“Holocene-trained
humans are extraordinarily ill prepared to master anything,
especially a planet.” B. Latour, “Gaia
2.0 / Down to Earth.” Lovelock
Centenary Conference,
July 2019.
3:1
The
Green Man with vegetal hair and virtual eyes, is a
continuum of becoming.
I can feel him like a feral animal on the prowl, scuttling
back into intangibilities,
into the gray dust. There is no more settling in. To be conscious
is to be equal
ethically to what you are conscious of.
3:2
On the steep climb up a red clay road, horseshoe tracks
suddenly broke into a gallop,
running toward the
smell of sulfur
and blood lingering from when the centaur “reeled
away…his heart like a wild storm,”(1) erupting
from Iron Age
Gods of Mining
and War.
3:3
In
old age the brain draws its synapses
closer
together for more intimacy and faster
calculations. Names slip
into crevasses.
Recognition sways to the caustic music
of
Gaia’s
Dance Macabre. Life and death
are no longer the same process. Death
is
the
whole process.
3:4
One simple definition of organic life is self-organizing
chemistry that can reproduce
itself, and pass on
its genetic materials encoded as DNA. How would life
be
defined
for fabricated beings, whose organs are made of clever
alloys? What is Life? would
be better asked as: What is existence? Not, What
does it mean to exist, as meaning
is becoming confused with mathematics. Science’s
nectar is philosophy’s hemlock.
Algorithms
will fear to tread “where the unknown haunts
us in our innermost self,
at the farthest point of being.”(2) Hijacked
by religions and institutions, spirituality
will reemerge as the essential incompleteness
of a creatively evolving mind.
Necessary pursuits, such as art and science,
may be subsumed by artificial
intelligence, but an always incomplete
unconscious will remain beyond AI’s
capability to replace. What’s unknowable is the unconscious’s
natural state.
In
Yolngu mythology, “Time was created through
the transformation of ancestral
beings into a place, the place being
forever the mnemonic of the event.”(3)
A path
taken is taken, but to where?
The past is an echo that has no calling.
There's only
finding one’s own being-in-place.
High mind, deep mind, the Unborn Mind reaches
a point of no return where
a company of rocks oversees a valley
with rows of carrots and beets. Gulp
some water, then climb higher, to where a lung-gum-pa
may race around a
bend, plowing me under to feed the future.
Old
Stony Face is pockmarked, mottled and grossly overweight.
As a man
she’d
be an ugly Calibanian creature.
As a rock she was one of Gaia’s
virgins, dancing
and
feasting
until, too large to move, she hunkered
down in the shadows of this
mountain’s
lofty brow.
3:9
Humans who had migrated over most
of the planet lost touch with
each other,
each
finding their
own territory, to which
they adapted their color, language,
economy,
mythology,
arts
and technology. For
a long time, I only heard my
own breathing,
crunch
of familiar feet on hardpacked
ground, and
the
buzz
of hungry insects
honing in.
With
the planet’s interlocking life-support systems
brushing aside unnatural
boundaries drawn by our
histories, the path forward is strewn
with obstacles
and
worn out routes.
We may miss
a
sign, an existential turn,
and step into a
pile of dung.
3:11
Every
description of nature opens to a deeper
level
of
knowledge.
Hiking
today from the
mountain’s
sweaty brow, into
the canyon’s
cool
shadows, to
a pump draining the
aquifer's hidden moisture.
The
concrete culvert sports a sign: “Fish
Passage Diversion:
Keep Out.”
But it's always too dry for this Steelhead
salmons’ alternate route. Here
the
intimacy between the earth’s waterways,
its atmospheric
systems,
and
sediments needed for the ocean’s windward
shores
are ignored.
Was
my bruised knee caused by two branes bumping into
each
other,
or by bone meeting terrestrial stone? Causes are not the
aggregate of
information, but are born from
interpreting
effects.
Is Big Data another
Absolute, just when
my knee is beginning
to heal?
Presently the AI enterprise consists of a comparatively
small STEM-educated cabal
inventing, investing, philosophizing
in midst of billions of people to whom concepts
such as posthumanism
ignore the grit of their daily existence. No matter how much
data is collected, algorithms written, works of art made,
we must not fail this planet!
3:15
Human
voices ascend the mountain. Stone steps
climb to
where the path
splits.
Gripped by a hawk's giant talons,
a small rabbit is flying
into a
reddening dawn.
After
an embryo refigures itself, it begins an indeterminate
maturation entangled
with all other biological life “that know themselves
to be part of multiple realities.”(4)
Finally it appears in the world' But what does appearance
mean if virtual realities
are
given a substantial place?
Boots absorb heat-hardened soil, dust clings to their tightly
tied laces.
A Zen Master shouted, “Emptiness! It’s
not what consciousness is but
what it isn’t.” The arts gain a foothold
where philosophers stumble on
the pedigree of their steps. Not before, nor too far ahead.
On the ridge, a barbed wire fence was cut and pulled aside.
Behind it, an
overgrown trail leads to a precipice overlooking a valley.
From here I can
see a world that doesn’t
look like the charts
of Earth-system scientists
plotting the temperature as it climbs
toward
heights not reached in the
past fifty million years.
Valleys are soulful, while mountain peaks, as in having
a peak experience,
are spiritual, “From the viewpoint of soul going
up the mountain feels like
a desertion.”(5) Along
this path,
Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” is
rising
from Utah's Great Salt Lake; or, rather, the water
is evaporating around it.
Chunks
of rock have sheared off the hillside, or are slowly
wearing down
to
pebbles. As cities spread out, the Hagazussa, who sat
on the fence marking
town from wilderness, lift off and ride toward
a future deprived of a
future.
3:21
An atmospheric river
streams voices not heard since “A
recording of thunder
to enter abruptly
after 63 to 70% of the agreed-upon performance time-length
has elapsed.”(6) Cast
off boots and rewire hominins for a Homo Cyberneticus
with lug-soled
feet.
Today all paths are muddy, infinitively dimensional,
unscalable variables, and
all “hominid ecologies”(7) are
extinct, on the cusp of extinction, tracked, caged,
or kept as neotenic pets.
Poor Frankenstein,
Square cement boots,
Only wanted love. (8)
1. Homer, The
Odyssey. R. Fagles, trans. New York, 1999.
p.434.
2. E. Jabès, From the Desert to the Book. Barrytown
NY, 2010. p.72.
3. H. Morphy, “Landscape and the Reproduction of the
Ancestral Past.” In, E. Hirsh and M. O’Hanlon,
eds, The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford, UK, 1995. p.188.
4. S. Rowland. In, S. Rowland and J. Weishaus, Jungian
Arts-Based Research and “The Nuclear Enchantment
of New Mexico.” London
and New York, 2020. p.80.
5. J. Hillman, “Peaks and Vales.” In, J.
Moore, ed., A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. New
York, 1989. p.116.
3. J. Cage, “Lecture On The Weather.” Performance
Notes, B111. Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in 1975.
4. L.R. Bryant. Larval Subjects Blog. “Denaturing
Nature.” May 24, 2102. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com
5. J. Weishaus. From, “The Coffee House.”