Susana H. Case
The World as We Know It
— After Olafur Eliasson's project, Earth Perspectives on Instagram during COVID-19
Focus on the dot in the center
of the pink and orange earth,
then the blank surface
of your wall, because you have
been staying within your walls.
Test the afterimage
as you become the artist,
new world in new colors.
Repeat nine times, for each
earth, an earth that does not
have nine lives, and think
about what you're doing,
this vastness full of us crazies.
Think: what is the perspective
of a thawing glacier: does it know
that it's dying and taking
us with it. Think about the raw
emotion of the Mariana Trench,
deepest in our existence,
full of plastics,
and the other dots: the Ganges,
Greenland, the Great Barrier Reef.
Do you feel any way differently,
maybe more alliterative.
We're all dying, and it's all dying,
people, coral, water, creatures,
on every dot and not,
every tilted axis. Even Chernobyl
with its returning wolve
and Przewalski's horses in their
pudgy, feral beauty can't save us.
What will we want in the After.
Think.
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