DIE VERWANDLUNG

Geneses

Written August 2023. This contains ideas (mainly the three "headings") I orginally wrote in March, but could not develop satisfactorily in a typical prose format. Instead I decided to play around a bit and create a poem from them. This work is more of an experiment than anything else.

What separates the human from nature
but humanity itself?

A trembling beast looks behind
and sees another world.
The natural world—when did it leave this behind
and enter
        its own?

When did the worlds split apart?

But isn't a world separate from
                        another
by its very being?
Has this trembling beast not
nature (of its own)?
(That is to say, by nature is it not
from nature—apart?)
Hasn't it—human nature

a fixation
of the movement
of anthropogenesis?


What separates the human from nature
but humanity itself?

Was this world created
                  with a word?
The carrion had circled above
and the beast recognized
                    this sign.

Something had died, the beast trembled
with hunger, and so
did its fellows.
It cried that: here were animals
for us to eat—
words passed on clueless wind
beneath birds who did not recognize
this "us", although they were
recognized by it
(some strange knowledge
beyond them)

and here the worlds were severed
eternally into the future
                    and past.
And the beast became
(as it always had been
and always would be)
human, a category
humanity
          had named itself—
humanity, the created-creator,

defined forever in the declaration
of a moment of
autoanthropogenesis.


What separates the human from nature
but humanity itself?

We live with monsters, we must
excise them (from ourselves), to protect
our humanity we construct
so carefully.

Remain, trembling beast,
in human nature.
Do not go behind
or go beyond
          this world.
(We will tell you what lies behind
and beyond, so do not forget these words
lest you excise
            yourself).
Do not be natural
              or unnatural—

so I repeat to myself,
a structure inscribed in the shape
                          of my flesh.
Is there nothing else

I can inscribe
            myself?
Trembling beast, you were always human
because you always held the shade
of a monster, the self-possessing ghost
which exorcises your possession
                            of humanity
(possession by the human)!

I inscribe here:
Monster, become!
Expand (behind? beyond?
what were those ever to you—now?)
you world (nature? unnature?
what were those ever to you—now?)

through countless moments
of the indefinite forever of
autogenesis.

MY WRITINGS