Seasonalight

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  • Trisense ~ an essay in three parts.

    1. Emily
    2. Lynn
    3. Ginny

     

    Emily

    1

     

    It’s barely possible to imagine the hem of her black or white dress resting close at the knee of a leather boot belonging to a soldier with so many children borne to another woman.

    Metallic scents of expensive ink on expensive paper linger not in her room, but in her father’s office downstairs. She writes by hand, of course, in her bedroom, at a small, crafted desk and seated on a chair that is cut and waxed from some of the grandest trees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The glories of lilac and generations of bees flavour an ordinary lead pencil, maybe a sharp knife too, laid on the desk to carve a point. Her neck is long and pale, black hair wrapped into itself at the nape, and pinned.  The line of her spine drops plumb as she breathes quick and anxious.

    In bitter winter, Emily looks down through her window at a horse raising his snow-dusted hooves through drifts, the wheelwright’s toil rolling behind. They travel along the road to a neighbour, delivering to the town’s elite. Her brother’s children, released from next door, laugh in these memory grounds beneath the cold, white blanket surrounding the yellow house. She’s observed robin search for his worm at the edges, pecking at the frozen leaf piles. Her secret lover makes boot prints through her father’s garden to his place of work. He glances up to her window with a wry smile beneath his flamboyant well-groomed moustache.

    Spring has raced through this year—the bulbs bursting with colour in the borders—purple crocuses, yellow daffodils with orange hearts, and pink and blue hyacinths—and then abandoned her. How must she feel? The petals have shaped her thoughts into words, but she is anxious that it will all end soon. This keeps her in with her thoughts.

    In a summer heatwave, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves, drifts into her hair, and Emily throws open the conservatory windows. A bead of sweat runs across her brow when the nights are sultry. And there is fresh-pressed lavender-scented linen on her bed when thunder comes, especially when the leaves redden and fall to the first frosts.

    Emily writes each letter one at a time until they make words, and lines like tiny rivers on the back of used envelopes, and orange telegrams—Baltimore orioles—and any scrap paper she can find. There is a slant of light, of truth, yes; that bright New England kind that contrasts even the palest patterned walls and white skirtings.

    She writes again in her beautiful garden. Blue jays are gifts, red cardinals shock. The loud warbles of tiny Carolina wrens float along the perennial borders of the Homestead under an orderly, painted, hickory fence. Even the Magnolia tripetala leaves swelling through the winds of the Fall gently vibrate that same, perfectly hand-stitched hem just when their rosy red fruit cones are in their prime.

    For now, thanks to Austin, I read they flourish beyond Homestead northward about two hundred miles from their native range and a degree of centigrade.  You are all visionaries.

    Emily mouths her own words quietly and sends them silently to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. The repression bubbles up, coded in decorum. Blood flows to her lips and through her fingertips. Skin on skin, under the skin of him, and her, then through the hand; hand through wood and lead; lead on manilla, and into her pocket. She can keep him there constantly, and no-one would ever know. She smiles, politely, at Lavinia.

    If Emily had split a lark herself, somehow without harm, and peered into the microscope, she’d find her neighbour Lynn searching for the slanted truth, and source codes, and yellow, deep in a cell and the organelles. This place is where all the energy is, and all that lays in her pocket.

     

     

    Lynn

    2

     

    She’s young on her wedding day—nineteen, like my Mum. She looks happy, swept into the folds of intellectual love. As a child, she has a bright mind free to roam the woods, unhindered. Now, it’s a strong will to study, and to be with him, and to inspire. They have a child together—Dorian. They divorce.

    We divorced.

    From the liberal arts to a passion for the inquiring, challenging mind, science history, she keeps her hair tied, or short. And she cycles to a humming lab where she dwells on processes, where the black and white microscopes stand in rows. Soon, she is eye-deep in the cell and the organelles through the glass—the glascella—where she splits the minutiae larks, to think and theorize a new understanding. It’s that slant of light falling across all those pale, patterned neo-Darwinists with her rolling-into-words, honey Illinois.

    But she takes all her nature in with her; all of it. Worms, termites, termite gut bacteria, birds, slimes, eukarya. And she knocks on the doors of the journals and they turn her away, until one day, the world just gently shifts on its axis. Life, it is proven (until disproved) is to be less anger, after all, and more love; an inter-kingdom of unions and sex and symbiosis, not war.

