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What Mars provides is not the orange ball
viewed as an object in space: the earth
is such a marble at that distance, compressed
to an inertness, which is the blotting-out
of all its events into one jejune orbiting.
No. But once on Mars, we have the start
of moods: atmospheric effects and vistas,
and the patient trundle over the terrain,
the expectation of the horizon, as once
the Pacific rim appeared to Europeans.
Anthropomorphism’s portfolio is good
enough: that one can project movements with eye
and the robotic simulacrum is understood
colonisation: the ambience is viable:
a child could plot a frolic in that sand.
Mars is a deceptive extension of domain:
the stretching to the utmost of possibility
of anything remotely human: no such
tricks could be played on any other planet,
so they are left alone, the gas and heat spheres.
But as with human attitudes on earth,
the possible is tackled in the semblance
of the impossible, but the really impossible
is somehow accepted as that: the journey
to the earth's core, or the problem of crime.
And wherever men shall go, or endeavour
to, they will moot the possible impossible:
they will not believe in going anywhere
near the truly all-consumable: Mars is
a joke, like Everest and the Moon - or Divine Love. |
