Because Life

Originally published on Tumblr.

I love the malleability of language, especially English. I love that Twitter, Facebook updates, and our newfound desire for short emails have unleashed a poetic resurgence impossible to predict just 30 years ago.

Romantic poetry was the last hurrah for the art form, the poets of WWI its dying gasp. Poetry was dead, the product of a civilization against procreation, the product of the old, the lonely, and the marginal.

How wrong we turned out to be.

Today we’re surrounded by poets. Men and women of action, creators, business people, reducing myriad ideas and feelings to their essence. An avalanche of words full of golden nuggets. Eternal and transformative.

But there’s a sharp break from the self-conscious observation of the Nineteenth century poet. Todays poets think they’re something else. They’re engineers, designer, and salesmen, writing poetry just because. (Maybe the soldiers, rather than last gasp, were the first full-throated cry of this new era.)

We saw signs twenty years ago: Haiku contests on Usenet. Haikus written by programmers. Of course. Same impulse. The elegant, the terse, the inspired. Our thoughts reduced. Expanded.

Then we paused. Was it dead? I thought so, until social media reignited that tiny flame. The poetic blaze that surrounds us today is so pervasive that most of us don’t even notice it. It’s so close we can’t see it. Part of the data fabric that surrounds us. Part of a new humanity that’s emerging, quietly, amongst the turmoil of technology-driven change.

The paradox is startling. All our fears were misplaced. Art is the greatest byproduct of the supposedly sterile, soulless revolution.

George Washington said that he was a soldier so that his son could be a farmer so that his son could be a poet. He imagined that the riches of farming were necessary for the emergence of a poet. He imagined that a poet could only write because he didn’t need to worry about the crass concerns of sustenance.

But he turned out to be wrong. The poet has emerged strongest from a culture full of activity and consideration for creation. In the most unexpected places we find wisdom and beauty. We find it in a tweet. We find it in a blog post. We find it in emails, as an afterthought, the incongruous contrast to otherwise practical communication.

This is by far the most creative period our species has ever known, the very opposite of what so many 19th and 20th Century thinkers predicted. It would be surprising if we weren’t surprised.

The corollary is a reemergence of spiritual consideration that is more than surprising. It’s shocking. And I suspect that what we’re witnessing today is merely a Haiku contest. This is a the start of a re-examination of our ancient religions, a re-examination of our shared humanity, and re-examination of our specie’s relationship with all the others.

But with all that, with all that activity, all that boil, we face a risk. We’re moving faster. We’re sometimes disconnecting from our neighbors, and bumping into others. This is exciting, often positive, but also dangerous. Like molecules in a gas, we touch a billion neighbors until, suddenly, we’re all alone.

Community is fragile. Too strong, and it dies a frozen death. Too weak, and it dissipates into nothingness. I don’t know what to make of this, but I think it’s important.

Because community. Because life. Because love.