    And Lynn falls in love again. We all do if we’re fortunate. I did. Two more children, all now flourishing, then another divorce—she’s a dedicated first-class scientist and author.

    She writes her notes by hand/in type. Spirochetes spin their corkscrews in white cups, and she looks to all those men again and gently laughs. Her time is big moves, from Chicago Chickadees to the Dark-eyed Juncos of Berkeley and back again to the East. And more, to NASA, to Russia, to international councils of men, and time with mics in studios, and interviews with great writers. She’s blazing trails to lecture halls the length of the land.

    Finally, Lynn finds her way home to Emily’s town and the grandfather’s college, where she is content as a botanist can be. She has moved next door to those Dickinson memory grounds. And they meet somehow over the hickory fence. Spring has raced through very fast this year—the bulbs bursting too late in the borders—and as Lynn writes through finger tips and plastic keys and memory boards in a summer heatwave, a bead of sweat runs across her brow. This is her place now, her Amherst. It’s friendships, yes Lovelock’s rainbows on Hungry Hill, and the geosciences where they also make art for her, and this is magic for her: an Earth so in sym as to be the sum.

    As her children’s children laugh, her love grows for the sauce code in decorum written on manilla and chocolate wrappers just next door; Emily’s yellow. I’m listening to you, Lynn, as you swim forever wild in your Puffer’s Pond.

     

     

    Ginny

    3

     

    I have two lives. One is before Mum’s suicide and the other comes after that. Before, I am steered by the great events of those I love. After, comes a life of trauma and healing. In healing, I emerge, though trauma is never a singularity.

    As a child, I have a bright mind free to roam the Herefordshire woods and streams, and listen to larks, unhindered. My hair is long, until the chemo, tied back into a wild bunch. We meet at college, where I design with black ink on whiteboards and read Zevi. He maps gold and reads Lopez. Then, in Welsh borderlands, he gives me tandems, and our dog, and daily walks. And I know these hills like the memory grounds. After walks under rainbows on Hungry Hill, our daughter comes, and life seems the best adventure. We go to that New England light (Chickadee) and wade through Pacific waves under the Aotearoan cloud (Tui). And I still love him for that. Big moves.

    But the after comes, and terrible trauma brings anger and control, and it takes a long time in the city between the Taff and the Ely for me to leave. But I do, and I find new, deep love. And so to this intellectual bird love—of  Cardiff Dippers and Albert’s Lyrebirds—I too receive a wry smile—and the hems and leather boots are in symbiosis with visions of a new epoch itself. I have scribbled in pencil on manilla envelopes our word, mirrors. They also know before and after, a lonely place to be.

    How dull would life be without you, Emily and Lynn, and I pocket all the slant light and symbiogenesis I can mine in your words, forming my own thoughts and words, pushing all the hickory fences back. I mouth my own words to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. Love is never sentimentalism. Blogs (light of all the seasons) are my instruments—plastic keys— and Twitter, though there is control there and it can make me unhappy. There’s a beautiful book too, thanks to my friend Riechmann, in a language my daughter knows well. And I relish, too, the visceral art with Lyons under Welsh sleet ~ ah, the Elan horses.

    You see, I grew up in my mother’s rambling garden with hardly an edge into the wild of the wood and the streams. And I tended a glasshouse, just like Emily, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves in my hair. I climbed mountains and even flew them (the Red Kites). But it was Dad who always tasked me to question. We cared for each other in the after, and I held his hand as he breathed his last. I miss him.

    And to abandonment and cancer ~ how must I feel? I am still here above red sandstone, standing at the confluences. Deep down here, there are all the five Kingdoms in symbiosis spreading to cover the entire Earth. I can’t tell you, Lynn, what ten thousand miles away means, and what ten thousand miles back feels. Straight down, beneath my feet, all of time. And then to record them, and the loss ~ each mile ~ with my tiny, black mic, pinned to my pale, patterned blouse.

    Daughter’s voice has grown strong in justice and language, like the river, and I learn from her. Meanwhile, I wait and write, and walk each day to Kingfishers and Goosanders, with Heron-like patience; at other times none at all, like the gleam of a Peregrine’s strike. I live Rilke’s questions, searching along my own Amethyst Brook or Connecticut—The Edw and the Wye—  imagining all the spirochetes, searching too for the light beneath my own versions of Magnolia tripetala and all their subsoil mycelium lovers and sunshine. Nothing is separate: All is flow, my rivers, yellow, and that gentle shift of the axis.

