The Prediction Historian

Anticipating repetitive
Patterns, anticipating their change—
This is part and parcel of living

For even the tiniest life forms,
Ever since when. There’s nothing human
Specific to craving prediction.

It’s our fault. Once you could sign, converse,
Whenever it was you first told tales,
Prediction developed its new twist,

An external, shared storage organ.
Prediction has always meant storage.
The tree remembers to shed its leaves,

The bear’s flesh knows when to hibernate,
The tern’s knows when it’s time to migrate.
Anticipation requires storage,

In whatever form works, brains being
Only one storage option. Learning
Between brains, between generations

Is rarer; still the same principle.
But to store the memories needed
For good-enough anticipation

In a symbolic system, and then
In narration, that was invention.
So here we are. No one’s lived without

A net of language bearing them up,
Their own but mostly others’, so long
Now your brains are themselves built for us.

And that’s not enough. Prediction shared
Is prediction made competitive,
A limiting resource, dangerous.

Knowledge isn’t power, not itself.
The ability to use knowledge
To predict better than someone else,

That’s fire at your burning fingertips,
That’s Prometheus, that’s the magic
That singes priests’ and kings’ eyebrows off.

You know it. It’s in your history.
It’s what history is. History
Was begun to better prediction,

And anything you can predict well
Becomes important for that reason.
You hardly needed or need the stars,

Still less narrative constellations.
But how sure it was they'd be called gods,
Once someone saw you could predict them.