This blue orb floating in a void is ground for the reiteration of a species, whose politicians, scientists, and technicians, corporations, philosophers and poets have finally reached "Headland's huge, cairn-studded, fall / into the sea," dying from modernity's waste around data points. With no return to the former stable reality: pacts signed, sealed, forgotten. Climbing past where I'd stopped before, from now on I will seek a world in which grid cells are updated using an internal, or ‘reference,’ copy of motor commands. This process, called 'path integration,' has the desirable property that regardless of the path of movement, the most striking marks are the most misleading, for a planet that has no boundaries has no end.

 

 

Headland's huge: L. Welch. From, "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings." In, Ring of Bone: Collected Poems. San Francisco, 2012.
grid cells are updated: J. Hawkins, et.al., “A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex.” Hypothesis and Theory, 11 January 2019.