    Lynn, you asked me for new words, a source code, so I give them to you. Emily, I understand you and the blood to the lips. I feel like we are the lichen on my Mum’s grave, the trisense; it takes three in symbiosis—the alga, and two types of fungi  (an ascomycete and a newly identified basidiomycete yeast), but all three must have that colour.

     

    End.

     

  • Grief, to a Fluminist.

    Lighting a candle.

    A year of grief, over. It means we have loved, and we need not be fearful of loving again.

    2020 has been a year of mass grief; grief for changed bodies and bodies lost forever. I am writing of people and teresapien lives, through pandemic and the vagaries of the Anthropocene. There will be more to come, no doubt.

    It takes courage to love again when the love that came before has pierced the skin with a hundred needles. Grief can feel like that. But without giving and receiving love, even love for ourselves, we are all dust. It’s just the way it is, the way more complex lives have evolved, who knows, maybe all life.

    Of course, we can have spells of time away from love, like we are holding a drink for someone else at a party. Some people may think they don’t care, rocks and islands and all that, but I think they do mind, deep down. I do.

    Sometimes, the love shifts from one type to another, say, from romantic to deep friendship, from fluministic devotion to kindship. Eventually, we need to drink for ourselves.

    Whether that love is in full view, the full public view, is another thing. Some believe love is not real unless it is demonstrable in full view of everyone and everything. That also takes courage, a revelation of something that makes us vulnerable. There is a reason why L Frank Baum’s Cowardly Lion was the bravest of all because he told everyone he met he had no heart but wanted one. It’s just that he doubted himself. We all have doubts. My father always said it’s the foolish ones who never doubt themselves.

    But some of the most passionate and dedicated love stories across time are surely never told. Life on Earth, of course, is a love and death story.

    The good of love may feel like the most searing punishment when the object or flow of our love is hurt or dies. This kind of pain is at least as old as eukaryote cells. We share that in common, and for millions of years. Grief is just as ancient, a kind of ancient trauma. I’m not using that word lightly. Some think ‘trauma’ is an overcooked ham, but it isn’t. When love is strong, the loss, and therefore the suffering, can’t be anything other than trauma. But it has evolved in the avoidance of death, and in the pursuit of care ~ you could say, grief is an aid for survival.

    Whether you believe in the afterlife matters less if whoever stirred those emotions of joy and sadness, frustration, and even hate, suffers or suffers and dies. Mother, daughter, sister, lover, bird, dog, horse, wildflowers, lichen, moss, fungi, ferns, trees, whales, entire ecosystems, biomes, coastal cities, continents.

    All that’s left are the memories. Maybe this is an icy take on what is the warmest process of all ~ two-way contentment of extreme care, celebrated in public, for all to see. If you’ve loved fully, then you’ve cared fully and lived care-fully. Be proud and content about that, because…

    “it’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent.

    Audio recording:

  • Tenovus Cancer Care Helpline.

    This Christmas, I just want to pay tribute to Tenovus cancer support.

    Two years ago, my very existence seemed uncertain, and I was lonely as I underwent extensive palliative treatment for a type 3 aggressive womb cancer at Velindre Hospital, Cardiff. Velindre staff were always lovely to me, but hugely busy, as they treat more than 5000 people a year.

    I knew  few people in Cardiff, and didn’t want to burden anyone. So I rang the Tenovus helpline. Ex-cancer nurse and confidant, Elaine, was a godsend. We discovered a shared love for nature ~ she even has a very special thing for red kites!

    Sometimes she’d call and we’d simply talk about this shared love, and it would be enough to ease away my anxieties and help me deal with the difficulties. So, I just want to thank Elaine again, and all the team at Tenovus for their commitment and dedication. As head of communications, I have also grown to admire Craig very much. I just know they all want to help.

    Despite COVID19, cancer continues to rear its scary head for some. Tenovus makes it less scary. It can be especially lonely when immune systems are suppressed and self-isolation is recommended, sometimes over long periods of time. I think everyone can now relate to this, because of the experience of COVID19.

