Above an ocean of oxygen

Probably a shorter post than yesterday, but much more meaningful to me.

To tell the story of this epiphany, It may be best to tell the story of the sunclipse behind it (yes, I get ALL my ideas staring at sunclipses, this is why I stare at so many of them).

I was lying on my front in my room, reading a book as I do, when I noticed the clouds yellowing and hopped onto the windowsill, craning most of myself out through the opening to see past the roofs... there was a small brilliant rainbow-tailed sundog, already fading into the changing angle of light (I saw one of those a few months back for the first time in my life and since then I've seen dozens. So not complaining.)... even without it, I could tell that it was going to be a phenomenal sunclipse - and that I was going to miss it if I didn't move slightly over a mile to the east very, very quickly.

Ran instairs, grabbed my boots (haven't got the new shoes yet), pulled them on, stretched briefly and bolted out the door. Slightly over a mile of desperate bursts of sprinting interspersed by jogging later, I got to the top of my Favourite Hill outside Doulting and collapsed on the same grass that caused last night's rambling epiphany... I could see another huge round eye-pulling lens of sky above me and, bending my neck forward uncomfortably, I could see the arc of reds and golds and yellow whites streaking a backdrop of turquoise that is a June sunclipse... And while it was beautiful, the neck-bending was quite uncomfortable and I wasn't quite finished being collapsed enough for prolonged sitting-up.

So, I pulled myself to my feet briefly, faced myself eastward and collapsed again, feeling the weird feet-uphill feeling and gratefully letting my head loll back. "This will be kinda novel", I thought as my eyes slipped sun-ward....

Whoa...

To backtrack a bit, I've for a long time been a fan of Buckminster Fuller, especially his work about re-shuffling human thought away from the norm, works which mirror my thoughts rather well... I was particularly impressed by the neologisms he made to get people to frame the world better in their mind (sunclipse is indeed one of them). I'd been having a lot more difficulty quite integrating "Outstairs" and "Instairs" into my conceptual foundations... The illusion of 'up' and 'down' is built into us at a very deep level, one of our senses is even built around it (balance is a sense just as truly as sight or touch. If you don't think so, try being 'balance-blind' and feel the utter disorientation).

Over the past month or so I've looked at the landscape and tried with great difficulty to strip away a layer to the truth... Conceptually, I know I'm attracted by the weakest distinct force to a hard layer in the arbitrary 'side' of a colossal, roughly orb-shaped body, rather than standing 'on' a faintly curving surface that I'm so accustomed to thinking of.

Viscerally, though, it was so hard to shake the assumptions... one of my main perceptual inputs is founded around the idea that my head is currently aligned with the quail 'up', that my feet are roughly aligned with 'down', and as long as I registered that those concepts could not me shaken.

Bound to the hillside, all that changed.

My head very slightly aligned with illusory 'up', that layer finally fell away into the ocean of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and water vapour (and poison) that I now knew viscerally to be beneath me. Looking down on the shapes of the clouds, either the angle of my eyes or just the perceptual benefits of a brand new viewpoint granted me a much better insight into their layers and structure, the way they preceded and anti-ceded one another, the distance between the temperature and pressure layers...

And suspended above it all by the magnet-like attraction of That Weak Force, I was spread-eagled at the very bottom of an enormous floating rock, for of course 'top' and 'bottom' have very little meaning either, except for as fulcrum points. I could see along to my left the grass as it seemed to dangle, the upward curve of the hill, the grey shape of the town sprouting in the valley-hollow of the green looked more like slime-mould than any of my metaphor-similes had put it before. The comparison to lichen and beetles on the underside of a lifted river rock was just too good to miss.

We were being keel-hauled on the bottom of Spaceship Earth.

And below me, it was indescribable. I'll try anyway, of course.

