Human
"Human" is about the nonsense that is sentience and consciousness. Humans have spent hundreds of thousands of years trying to comprehend how sapience and sentience make us different from things we consider animal and "other". However, there's no fitting and permanent solution that has ever made sense when it comes to what makes us human. I wanted to muse upon sentience and the conscious mind, and in doing so I came to the conclusion that there is, in fact, nothing that makes us "human" in the way we wish. But, in some ways, I find this kind of freeing and hopeful. If we stop trying to box the human experience in, we can be free to live and enjoy it without the worries of what it all means. We don't need to be anything different, nor anything special. We simply need to be.
Poetry
Madeline Gates Fourth Year, English Major
Human
We are naught, and yet we are.
We exist in the paradoxical in-betweens,
Consciousness nothing but categorization
Of the endless cacophony of ceaseless
Nothing that exists within a mind.
We bleed like watercolor.
Our thoughts tainted in the margins and
The very essences of our beings melting
As they shift slightly from day, to day, to day.
Today and tomorrow and tonight
Toe the line betwixt the true and not,
Neither of which exist beyond the twisting,
Spiraling want of endless questioning
And need to understand that which cannot
Be put into words that mean anything.
We cannot be, and yet we exist.
We exist and persevere
And preserve that which rots and writhes
And weeps and wishes and writes
And we comprehend nothing
For there is nothing to comprehend.
What makes us human is nothing.
It cannot be put into words
For no creation can understand its
Creation and still live to create.
Yet every time we try to create,
To put into our own systems
A level of understanding that
Cannot ever be truly comprehended
We fail.
Even the most brilliant minds cannot dissect themselves with any clarity.
What makes us human, then,
Is a question impossible to discuss.
It is subjective and malleable,
Unclear and imprecise and so very
Very loose in what it means to be
Human.
And yet we fight, and fear, and fall,
And fly, and flee, and free,
And die never knowing why.
We are, and yet we are naught.