    Here, I post a recording made to help in an appeal for funds, and you can also read my story here in Wales Today.

     

     

    I know financial circumstances are massively uncertain due to the ongoing pandemic, and charities have suffered too. But if you can afford to donate, even a small amount, it would certainly help them, and so many others like me in these times of uncertainty. Thank you. If not, no worries! Just know that there are people to help should you ever need it. With love from me.

    https://www.tenovuscancercare.org.uk/support-us/christmas/christmas-donation/

    PS On a personal note, I gained weight by going through surgical menopause and by taking steroids through treatment. I am now losing it again, but it is so much harder as you get older! Wish me luck.

    ~~~~~~~

  • Alder the Elder.

    Alder, Wye, and Ben. Photo by me.

     

    I am thinking about Alder fixing nitrogen at the roots next to the flowing, swirling river. They are in symbiosis with all realms of friendly powers to do this.  True.

    Fixed, rooted, “they have figured how to live trapped into place,” says one of Richard Powers’ characters in Overstory.*

    They are stillness in the ground, and unable to outrun us. They are vulnerable to pestilences, including our terrible machines. They evolved to be hardened, poisonous and giant to all who may assault them, yet they are losing this race brought upon them. True.

    Are they really so fixed?

    I am listening to Alder, intently.  With their belly in the ground, their body and limbs above, defying gravity, and their thousands of faces — leaves, buds–  turned patiently towards the sky, I am quiet; present. Sixty years staring at the sky, as we spin on our axis, and around the Sun, and around the Milky Way’s tiny, dense, black hole, and away from whatever lays at the centre of the universe, riding on dark matter at ever-increasing speed.

    Alder says they don’t know the meaning of stillness. It’s not in their vocabulary, so rooted are they in this cosmic dance. Neither do their symbiotic messengers know such stillness. We are all constantly moving. In Spring, look up towards the Sun and the stars, just like the unfurling leaves.

    Alder’s DNA, their being, floats all the way up to high cirrus, and thousands of miles, and years.

    I think I’d like to be a part, if they’ll allow it.

    ~~~~~~

    Alder pronouns: they, them, theirs. They are monecious, hermaphroditic, so until I can hear them say their pronouns…

    ~~~~~~

    *Overstory by Richard Powers, Vintage. 2018

     

    Audio:

     

  • Anthropomode

    Cardiff Bay Sluice Gates. Photo by me.

     

    The Anthropocentric mode of being. Norm of the Anthropocene. A problem.

    Anthropo, of the human. Mode from modus “measure, extent, quantity; proper measure, rhythm, song; a way, manner, fashion, style” (in Late Latin also “mood” in grammar and logic), from PIE root *med- “take appropriate measures.”

    Business-as-usual.

    Tethering any potential vitanance of ecosystems to an ill-ecological disunion or dominion of human behaviour ~ mistake.

    Economies, law and other human modes of existence are not fully diverse, inclusive and based on ecologism.

     

  • Peat Bogs and Pwca Tribes.

    Bogland, Hay Bluff to Waunfach. Photo by me.

    Is it possible to forge a new kind of relationship with the ecological community we in English call, perhaps, unceremoniously, peat bog?

    Here in cool Britannic islands, peat has been forming since the last Ice Age, when luminous green mosses took over the quagmire. Fibrous layers of arrested entropy are fuelled by the surfacing of a froth of bryophytes, metabolizing through an exchange of oxygen with carbon dioxide, sunshine for sugar, nutrients, bacteria, and plenty of water. As each generation and their symbiotic partners die down, the decay is slow but sure in locking in carbon. Like snow transforms to glaciers, the dead are pressed down by the weight of the living into an airless solidity. If locked under rocks for millions of years, this is the stuff of crude oil.

    At a tender accumulation of just 1mm per year, the process is slower than slow. In the slow period of human evolution, cutting peat to burn and grow food seemed just a nibble around the edges. But now, in full Anthropomode, the extraction is leviathan; industrialized, packaged, and shipped in plastic wraps to a peak of ignorance.

    Peat bogs, high and low across continents, are keystone ecosystems in the slowing of the flow of planetary carbon. The absorptions are remarkable, storing more than all other vegetation communities in the world, combined (IUCN). At 6% of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, their degradation has a profound effect on warming.

