45s on 33 – #100: “My Prerogative”

As a human, it’s my prerogative to assume civilized superiority over even my own sensory perceptions. After all, humans made jukebox, not just one but armies of them, scattered throughout the civilized world. We had the ability to take bits and pieces of this and that in the natural world, reshape it, configure it together, and manufacture the existence of jukeboxes. We still do – though tiny little electronic devices with trace amounts of minerals from one continent, trace amounts of ingenuity from other continents, assembled together on even another continent, and then sold throughout the universe. Even if the spiritual aspect of earth dominion has been abandoned in most of our minds, we still seem (it seems) to possess a scientific as well as manufacturing dominion over the earth. We can definitely make some shit. None of it is simple, as we are very effective creatures in taking the complex intertwinings of natural biosphere, separating out components and then reconfiguring them through overly complicated procedures into bold new creations which do things like spin etched pieces of wax vinyl that when you have a special (overly complicated) needle poked into, it makes sounds which when filtered through a giant box are than amplified into loud sounds which recreate original recordings done somewhere way the fuck away on space-time continuum.

So despite the overly complicated often times self-serving complications of human manufacturing creation, it remains my prerogative to assume initially my species is the number one species, because ain’t no species like a human being species since a human being species don’t stop. We make all kinds of amazing shit, which we deem amazing because we are amazed by it in our simplistic overly-complicated ways, but also we did it. Not nature, but us.

Except where does nature end and we begin? When you analyze our overly complicated ways, at what point does the complication step from natural to manmade in that nature vs. man equation (of which religion gave us dominion over, as science does now)? Is it the separation of raw components? Probably not, because simply having coltan dug out the earth from deep in the Congo alone does not make it unnatural. What about after the raw rocks are crushed and separated in simplistic enough means this can be done near the scarred pits where it is harvested, and additional chemicals are added to create new chemical compound tantalum? This certainly seems complicated enough to not seem natural? Or perhaps once the tantalum is created, so to speak, and then used as a small tantalum capacitor – a tiny but powerful integral piece of all our new-fangled human handheld computerized robot talking devices? This certainly seems to cross the lines from natural to magic, designed by the minds of us super monkeys, to the point we have to be given credit. What other species on this planet would not only separate a rock into a substance to help make a tiny doohickey even more powerful, and then combine this with a slew of other similarly overly complicated pieces, send them all to a corner of our planet where there are people who simultaneously smart enough to slap them together according to instructions but also still simplified enough (natural) to do it as cost effectively as possible? Each little robot phone we all have is an amazing testament to the magical ability of us humans to manufacture something nearly immortal by all humane matrices.

And yet the irony of our mad minds – also having created mythology and the story of Tantalus, with his unsustainable desires, standing in water beneath a fruit tree for eternity, never able to reach the fruit, and never able to drink the water. Tantalus, according to mythology, was the offspring of one god and one mortal. And if you think of man vs. nature in religious dominion sense, we were given that eminent domain due to our being created in fake god’s image, over all of nature. We are, similar to  Tantalus (although we made him up), the offspring of god and nature together. But certainly we get to taste the fruit and drink the water, unlike doomed Tantalus. Right?