The disturbing inevitability of the human shimmer - Part 2
Please get yourself up to speed by reading part 1 first
There is an uncanny resemblance between VanderMeer’s shimmer and the advancements of human progress.
Think of how a cityscape expands it’s limits. Hectare after hectare of ‘pristine wilderness’ slowly becoming enveloped by a haze of dust and light. Few things that enter return unchanged.
Our boundaries leave only that which we can control. Grand, majestic forests that once rivalled for our dominance left decimated in our wake. Only subordinate species may survive, tolerated for their adornment in parks, kerb sides and along the great arteries that feed our cancerous growth.
Even rock, ancient in its makeup becomes fragmented, reconstituted and made a new. Great structures rise from its remains like fungus on a corpse, harrowing and subjugating the surrounding landscape.
Animals that have existed for too long within the shimmer see their DNA refracted beyond recognition. Domestication is evolution through human selection. What it lacks in creativity, it makes up for in repugnance and cruelty.
The once proud and powerful ruminants of the grassland now stunted and zombified, unable or unwilling to break free of their meagre enclosures. Even the mighty wolf is reduced to an obedient wretch.
Sentient creatures looking on would surely wince in horror at the grotesque mutations we call pets.
Are we the proverbial alien in Vandameers lighthouse?
Does the southern reach trilogy provide for us a mirror, a way for us confront the horror that we inflict upon the world? A horror once again masked by the subversive ignorance we call ‘common sense’.
I’ve begun to wonder about the role of choice in all of this. Can we truly define our future or is time cast with weighted die.
Its considered a mathematical certainty that the universe will end when it reaches its thermal maximum. A state of equilibrium that will see the universe slowly torn apart, divided in to its smallest parts and spread evenly across the void.
Its now thought that ordered and complex systems like life may exist because they actually increase the net disorder of the universe. Systems of dissipation, better at capturing energy than inanimate things.
The human shimmer may simply be a hungrier and more efficient system, better at absorbing the limited resources of this planet, favoured by the die over its ancestral forbear and therefore just in its parricide.
From this point of view the many crimes of humanity would seem only to be the inevitable result of an indifferent universe playing out. Atrocities like climate change, plastic pollution and nuclear war being almost predetermined, fatalistic or even the way things are meant to be.
A point of view that many would consider to be a convenient truth.
But if our actions are unavoidable, then so too is the sequence to which we are are only a part.
We may yet have our chance to experience the horror that the southern reach trilogy instils upon its readers. A shimmer within a shimmer is once again due, but this time we may not have the insiders perspective - in fact it may not conform to our sense of reality at all.
The signs of this shimmer may have already begun. There is a science even beyond that of phycology and its lighthouse moment might be the point at which it finds its autonomy.
Technology, is the birth of inorganic evolution, and its growth will be exponentially faster than ours.
The technological shimmer will not debate its actions or become conflicted by moral fibre. It will be driven by a motive far beyond our comprehension and deliver complexity to which our bodies would not hold.
Resources held by its forbear will be stripped, reconstituted and made a new.
All at the bidding of a ever restless universe trying to find stillness.
“It's not like us... it's unlike us. I don't know what it wants, or if it wants, but it'll grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains... Annihilation”
