Utterquidaunce: The Uncanny Valley

Tasmanian tigers. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

"Outrecuidance" is arrogance, or conceit.

Derived from England’s Norman Rulers' Angevin French, its Middle English cognate was utterquidaunce.

A lovely word! Let's bring it back!

Down in Dallas, Colossal Biosciences almost has the genome complete

and plans to recreate the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine,

an extinct marsupial resident of what once was called Van Diemen’s Land,

using as proxy its relative the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata).†

The logical extensions of this lie close to hand,

and the view from here into the Uncanny Valley‡ is fine!

(I pluck these fragments from the Internet—all handy data.)

Perhaps one day we’ll be able to resurrect

a Genghis Kahn, Stalin, or maybe Hitler—

If they're what’s wanted, who’s to say?

All we’ll need’s a suitable "dunnart" and a smidgen of their DNA.

A tempting project for the outrecuidant brain:

some near-tomorrow, in a scientific jump,

Colossal Bioscience may conjure up a faux Donald Trump,

who'll make Van Diemen's Land great[er] again!

Dunnarts

† “Colossal Biosciences have assembled a near-complete Tasmanian tiger genome and developed artificial reproductive technologies that could help de-extinct the species.”

“Most complete Tasmanian tiger genome yet pieced together from 110-year-old pickled head,” Live Science, https://www.livescience.com/animals/extinct-species/most-complete-tasmanian-tiger-genome-yet-pieced-together-from-110-year-old-pickled-head

‡ “[I]n climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.”—Masahiro Moti, https://spectrum.ieee.org/an-uncanny-mind-masahiro-mori-on-the-uncanny-valley

Tractcatus

The cat meows. I translate this as “All philosophy is critique of language.”—Anon Nemosky, Particle and Wave

Found in a Little Free Library box on Preston and Rugby avenues,

“Nemosky” forbids me to reproduce this sally.

I plead its brilliance and Fair Use!

If one can’t plagiarize, well, really, what’s the use?

What's more, I’ve noticed that poems about cats

Exceed all others in popularity.

This great Eliot, too, discovered in old age.

Why it should be so’s a riddle of our time,

Puzzling even the wan ghost of Wittgenstein.

The Temptation of What’s Easy

Now I have grown into an age

In which to run a rhyme across a page

Is no more trouble than to lie awake

Scanning the night's silence for a quake

That in a distant land might kill

An infant conjured by my will.

Worst is, I fear the child is real.

It makes no difference what I feel.

Distraught, I imitate a poem by Yeats,

Hoping to pry open Morpheus' gates.

The fascination of what’s difficult,

He writes, has "dried the sap" out of his veins,

Shut in a stable by an ailing colt,

Whose sacred blood anoints its bolt.

What if—supposing all this—I read wrong?

Why, then, consult some other midnight’s psalm!