Intelligent Life
written by: Wortley Clutterbuck
“Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche.
I think I am, therefore I am
oblivious, just like a clam;
I’m minding business, all my own —
an unexamined life, unknown;
intelligent life does exist
if asking a psychologist
but what I’ve seen don’t seem too smart
because we’re brainwashed from the start.
There’s beings on this planet who
I stopped trying to relate to;
somebody who’s a vertebrate
will not always reciprocate;
so are my neighbors neighbors, or
some lifeforms I should best ignore?
I gave humanity a chance
but I prefer my friends, the plants.
My reasoning is rather fine
but there’s a lot more that is mine;*
supposedly the tree outside
knows more than me, and barely tried;
someday it just might come to pass
we’ll build machines that run on grass;
while having brains is very grand,
some things I choose not understand.
* – “I quite naturally want to live in order to satisfy all my faculties and not my reasoning faculty alone, that is to say, only some twentieth part of my capacity for living.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground.
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