    As with all living systems classified in English, the words “peat” and “bog” together seem somewhat inadequate in describing the exquisite symbiosis and delicate processes of interconnectedness in these places ~ the kind of life-love I call Fluminism. These processes, in the name of a tiny minority of humans earning a living, are now being destroyed like there’s no tomorrow; cut, ploughed, burned, dried, stolen, degraded, and eroded. The critical second law of thermodynamics in living systems, otherwise known as entropy, is unleashed. A steadier state of life-creating disequilibrium (Margulis/Lovelock) becomes a gaping hole of profound loss.

    Sphagnum Moss. Photo by me.

    If ever there was a time when we ought to value natural processes capable of locking millions of tons of carbon into the ground, it’s now.

    The invaluable emerald and gold communities of mossy production, which required such a delicate intersection of topographic, geochemical, climatic, and biological variabilities to begin, are vanishing.

    An increase in entropy accounts for the irreversibility of such natural processes, an asymmetry in states from past to future ~ and in some cases the changes are irreversible. Even the hoof-fall of a flock of sheep can sear through a peat bog, triggering expanding evaporation of moisture that will degrade this ancient semi-closed system.

    Globally, human cultures have aligned these atmospheric places of slow carbon burial with ghostly mythologies, perhaps a subconscious, spiritual warning to keep our ancestors from ruining these critical ecosystems. They are deemed eerie, often misty by the nature of transpiration of wetlands as if belonging only to lost souls and fuzzy apparitions.

    Partly responsible are the will-o’-the-wisps or the ignis fatuus (giddy flames), documented and told in stories by many different human cultures around the globe. The Welsh, for instance, traditionally described the light as Fairy Fire held in the hands of mischievous goblin-fairies or nature sprites (think of William Shakespeare’s Puck) named Pwca*, who would mesmerize and lure travellers off their paths, only to extinguish the flames and leave folk abandoned and utterly lost.

    We modern folk of the Westernish have forsaken such myths in favour of science and concluded the oxidation of phosphine, diphosphine and methane can cause photon emissions that can also ignite on contact with oxygen in the air. If there are bubbles of methane about, these too can ignite, and all the myths and hocus pocus are burned up into the atmosphere along with reverence and fear.

    I cannot seriously suggest that conjuring a new state of fear for the precious and vibrant matter (Jane Bennett) of peat bogs will save them. But maybe love, reverence and celebration could.

    When all the most technical minds are searching for ways of trapping carbon from the atmosphere, it seems utterly foolish to ignore the sphagnum mosses and their partners as a true commonwealth in the slowing, dampening, and sequestration of dangerous climate change. Maybe we can begin by joining together to form a Union of Concerned Peat Bog Lovers, or The Great Sphagnum Mossites, the Emerald and Golds, or simply The Pwca Tribe, to write and tell stories about the magnificence of the processes involved, to create an annual Festival of learning near each place, and to take time to join in reverence, celebration and protection.

    Suggestions welcome, as always.

    *It is thought Shakespeare may have learned of local Welsh folklore from a friend Richard Price of the priory of Brecon. Could Cwm Pwca and the beautiful Clydach Gorge be the original setting for Midsummer’s Night’s Dream?

  • Rockle/d

    Large pebbles washed up on rock platforms at Llantwit Major Beach, South Wales. Photo by me.

    Simply, the noise rocks make when they are washed in and out by a wave or tide, or down a river bed.

     

  • What is Artifice?

    Sheep field next to the River Wye, nr Hay. Photo by me.

    There seems a renewed and furious human chauvinism by some, rejecting the material reality of ecological processes to the extreme, including the principle of Rewilding (Soule, et al).

    The fury seems based on NGO dominance in the field (they are certainly not democracies), plus purchasing power without local consent or participation. NGO’s aside, because alternative treaties for collective and local management are possible, without ecological succession we are talking about the proliferation of anthropogenic urbanization, suburban expansion, farming, fishing, and forestry as the default position on a central plank of Human Rights.

