Splice my magnetic poetry: Hopeful Monsters Dream Furiously.
(So let us go then, you and I,
When the scientists no longer ask us why.)
Like magnetic poetry,
strung together: sticky ends,
that even biologists cannot buy.
We have forgotten to be playful:
wax our poetic biologies,
sculpt our plasticine bodies,
throw our proteomes carelessly into the wind.
(Did you overhear
on the subway yesterday:
"When was the poetry slam of creation?"
"Right here," she whispers,
"weaving words and genes.")
But beware the playground placard!
(etched in carbon)
[It's a jungle of a gym.
Where imaginations tango
with your straight-edged intuitions.]
So let us go.
And tickle these bio-inspirations.
Did you ever doubt that science was art?
And art the science of creation?
(Layer your androids
with algorithms and acrylic,
to paint a portrait of Carrollinian possibilities
in this chassis we call a cell.)
And so, I know,
You sleep so well
(dreaming of the epistemically virtuous life)
since you dare to build,
build to know:
weave your genes in a row?
And live!
To paint a life,
but should you ask
"Does it paint me back?"
(Paley's god was pleased to prescribe
limits to his power
and work out the details
within the curvature of watches.
But we've reinvented time.)
Dearest fumbling techno-artists,
an organism is not a computer
of endless forms most beautiful.
You squish life into Euclidian axioms
(forgetting that space bends).
But what you create
you no longer understand.
You cannot serenade us,
with tales of mutant tails.
As we hang
on the frontier
of this reciprocal adaptation.
(Or, as you tinkerers have minted,
the edge of synthetic incantations.)
From springs and gears and ratchets,
you've constructed the minimal cell
in shades of office-grey.
Blurred the bounds
of wetware-widgets
that cares not of it's built in
'anti-commons' or
shared in the open pirate bay.
(Is this what happens to diversity?
when beautiful and inefficient bridges are re-engineered?
Feats of whimsy bring you to the start:
'designed weirdness', an oxymoron, torn apart.)
Ethics and play
(the ethics of play,
playful ethics)
orbit each other
thinking
Maybe hopeful monsters should be...
Speak! engineering to me,
indulge us
with rose petal colonies
and switches of unbreakable carbon
so that life
might dream furiously.
Michael Cournoyea is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.