In what way is any information ever alive?
Despite the second law, the very decay
Of everything creates all the traces
Of the past that pack each rift and seam
With information’s ore. Continually erases
And continually creates. Death is a mother,
To be sure, but change is the mother of death
And information both, while life is death’s
Father, I guess. Life evolves, yes, but
It’s become clearer that all sorts of processes
Evolve, not all of them alive. Evolution is
Greater than life and also insufficient
To distinguish life from what is not life.
Take culture, the nongenetic transmission
And accumulation of information among
Living things. Does it evolve? Hell, yes.
Demonstrably. Does it exist without life,
After life has lost it? Consider Nineveh,
The great library burned and buried
For thousands of years. Was that not culture?
Was Gilgamesh not culture during the long
Centuries of silence, when cuneiform
And Sumerian fell from living knowledge?
Every unread book’s undead, and vampire
Texts from pyramids, mounds, barrows,
And tells rise to walk among us, seductive,
Rich with potential information, zombies
Of culture infiltrating living brains, inhabiting
Our minds. But are those texts true monsters?
Are they alive? If they aren’t. . . . If information,
The detritus of change, the signature of
Entropy passing, what left of what’s destroyed,
A new thing thereby made, is nonetheless inert,
Then genes are just byproducts of life
As spectra are byproducts of furnace stars,
As the spirals of galaxies are byproducts
Of the dark. And culture is indeed like genes,
More than most of us imagine. At most, it is
A quasi-lifeform, and the analogy some make
To viruses is apt. At least, it is only data.
But I wonder, living thing, collection of lives
Living and dying within the vortex of one
More or less ambulatory skin, if I am
Really just a carrier of these bits of information,
Infested by them but not them, fit or unfit
In part because of them, but not them, or
If I am them, not myself, in which case,
Maybe information needs no furnace
To pursue its own intentions, but lives,
Monster made of entropy, it lives. I wavered.
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