    In reaction, particularly to the question of urbanization and suburban expansion, the legally trained and culturally-influenced capitalists (though they would deny the latter), are persisting in claiming the Rights for Nature. All arguments are, therefore, sucked into the realm of the Courts, to mainly White Eurocentric judges, lawyers, and clerks. Rights are important agreements of equality between ourselves as human individuals, there is no doubt, and they are judged in Courts by other humans versed in the language of humans and the Law. All of these Human Rights should be firmly based upon ecological and physical material reality because that is the ultimate responsibility. But let us not forget that ecological processes are incommensurable with complex Laws evolved for one, single species ~ Homo sapien. One could call the Courts an “artifice” in ecological terms.

    Terribly oversimplified, there are three main interconnected effects that drive suffering and extinction of human and teresapien life.

    a. Global human inequity (to include extreme capitalism, arms trade, neo-colonialism, GDP Growth, racism and poverty, nationalism, conflict and migration, et al)

    b. Ecological depauperation and biodiversity declines (critical to existence)

    c. Climate crisis (volatile, extreme, and includes sea level rises)

    Inequity has a great deal to do with depauperation and climate, but without ecological resilience, quite frankly, we (all life) face armageddon. Food and clean water depend mainly upon b. And c. contributes to a. and b.

    We are, indeed, nature. But we are not the sum of all ecological processes. We must understand moments when letting things go is as important as when, where, and how to intervene. In not allowing succession and a plethora of other life-sustaining processes–some of which we have no idea–to re-instate their own evolutionary force, we are continually arresting ecological growth, interfering with ecological cycles of entropy, and preventing niche opportunities for life to flourish. Disturbance can drive evolution over time, but planetary dominion by our species has all the features of a catastrophic, continued extinction event (pain and suffering). As Chomsky said, “we are the asteroid,” more accurately, the conscious asteroid.

    Ecological processes are core to ‘life.’ Indigenous cultures greatly understand this, and we in the Westernish have a full opportunity to learn from these people and their wisdom. I agree, that without consent or agreement, all interventions, passive or active, are forms of oppression. But the most oppressed of all, we have to remember, don’t speak human.

    Ecological disturbance (that’s what we are, ecological disturbers, primary and secondary consumers), is now so vast as to arrest and even undermine evolutionary succession across all biomes. Climate change is fundamentally linked by the nature of this dominion, especially in the destruction of ecosystems for the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

    There must be room for ecological succession without heavy human disturbance. Setting up Rewilding v Traditional Pastoral is a non-starter. There’s no pulling the past out of a bottle like a genie, but we can learn from all, science and indigenous wisdom, moving forwards.

    What if.

    What if it’s not the last 50 years of human interventions that have caused the crash in living systems here in the UK, but the last 200 years? What if it’s not the last 200 years of human intervention but the last 10,000 years? These are still relevant questions in ongoing geological discussions as to when the Anthropocene began. They are also relevant to how we perceive a need for change.

    Without the development of farming techniques over the last 10,000 years, there could not have been an industrial revolution in the last 200+ years. Without the industrial revolution in the last 200+ years, there could not have been intensive development and farming over the last 50 years.

    People are considering we must again, at least, adopt the traditions of, say, 50 or 200 years ago, but in many ways, these are assumptions based on an emotional but often warped sense of comfort that stems from nostalgia. Human Rights? I have outlined before and above the problems of Rights, and believe in a fundamental Responsibility for all life in all we do. Ecologies have changed, the climate has changed/is changing. Our numbers have changed. And all kinds of social patterns have changed. We need to look at each place, case by case. We are in crisis.

    Urban agriculture, urban ecology, community gardening, produce share is totally underestimated here in the UK. These are lands already heavily occupied by our species. To most people, rural land is utterly unavailable. To them, rural land may as well be the deep blue sea or the rocky mountains. Cities and suburbia offer, at least, a chance to form strong community bonds with a critical mass of political will in order to form gardens, homesteads, and varying organic horticultures: Reclamation of the public place. Why do we continue to allow ourselves to be dominated by landowners, NFU, supermarkets, NGOs, and/or corrupt state politics interested only in maintaining the status quo? Bring back food/ecology into local control, where the majority of people reside, including distribution, and let locacede happen where it can be agreed and will be welcome.

    Above all, we are making choices now. Claiming successional processes, or re-introducing trophic species, are an “artifice” in favour of Homo sapien farming practices 50 or 200 years old is a broken concept, because all we do about living within resilient ecologies from now on could, therefore, be classed “artifice.” Remember, and for Earth’s sake, the real “artifice” is pouring tons of chemicals onto the land, draining rivers and water tables, forcing seasonality, and being exclusive about who manages the land, whether it be farmers, rewilders, developers, or industrial biochemical and genetics companies. We can do better and for all life.

