The most far-reaching community. Every nonhuman being, as much as, perhaps more than, every human being, has something to teach us, if only that our attempts to humanize everything are more than ill-founded, they are pernicious: nonhuman beings don’t say it to our faces as we beg them to, but still face us, and thereby say more than all our chattering and tomes throughout all history combined, something that puts us on the same playing field and makes us play by the same rules. Even if their numbers are dwindling–dwindling at past-alarming rates, dwindling so fast we can’t keep up, we can’t even learn of our fellow earthly ones before the last of them falls and is lost to sand and time and rock and mud and water–they are everywhere, and that says enough: it says Enough, human, you terrorizer! Don’t forget about the microbe, don’t forget about the smallest of us! With a cough, or with a dull ache found inside the head of the first patient, patient zero, the human face you projected, not only all over the earth and not only to the moon, so that that rock too has a face, but everywhere, that face of yours, grinning for such a long time so short to anyone but you, could be made to gasp, could be made to gasp and disappear. That is, we look all around and inspect, whether through the windowpane or the microscope, whether behind the bars of the cage forlorn after protracted rage, and we see them, we see them all and they say to us something like a mood, something of a tone, that strikes once before we get back to human business, teach of something about the most far-reaching community.
Love the Dust 