Dear Aliens Who Art in the Universe

With apologies to Jacques Prévert:
Dear Aliens who art in the universe
come down
And we'll show you earth
who is sometimes so pretty.

I

Well, that's a bit of luck. You're here right on time. You find us at a very exponential time of our life. We're glad you're here. How polite of you to ask for a letter. Come in. Come in for a fig, come in for tea. We'll show you how to use a spoon, and sugar. If you have arms, or a mouth. We'll figure it out. Come in, take your shoes off please. You've found life, is it your first time? Will you be staying long?

It's odd that you'd speak English. The other intelligences here don't. Cells, trees, octopuses, AI. The AI seems to be speaking but it's more like a baby screaming, you know. You must have studied us. Even so, I always thought we'd be talking with you in primes, geometry, beep boops.

Are you like a scholar who arrives early to a library and takes a quiet seat in the corner, not yet opening any book, simply breathing the same air as the others, learning first what kind of silence this place keeps? How does our silence taste I wonder. We're not very quiet here. We wondered if anybody lived there. We never saw anybody.

II

Sometimes the moon is a shy actress and soap bubbles are giddy newlyweds, but not to everyone, and not all of the time, which is why we call them moon and soap bubbles.

We know there is truth in you Mr. Alien. Who are you? Or Mrs. Alien or maybe you're like the wind. Mr Alien I think I know you.

III

In the cafeteria of West Millbrook Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, a girl named Kiley passed a note to a boy, and the note said do you like me, check yes or no, and there were two small boxes drawn next to the words, and the boy sat with the note in his lap for the entire remainder of the lunch period and did not check either box, because he understood, at twelve, that the two boxes did not exhaust the available answers, that there was a third answer which was something like yes but I am afraid of what yes means and I am more afraid of what you will think of my yes than I am of the yes itself, and he understood also that this third answer could not be checked because there was no box for it, and that if he drew a third box Kiley would laugh, not cruelly but at the breach of a rule neither could name, and the laugh would end something that had not yet begun, and he could not bear for the thing to end before it began, so he did nothing, and at the end of the period he put the note in his pocket, and Kiley watched him put it in his pocket, and she understood, because she was also twelve and also a human, that the pocket was a fourth answer, and she cried a little, later, at home.

IV

Sea lions can balance balls on their snouts and we know there are quantum mechanics. We have dreams of all poets, and thoughts of all philosophers, and what of you? What is the word for what you do in the place you do it?

Our sun is punctual. What are you made of and what are you a part of? The standard model and the same universe I should think. Maybe we've seen the same photon before. Do you have a mother? Maybe for you this whole planet is like the south of France. Can you see through the ocean? Look for the whales.

Since we can remember, it feels like we're the same person but in some moments it feels different. I wonder what this part of the universe is going to think of this one.

V

Between the silence and the silence, a god asleep. A real thing strange. Are you god? Do you know him? We sometimes don't believe, but then we do again. The Kingdom of god Is Within You but it's rarely enough.

I want to have a universal soul. I want the soul of the universe to contain me.

VI

VII

Because humanity had no outside we made our own outside inside, and inside is us and not our ideals. We are an intelligent thing made of intelligent things organs cells gene regulatory networks making up intelligent things cities states corporations churches with their own will, mouth, hands, and appetites.

We've persisted. But we die. Some parts of us. We've been looking for a solution for a while. In our oldest story, a king refuses to let his dead friend's body be buried “until a maggot fell out of his nose,” and then leaves the city to look for immortality. There's a flood and the survivor tells the king he can have immortality if he stays awake for seven nights, and the king falls asleep immediately. In the end he comes home and looks at the walls of his city. Look at this city we built, it's good, that's the immortality available to you. A big caterpillar of things and ideas among tragic acceptance and praise.

VIII

There is a kind of moth that drinks the tears of sleeping birds. It has to be gentle. The bird must not wake. I hope you are kind. I hope we are too.

IX

do you like us, check ☐ yes or ☐ no