     

     

    Audio:

  • Time, and the conscious asteroid.

    The Corpus Clock, photo by me.

    Would it make any difference if we knew our ancestors could see what we are doing to Earth now? I look at the newest cosmological theory of time. Indigenous thinking may be closer to the truth than we in the Westernish may ever have considered. Until now.

     

    On the basis that the Anthropocene is a planetary extinction event, there is no good Anthropocene. The Anthropocene covers only a small part of the full experience of Homo sapiens, indeed the family Homo.

    Could we ever consider earlier periods of the human experience more progressive? Huge energy resources are expended and ecosystems killed for the extreme Capitalists’ yearning to sell that so-called progressive future. For instance, Elon Musk’s private, personal vision for a Mars mission for profit may not be in the full interest of the entire Planet Earth, especially when all is skewed by the idea of making money. The idea of space exploration may be inevitable for our inquisitive species, at some point in time. But surely there should be a union of everyone in any efforts beyond our atmosphere for everyone, and every life form, launched from a secure home planet.

    Sanctuary Earth a given, other than the two main strands of human wellbeing of health and good relationships always a necessity for our species, we already have the technology to produce food, clothing, and shelter in a nature-aligned way here on Earth; an expression of fluminism. All the rest, right now, equates to profit for the few and a dying planet.

    That we in the modern Westernish consider future time as instantly progressive is also a failing. The English language determines a structural perception of time that is different from others and, as it becomes globally dominant, so does the perception of time. We think of time as linear, the past to our left, the future to our right. This is how we write, from left to right, and how I am creating typed words on a screen right now. Einstein’s work on time contended that it’s the fourth dimension, relative to all else via gravity, including how fast we move through space. Perhaps we should write in whirlpool patterns, to reflect the past, present, and future. Consensus continues to build on so much of Einstein’s remarkable insights on relativity.

    Rovelli goes further, and this is where it gets super-interesting to me. In his work on loop quantum gravity theory, time is a non-entity. There are simply events that are related in all directions shaped by gravity. Our neurobiology creates memories in order to survive the impacts of the complexity of almost infinite frames, reflected in how we create film so that we can record and replay. Imagine all the different perceptions of time as a force by all the lifeforms that have ever lived. There may well be beings who perceive more or less of these saved copies in the ether. Such ideas are as mind-bending as Galileo’s assertion that it is actually the Sun that revolves around the Earth and not the other way around. *

    My imagination is running free, and moving from one event to another in the quantum world seems somehow possible, if only we could find a way. Rovelli’s work doesn’t imply universal determination, because the geochemical and physical variables are different from moment to moment, and living beings are constantly making choices. Each wave placed into the cradle of what we call time represents a different universal set of atomic experiences as we spin through space. Who knows whether those experiences might have evolved very differently in life on Earth if we had been more proximate to black holes. If there is other life in the vastness of the universe, the basic perception of experience itself may well be entirely different to our own, and so too ideas of communication. Perhaps, we are already surrounded by messages, and we just don’t have a clue.

    The real nature of time is yet to be fully decoded, though our perceptions of it have huge implications for the way we live our lives, expectations upon future generations, and the way we relate to, and as part of, nature. How do we frame the context of the Anthropocene? Did the Anthropocene begin after the last Ice Age and the transition from hunter-gathering to nomadic shepherding, and then to sedate farming practice? Or the Industrial Revolution and Capitalist/White Eurocentric Colonialism? Nuclear detonations? The geologists continue to argue the implications of all these events in the rock record. Perhaps, Rovelli’s work gives us leeway to accept the past is not something so distant, and could well be more progressive in certain ways than any vision of the future. Regardless, the decisions we make today do not have to prove themselves to be anything other than caring.

    In the Westernish, clocks dominate, and time is money; there is an anxiety about time as a resource; death is time-up unless one believes it is eternally enjoyed in the spiritual afterlife. We know, for sure, we have at least one life. What if the afterlife is in fact our ancestors held inside the cradle of time, and if we are close (the physical nature of this still to be determined) perhaps in certain gravitational fields, or in places which are close, we have subatomic feelings of these past realms. Perhaps, the Everywhen, or the Altjira, or the just plain Good ( The Dreaming, named by anthropologists) of the Australian original peoples are closer to the truth than Relativism could have ever conceived.

