For hundreds of thousands of years, nature has been the enemy of man, who tried to subjugate it to himself

Most people can't identify with the twentieth-century worldview of poetic mystics like Yeats or Rilke. How can we, imprisoned in prose, begin to "feel the past" that happened 2,000 or 20,000 years ago, when everything—in a sense—had to be poetry? Since we've invented "the past," thereby denying the cyclical nature of time and the perpetual present, let's try to do everything possible with its material remains. We can enshrine them in museums, protect them like the stone circle of Stonehenge, seal them off like the cave at Lascaux, or transform them into caricatured prehistoric supermarkets like the tomb of Newgrange. But we can't do this as long as we continue to use the concept of "the past"—a concept that, like Cerberus, guards us from awareness of place and time.

Our prosaic language confines reality to "facts" and "information." We attack it with prose, and it thus becomes our fiction. We apply the same method to the past, superimposing on it, on the one hand, our pragmatic, twentieth-century approach—action, goal-setting, data collection—and on the other, current interests and contemporary ideas. In desperation, we look back on "the past" as a golden age, full of respect for "Mother Earth" and harmony with nature. Yet, for hundreds of thousands of years, nature was an enemy that humans had to contend with. We may have learned to respect it, but it is our sense of hostility toward it that has led us to our current situation—to a point where we no longer see ourselves as small, fragile colonizers, but recognize the fragility of the biosphere. Of course, we realize that the biosphere has always been fragile. It will survive the sixth great extinction, to which we are inevitably heading—but in a completely new, unfamiliar form.

To break free from the historical fallacy that, as a thought form, defines our culture, we can—in my opinion—only "see in time" (which is itself a fiction) the meaning of poetry. Sometimes a single line can offer more insight than hundreds of books on archaeology or anthropology. Paradoxically, it was the "coming of poetry" that would weaken our desire for a prosaic "understanding" of the past. We would then see that understanding itself is merely a prose fiction that has usurped the right to the miraculous.