—Imagine 300 Million Years in a Saturday Night Fever!
AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN ST. EVOLA, EDITOR
Nine years ago, our contributor Black Cloud composed a parody of the disco hit I Will Survive sung from the perspective of a fossilized trilobite addressing the return of humanity in the person of a fossil hunter.
We had completely forgotten about it.
Yesterday, driving along a road bordered by a rock cliff, I noticed a peculiar man about twenty feet above the roadway, digging into a layer of sedimentary rock. Curious, I made a U-turn and stopped to speak with him about this hunting site which I had heard about before.
He was collecting fossils.
During our conversation, entirely unprompted, he mentioned that trilobites could be found in the very layer he was excavating.
Another coincidence emerged. The fossil hunter had driven approximately 150 miles from a town adjoining the one I had departed that very morning! Our journeys had begun in neighboring towns and, quite independently, brought us to the same roadside cliff.
And then, this morning, Black Cloud’s nine-year-old poem unexpectedly appeared among my social media memories.
FOR YE WHO SUSPECT WE MAKE THESE THINGS UP :
Now consider the sequence. I had not been thinking about trilobites. I had not remembered the poem. I had not prompted the fossil hunter to mention them. Yet here was a man who had traveled from the same distant place as I had, digging for the very creature that had been singing about the return of the fossil hunter nine years earlier.
Carl Jung called meaningful coincidences of this sort synchronicity. Such coincidences seem to occur with remarkable frequency around the Council. Or are we simply more attuned to noticing them? Perhaps the coincidences are no more frequent than anywhere else. We just have a habit of catching them in the act.
The poem was imaginary. The encounter was not.
And there is one final curiosity. Black Cloud’s trilobite had been preserved in the geological record, while the poem itself had been preserved in the digital record. Both resurfaced within a day of one another.
We present the original composition, with a few clarifications to its introduction.
—JOHN ST. EVOLA
FROM BLACK CLOUD, NINE YEARS AGO :
“Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either ‘primitive’ or ‘unsuccessful’? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long.” —Richard Fortey, TRILOBITE: EYEWITNESS TO EVOLUTION
Today we present an adaptation of a disco-era hurt song. The Disco era is now almost as estranged from us as the Palaeozoic era must seem to the living relatives of the trilobite. Evolution tells us we’re all relatives, but time is relative too. A million years is quite a different proposition to a species that has been around for three hundred million years than to one that’s only just arrived.
We were amazed to find just how easily the original lyrics could be adapted. It was almost as though they had been lying in the fossil record waiting to be discovered. Adaptation is what it’s all about, right?
Suppose our origins were among the stars. Suppose we had been here before, departed, and somehow managed to return. What would the creatures we left behind make of our reappearance?
As in popular music and the struggle of life, somebody doing somebody wrong is always a reliable recipe for a song and an explanation for the playing out of the drama of LIFE.
And so we present our poem about the descendants of Ancient Astronauts, now returned as fossil hunters. Our singer, a fossilized trilobite, recognizes humanity as the long-absent visitor who abandoned it eons ago. But the returning fossil hunter has not forgotten the trilobite either. What exactly is the relationship between the hunter and the hunted, the fossil hunted and the fossil hunter? One has returned to collect, while the other has been waiting to be collected—and has a few complaints about the long separation.
We now know it was not a one-way love affair.
—BLACK CLOUD
I WILL SURVIVE
🎶At first I was afraid, now I’m just petrified
Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side
But then I spent so many eons
Wondrin’ how long
that
you’d be gone
And I grew strong
And I learned how to get along
And so you’re back
From outer space
But I still can’t walk
In to find you
here
with that sad look upon your face.
I should have changed the atmosphere,
Made it hard to breathe for free.
If I’d have known for just one second
you’d be back to collect me.
But I will survive. . .
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