The Ministry for the Future

the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet, on and on it went, it seemed clear to me that the original had been written in some other language, that we were listening to a translation into English, and in fact you could tap around and hear what was being said in other languages; Gupta insisted on listening to it in Sanskrit, which he admits he doesn’t understand when spoken, though he reads it, but he claimed that what we were hearing had to have been written or thought originally in Sanskrit, maybe even thousands of years ago, and in fact the Sanskrit version did sound very primal, which made me curious and I clicked around and found a version in Proto-IndoEuropean, why not? It sounded like Spanish. I switched to Basque, supposedly a living fossil of a language, and it too sounded like Spanish. Actually both sounded quite a bit stranger than Spanish, older than Spanish, odd harsh primal sounds, but no more so than Dutch or many another language that isn’t Hawaiian, you always hear all the same sounds, and no matter which language I tapped on, I kept hearing mamma Gaia. Yes of course mamma would be one of the oldest words, maybe the first word, invented over and over by babies trying their best to talk but having limited control of their mouths, and yet always trying to say the same thing, to beseech or celebrate that great goddess filling their sight, the fountain and source of all food, warmth, touch, love, and eye contact— mamma! I cried out that night on the ridge, seeing the why of it for the first time, the why of everything, of course it’s a category error on my part to genderize the planet in that crass way, but we were high that night on the worldwide lovefest, and since everyone else was singing and cheering and hooting as after having caught a great ride on a great wave, I just kept shouting Mamma Mia! Mamma Mia! Because of course, being human, the other first word we speak is always me, mine, me me me, and God bless the Italians and whoever else in the Romance languages for holding fast to that very first Ur phrase, the same in all the languages, I checked Proto-IndoEuropean and sure enough it was the same there too, Mamma Mia! Mamma Mia! Genius of a language!

Yes, I was a little drunk, a little high. A little giddy. I mean think about it, a worldwide moment during which all sentient beings aware of the project were to sing praise together to the one planet we stood on, to perform the noösphere created by this so-vast and complex biosphere, while standing on the lithosphere and contemplating the hydrosphere and circulating the atmosphere in and out of us, breath after breath— it’s great, but it’s a little hypothetical too, right? It’s hard to know how to feel it. What could we do in that moment but try? As a linguist I naturally think of the words involved, but there was more to it than that, so I tried all that too, I drank and I looked around at the faces of the other people on the ridge, all of them also trying, and many of them had their dogs with them there, the dogs too were trying, trying to understand it, very aware that something unusual was happening, such that some of them barked or howled, which some guys instantly took up, of course it was time to howl, howl at the moon like wolves. What a great language! And besides we were like wolves! We turned wolves into dogs and they turned us into humans— we were something like orangutans before, solitaries who didn’t know how to work together, it was the wolves who taught us that, who taught us the idea of friendship and cooperation. So we howled at the moon and hugged the people around us, if they were hugging types, and the dogs, and I kept looking at all the faces, so vivid and real, and I kept coming back to saying Mamma Mia. As one does when in awe. Hugging Gracie in particular, as always. We’re lucky that way.

This went on for about fifteen minutes. Then we quieted down. Time to get back down in the bowl of the concert space and dance to the music for what was left of the night. Had we done it right? Had we joined with every sentient being on the planet, brought into existence a new Earth religion that would change everything? Were we all brother and sister now, as they were always telling us we should be? Hard to tell. It felt like a lark. But larks are beautiful. All these bird and animal names we use for our moods and actions, of course they’re always perfectly apt. We are all family, as the new religion was telling us, and as every living thing on Earth shares a crucial 938 base pairs of DNA, I guess it’s really true. So yeah, we went down there and danced all night long, feeling very high, and when the sky lightened and dawn approached, and they sent us out to greet the day and go home and do whatever we were going to do that day, they played Bruddah Iz Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World,” a great piece of Hawaiian schmaltz that we could sing along with on our way out, and hum the rest of the day. Later I read that people said they really felt it, that moment when everyone worldwide sang the same song of praise and devotion, it was said to be like an electric pulse filling you or like that. I must admit I didn’t feel anything like that in the moment itself, maybe I was too drunk or too aware of Gracie’s hand