Pilgrimages: Miilba, Jerusalem, Mistake
Qpoetry chapbook cover art Christine Sharp
Part 2
‘Bring signs, banners, music and your love’. It’s eleven, I should be
at the forest demo protesting logging in Mistake State Forest.
More than half of forest / woodland in this State are gone, and
what’s left is much degraded. We are still destroying all habitats.
Instead, I’m writing this, feeling crook as well as guilty,
reading William Blake who saw angels in a tree as a child.
Acquitted of sedition, Blake returned to London and began work on ‘Milton a Poem’. (‘Jerusalem’ is found in the preface to this ‘prophetic book’). And his most ambitious work, ‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’. Golgonooza, his mythical Anglo Jerusalem of art and science in harmony, lives in both poems. His apocalyptic writings parallel mainstream religions and doomsday cults, but what’s certain is that global warming will cause misery, deaths and extinctions.
Technologies opens the body to more opportunities, but Kurzweil predicts nanorobots will to enable humans to fly like Blake’s angels, to: ‘run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings.’ And what of animals and birds, of those cowering in conflict zones, in famines, those without food, water, shelter or any form of technics?
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With A.I., Viking, 2024.