In reversal of my perception of that curve, I was reminded continually of the sunsight photos the ISS takes periodically... I tried in vain to get a good hint with the inverted photo you see above. But I now think I have a much better understanding of the view from Low Orbit... Though there was no earth beneath it, my new gas ocean had just the same layers of sun-edged clouds progressing down to the illusory surface. My imagination was all geared up to conjure oh-so-distant waves on that blue canvas. Little patches of cirrocumulus in the lowest/highest layer were so very easy to mistake for little archipelagos of white-sanded islands, slowly sinking into the sea as the sun stopped glinting on them. I stayed there, paralysed on the underside of the planet for a long time. Venus became visible, and I was given yet another perpective jolt by the sight of the distant planet hanging below me. Were it not for the cold slowly seeping into the field and the knowledge that I had to write my experience down, I would have stayed out until my New Ocean darkened further and became translucent, get a taste of hanging under a rock above unshielded infinity. The lights of the lichen/town would have spoiled it anyway, I'll endeavour to feel it when I get to the mountains.

Eventually, knowing I had to share the freshness of the experience lest it flee me too, I reluctantly put my foot on the earthy sky/ground and pressed up/down, levering myself over and turning my head back to the old-fashioned view in the process. I was so startled by the transition that I rolled over a couple more times, catching that shocking switch. Ocean/dome, Ocean/dome. I think I like ocean better.

Ran the way back, as well, needed to get to a keyboard. There was an amusing incident as I passed the cargo loading bay of the cider factory. One of the forklift-truck men clearly saw me sprinting past and grinning, and shouted out something like "Oi, what's the hurry, mate?"

"HiSorryCan'tStopJustHadALifeChangingExperienceNeedToWriteAboutItNiceTalkingToYouByyyye..."

So, finally, after all my kraken-like struggles with the inadequacy of the English language and my own grasp of how to communicate to people, I can inform by example. Wait for a good sunclipse, with great reams of high cirrus clouds and a turquoise horizon. For some of you around the curve of the world to the west of me, sunclipse has yet to happen or is just starting. Does it look like it's going to be good? Can you get to a decent hill?

Good.

Put your shoes on (or if the ground between you and the hillside isn't to jaggy, don't), go out there, climb the hill, don't quite go all the way to the top. Enjoy the sunclipse for what it's worth for a bit first... then face your feet away from it and lie down, your head downhill. Hang on the underside of the World, above the ocean of oxygen that we lie at the bottom or the top of (or in truth, neither).

Gaze into those beautiful depths and re-assign everything you thought you knew about up and down. The soil is above you, processes of greater mass rise and it is the lighter processes that fall. Acknowledge that these new directions are just as valid as the 'Up' and 'Down' you used to know, i.e. that both are so much wind and illusion.

I'm glad I could explain so straightforwardly for once. Examples rock.

Happy hanging.

- David

Aleph

How should I feel small

Beneath the open sky

When at last I see all that I am?

This fragment of poetry has been spinning around in my head for something like two years. I can't remember where it came from. Perhaps I read it somewhere and forgot the source. Perhaps I saw a verse a bit like it in a poem I remember not at all, and the fragment has been twisted into what it is now. Perhaps I even made it myself in one of the great swathes of time of which I have no memories to speak of. Perhaps I found it in a dream (is that the same as having made it?), and of course I rarely remember my dreams at all.

Regardless of it's source, it's meant a whole polytopia of different things to me over the course of years of personal development. The an earlier state of the process I'm forced to refer to as 'I' and 'me' (for want of a better language, or better yet a good DNI) saw hazy connections between the shape of the clouds and synesthesiac representations of his/my emotional states, felt some strange pride in the perceived connection between his/my mind and such a beautiful thing.

More recently, it was something like my acknowledgement of the origins of the particles making up my body and the wider universe... seeing the majesty of the sky, I was seeing some similarity to the phenomena that birthed my synergetic components... and that's a meaning I still like, and it's a component of the larger understanding I came across this evening beneath that open sky.

Cut to an hour ago. The curve and spin of the planet is pulling me and the horizon away from the sun, my vantage point in relation to the air above that distant curve filters the light of the sun to a warm red-orange, like the embers of a fire. The gradient of the clouds sheeting the atmosphere and following that barely-distinguishable curve reflect different bands of light at me in a pleasing gradient. I'm lying on the highest hill in a few miles, arms spread and looking slightly cruciform on the stalks of what was recently tall grass and is now hay bales. Looking straight up, the sky from my vantage point resembles a lens, and I stare up at the perceived apex, trying to glimpse the infinity I know is out there but which is hidden by that beautiful blue layer of scattered light.

