Oh that's @sophiestrand! I thought about adding a bunch of footnotes to this poem, but decided (for now) that poetry is better as an iykyk medium, so I didn't add any. But those lines probably deserve one the most. It's from her post "The Body is an Ecotone" https://sophiestrand.substack.com/p/the-body-is-an-ecotone-8dd
> …it is also interesting to think of our bodies themselves as being ecotones, evolved and molded into being by the tension between the landscapes of the past and the environmental conditions of the future.
>
> We are the flickering bodily shoreline between grassland savannas and boreal forests. Between the forgotten and the yet to come. Evolution moves at so slow a pace that it is hard to comprehend. Genetic traits are selected for not in one generation, but over the course of hundreds of generations. The morphology – the shape and function of our features – are not a bounded subjects. Our physical shape is a verb in a long ecological dialogue, a response to a particular environmental embeddedness. If you can find a niche, a shape that helps you survive and reproduce yourself in a relational context, you pass along your traits to the next generation. Thus, the bodies that emerge, over millions of years, out of this embeddedness are flesh odes to past ecosystems. Your body is a love song to a lost landscape. Your eyes were first developed in the penumbra of the Cambrian explosion, fitting into a seawater niche that they no longer blink through. Your eyes were crafted to see beings that no longer exist. Is the inky iris at the center of your sight an ode to those extinct witnesses? Does your sight, like the spokes and hubs around a wheel, depend on absence? Does it remember that it was developed to see corals? Arthropods? Trilobites? Viridian cyanobacteria growing like dragon skin across the oceans? Further on, our long arms and curved fingers were made for tree climbing, for manipulating vines and branches. Our bodies are the photo-negative of these lost forests.
>
> There was no first human and last monkey-becoming-a-human. There is only one pulsing river of bodily becoming.
a kind of self-aware prophecy critique. “your body is a love letter / to a time, an ecosystem that / no longer exists.” this embodiment slaps hard AF
Oh that's @sophiestrand! I thought about adding a bunch of footnotes to this poem, but decided (for now) that poetry is better as an iykyk medium, so I didn't add any. But those lines probably deserve one the most. It's from her post "The Body is an Ecotone" https://sophiestrand.substack.com/p/the-body-is-an-ecotone-8dd
> …it is also interesting to think of our bodies themselves as being ecotones, evolved and molded into being by the tension between the landscapes of the past and the environmental conditions of the future.
>
> We are the flickering bodily shoreline between grassland savannas and boreal forests. Between the forgotten and the yet to come. Evolution moves at so slow a pace that it is hard to comprehend. Genetic traits are selected for not in one generation, but over the course of hundreds of generations. The morphology – the shape and function of our features – are not a bounded subjects. Our physical shape is a verb in a long ecological dialogue, a response to a particular environmental embeddedness. If you can find a niche, a shape that helps you survive and reproduce yourself in a relational context, you pass along your traits to the next generation. Thus, the bodies that emerge, over millions of years, out of this embeddedness are flesh odes to past ecosystems. Your body is a love song to a lost landscape. Your eyes were first developed in the penumbra of the Cambrian explosion, fitting into a seawater niche that they no longer blink through. Your eyes were crafted to see beings that no longer exist. Is the inky iris at the center of your sight an ode to those extinct witnesses? Does your sight, like the spokes and hubs around a wheel, depend on absence? Does it remember that it was developed to see corals? Arthropods? Trilobites? Viridian cyanobacteria growing like dragon skin across the oceans? Further on, our long arms and curved fingers were made for tree climbing, for manipulating vines and branches. Our bodies are the photo-negative of these lost forests.
>
> There was no first human and last monkey-becoming-a-human. There is only one pulsing river of bodily becoming.