, paying forward better than our ancestors did, indeed doing as well as they could, sacrificing and suffering for conceptions
of better futures for their children.

The unborn speak the chilling truth of the black and starry night: Our pale blue dot is all the Heaven there is.

We can be ecogenically historical or not. The Earth doesn’t care. But also,
the Earth doesn’t know that it needs the intelligence that It evolved, like the gods
we evolved—and teleology We conceived to mirror our aspirations—those gods: child-like personifications of desire to know.

We know that we must eventually move to another planet. How many beings Out There have already done that, but stay Silent because planets must evolve their own way?

We know that the Andromeda Galaxy will eventually bring billions more stars
into intersection with the Milky Way.

We’ll soon know whether or not there are other universes beyond our physics
(the Anthropic condition?). Meanwhile, more personification gives solace
in the face of there being anything at all.

Days go by.

A gentle song somewhere transcends the air as if one’s spirit is flying.

Jupiter and Saturn are about to align again, after 800 years.

I daydream, “as if a mind destines itself for solitude (and distant intimacies through inwordness),…” (2011).

I’m flighty, audacious, transgressive,… elated, conceptual, sometimes conceptual eros (and haunted), ethical, artful…

There’s no ending, just: one day, or night, never to know I stopped.