I'm running about three thought processes in parallel: one about leaves, one of thoughts about various people I know, and the other seeing the sky in front and feeling the grass behind and juggling concepts of scale, perception, context and perspective (I've been reading some of Moravec's stuff about interpretation spaces and it's stuck).

Compared to the vastness I know to be in front of me but cannot see, I am a collection of quantum blips adhered by gravity to a mote of dust floating in a sunbeam/Compared to the sessile life-forms I'm lying on top of and the micro-organisms in the soil beneath them, and in the air and in every part of my body and In my every breath, I am a vast pseudo-deity of coherence and consequence and beautiful interrelationships of focused biology.

Compared to the spherical world-ship I am a tiny integral function and product of, let alone the entity we call Galaxy in which it is a similar speck, I have lived a few microseconds and glimpsed and learned infinitesimally little/compared to the things that live in my mouth, the butterfly that flew past me as I walked up the hill, let alone the human children who die every day a few days or hours or minutes old, I have lived an eternity and am functionally omniscient. We are microbes and we are gods. It probably takes a tiny effort to switch between those two perspectives. For one who can hold simultaneous multiple worldveiws, being both of them is quite an enlightening experience.

Those three lines of untraceable poetry sprung to my mind, and, as if meeting an old acquaintance and wondering whether you still like them, I turned it over in light of this new insight/lens/filter, as well as some of the other insights, epiphanies and conceptual markers I've picked up from my travels. The sunclipse was over and the sky was getting less directly interesting, so I stood up, looked around a bit, stretched and set off on the run back across the fields to town. As I was vaulting over a fence when the lazy flows of self washing around and bouncing off each other, I suddenly came to one of the emergent-idea things that I like to call a Confluence.

Like a paradigmatic layer being ripped away and letting the thoroughly-metaphorical waters of thought and being flow into a new deep pool or shaft or maybe lazing cavity (though mixing metaphors never helps to explain), I could see a meaning to Those Three Lines more profound than all the others I'd tied to it over the years.

I've acknowledged for a while now the nature of sophonce as a homunculus experience nestled within an opaque cushioning layer of data. I tried to explain that epiphany before in a rambling that I never put up, because I couldn't make it make sense. I'll try short-form.

I'll leave the wonderful connected insights for another post or possibly even a recorded talk on one of the video sites, Alex Kaapa style, because I can explain it better by wandering around an empty room and talking to no-one than I can ever do in writing.

But, basically, the 'we' that we acknowledge with the word 'we', the 'I' that 'I' am not yet cognitively flexible enough to avoid thinking of, the 'you' that 'you' perceive to be reading this are abstractions, our original function something like a cognitive sorting engine, a circuit for all the beautiful efficient animal prediction-and-control processes to... to "bounce ideas off" and to find out what the other 'teams' have been doing and make connections. As Peter Watts put it, like the pointy-haired boss off of Dilbert, signing memos, passing them on, and taking all the credit for the company. We are the circuit with the power to acknowledge... but like the superficial manager and router in the metaphor, we can only see the surface 'buzz' from each team as they try to explain the process to one not educated in their field of work. The communication between sections of the brain to the 'mediator' (sophonce) is about as superficial as current language is for communicating true thought between two humans.

The patterns and relationships we see in the world are the explaining-to-a-numpty feedback of the deeply integrated pattern of prediction algorithms the unique 'team' lobes have developed from observation of their particular specialisation... food-detection, social analysis, memory storage (those memories we can call to mind are again as talk is to thought, our brain can remember a lot more of our previous iterations (lives) than 'we' can... I think people with eidetic memory are those who have a clearer connection between the memory and the 'sophonce' circuits, people with super-functioning mathematical abilities similarly so, same for 'empaths', etc.) and so on.

