We Have an Answer for Everything is a speculative, evolution-driven poem turned video that imagines adaptation as a survival strategy through radical, almost grotesque imagery. The lyrical ‘we’ is not a passive victim of crisis (‘when the crash hits’), but an experimental organism that continuously reshapes its body, perception, and identity in order to survive.
The world of the poem and the video is biological and cosmic at once. Scales, feathers, gills, multiple hearts, and regenerating organs evoke a sped-up, consciously directed version of evolution, while the use of electricity, the icy vacuum, and the extreme temperature of –270 degrees Celsius push the text into a sci-fi, posthuman register. The body is no longer a stable identity but a tool – one that absorbs the form, color, and smell of its environment and abandons itself whenever necessary.
A central motif is anomaly: humanity steps out of the order of Animalia and becomes sovereign according to its own laws – not in a moral sense, but in an evolutionary one. ‘Devolving into innocent darkness’ appears not as regression but as cyclical renewal. Consciousness, sexuality, and understanding are lost and regained in recurring motion, carrying the grotesque promise of immortality.
The poem’s closing cosmic nihilism – coming to a halt without rituals, being lulled by the vacuum, and re-embodiment through gravity – suggests that even total dissolution is not an endpoint. ‘We always just narrowly avoid eternity’: existence (human or posthuman) is an endless state of transition, a mode of survival that never arrives at either redemption or final destruction.
The project is part of the subthemes Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Hybrid Selves – Gender, Identity, and Posthuman Intimacies.
Author
Orsolya Karácsony
Orsolya Karácsony (b. 1988 in Debrecen) completed the coursework of the Doctoral School of Literary Studies at the University of Debrecen in 2018. She currently works as a freelance English teacher and translator. She began to pursue writing more seriously as an artistic activity in 2021. In that year, she won third place in the literary competition of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Hatvan. Her poems have most recently appeared on Nincs, DunapArt, Litera, Székelyföld, and Helikon, and earlier in Irodalmi Szemle and in the anthology Semmi ágán.