    Back to the present, this precious phenomenology right now, one of the remaining species in the order of the Great Apes, Homo sapien, is risking all life ~ ALL LIFE ~ therefore, global evolutionary forces too, for their own purpose. Unlike the previous five known major extinction events caused by random geological and cosmological forces, recorded in time’s cradle somewhere nearby, the Sixth is fully conscious. If we can feel those lives suffering maybe they feel us. We are a conscious asteroid.

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    * Rovelli himself via the FT. 

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  • Virus: The Enormity of Littleness.

    Ocean waves containing trillions of viruses, photo by me.

    Life is never split away to nothingness. Even as prey, we are consumed by others. An ecological death is the breath of others. Sex is a consuming, an appetite. The cell itself is the most exquisite sex, a moment of evolutionary consumption. A very long time ago, one bacteria consumed another and the other survived too. * Both replicated in the union. This is the cell in perfect symbiosis.

    Lynn Margulis, the great biologist and theorist, not only found proof of the process but fathomed a true power in it. From these two fused micro-organisms, and on through time, the reality of all life processes is in this direction ~ together, even after death.

    Here, in the middle of a brutal pandemic, where Covid19 still evades extinction, I’m also going to tell you that viruses count, and in similar ways.

    Viruses are not supposed to be alive, yet their enormous genetic volume swarms through our nagorasphere as if they are one the most intrinsic families of life. They are abundant everywhere there is life. They are even found in the giant sub-seafloor microbiome surviving for thousands of years. They are genetic parasites, though do not always destroy their biological host. They break into living cells to replicate their genetic patterns, and burst out in a process called lysis, which may end the life of the living cell, but not always. They can transfer genes horizontally from species to species, triggering speciation and leaving their ‘marks’ in surviving DNA. 8% of our own genome is laced with the remnants of viral genomes. They shape life by stimulating immune responses, and even by causing death.

    In these many epochs of the living Earth, the flow of metabolism, and togetherness, and consuming, and sex, have remained unbroken for billions of years. Even after global cataclysms, life prevails. It seems unstoppable. Viruses are all part of the flow, like the dark matter of the universe. They are critical ecological agents and possibly have been managing populations of bacteria since way back before the endosymbiosis of the cell.

    I have explained before that it’s probable that Covid19 had been bubbling away in mutualistic symbioses among bat, other mammalian, and even human populations of the forest valleys of Wuhan for some time. That our technologies like air travel have pushed it around the world has proven it to be devastating to novel populations. New viruses naturally take generations for our immune systems to de-code. Highly lethal pathogens are, of course, a dead-end for the viruses themselves, killing their hosts before infecting others, or mutating to infect others, in different ways. Covid19 lies somewhere between a mild immune-stimulating event, able to infect many often before detection and any show of symptoms, and a deadly Category A event, for humans at least. Many other forms of viruses are harmless, or even beneficial.

    Bacteria rule the world, and viruses rule bacteria. In humans, we are realising our virome can manage the populations of our gut biome in positive and negative ways. Anti-bacterial and anti-viral medications save lives, but we don’t know the full extent of the effects upon those critical symbiotic relationships. They leave their trace, like messages through genetic time.

    Most startling of all, and completely mind-blowing to me, the oceanic virome could be so powerful as to be critical to governing our climate. Bacteria and cyanobacteria are the ocean’s recyclers of nutrients and alter chemicals and gases we eat and breathe. A viral infection is the breath of others. As viruses control not only the numbers and densities of bacteria, they also change behaviours. Who knows how far up the trophic levels these effects travel. Despite our curiosity, we still know so little about those enormous systemic effects, including climate.

    Could we ever learn to love viruses? Maybe not. But they are revealing themselves to be as ancient as life; genetic sculptors we symlings could never do without. Just like the origin of the cell itself, bacteria and viruses come together, swap DNA, and leave tiny comet tails of potential throughout all life. I’m sure we will continue to learn more about them, despite deadly pandemics, and even to respect the enormity of their littleness.

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    *Endosymbiosis

     

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