Everything dies.
My personal history has made me a race traitor, gender traitor, sexual preference traitor, nationalism traitor: I prefer to be a person, not a citizen of any restricted airspace.
I view my own demise, that of my nation, my planet, my kind with a sort of melancholy equanimity--inevitable, and inevitably underscoring how much breath and time we waste.
I can identify more largely with life in general than our kind, but it seems no instance or class of it will continue forever, and life itself one day must pass from our universe, I suspect.
James Dickey has a wonderful meditation on extinction. Here is an excerpt--I couldn't maintain his freewheeling stanza forms here, since spaces are redacted, so check the original for the beauty of it hot:
from "For the Last Wolverine"
But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching
Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton's internal fire
the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the "blind swallowing
Thing," with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty
Non-survivor.
Lord, let me die
but not die
Out.
™ Version 4.2