And our 'being-ness' is something like an iffy boss in the way it misunderstands certain team input, overvalues certain data over others, and makes biased decisions based on it's slightly skewed and under-specialised view of the situation, and the lobes knowing that while their director is by no means perfect, they have no capacity to object or even acknowledge how the other lobes are working, and so they all go along with their part of sophonce's decisions, and 'act to keep it happy' according to their specialisation. This 'keeping the boss happy' is what leads to the phenomenon of preconscious free will (this explains a lot better than I do, I'm just doing the basics. Yes, that's what me covering the basics looks like).

What we end up with, then, is the sophonce living purely as a not-really-decision-making conduit, being fed data by every'one' else, including the sensory cortices who have already parsed the sight for them. 'We' can already be said to be living in telepresence, VR, whatever. It's Eric hunting's 'actual transparency vs. virtual transparency' thing applied to brains. We are just a stream of experiences and data suspended between the nodes that are doing the actual work and causing them to misunderstand each other.

All this I acknowledged as something I'd learned previously, this I acknowledged whilst leaping the fence. Running through then next field, I pondered it's relevance to the poem, and whether it really applied anymore...

And to my surprise and elation it fits more than ever. If i take 'sky' as not the sheath of gas it really is and instead take it as my interpretation of the shape of the cloud, the colour I think I see, and the fact that I am my thoughts and perceptions, I realise that I'm more expansive than I thought, even in my musings on the nature of scale as I lay on the grass. I am the sky. I am the trees. I am but a pale reflection of true beauty and complexity but every part of my process is achingly beautiful, stunningly complex nevertheless.

For the rest of the run I sort of elatedly ran off a list that reminds me rather a lot of the longest and most beautiful sentance in the history of literature, from Jorge Luis Borges' story about the quest for the Aleph. Find it and read it, it will change you.

My list, as I ran home, ran something like this

Beneath the open sky, at last I see all that I am. I am every blade of grass I can see here, in their infinite varying rows that are but illusion. I am the clouds that spiral above this body. I am the feeling of my hips and the bones of my legs vibrating with the percussion of the ground, I am the muscles that move them, I am the elegant relationship between these feelings, I am the dirt beneath the balls of my feet, I am these leaves I duck beneath, I am the wind of my passing on my face, I am the feeling of the shape of my face and the knowledge of the variations of it's look in a million mirrors, I am the face and appearance of every person I know and many I do not, I am the knowledge that behind those faces lie other strange collections of beauty I will never know, unaware of their expansiveness. I am the knowledge that behind the sky is infinity, I am what I see of every other person, just as they are what they see of me. I am the guesswork as to what they feel and experience, the attempt to empathise and the knowledge that I allow my hand to be warmed by a sunbeam and clam to hold the sun in my palm, I am the unfolding patterns of a Mandelbrot set, I am the memory of mountains and I am the assumption that they are still there, for I cannot know. I am a thousand places vividly remembered in a little area of the world made of of little bits of Europe. I am motorways and oceans, I am the taste of an apple turnover from Belgium, I am the still images of places I have never physically been, (yes, been) seen in photograps. I am the sweep of stratocirrus and I am the strange way it reminds me of walking down the streets of Santillana del Mar, I am the spires of sandstone cathederals, I am the veins in a leaf, I am my own organs, I am the evidence of billions of people, people like snowflakes, utterly unique yet so similar from a distance and there's so damn many of them that we forget to pay attention to the uniqueness and beauty, I am the taste of eggs and grapes....

It went on like that for some time.... I just thought I'd share this insight while it's fresh in my mind and I'm enjoying it

A Thing, y'ken?

So I had slightly skewiffy day, in a good way. Didn't so much skip college as overshoot it a little, decided to walk there since it was such a nice day outside (seven or eight miles to wells, probably more considering I took the scenic route, then a bus ride to Glastonbury). But I've got a brilliant excuse for tomorrow "Of course I was doing coursework, I was doing the most important bit: daydreaming, mostly).
One of the many things I've been pondering, in parallel with the social layout of Aquarius floating settlements and the possible applications of P.M.'s "Bolo'Bolo" concept, was yet another train of thought concerning the concept of Utopia.

Utopia is widely recognised as the ultimate aspiration of any (nice) society, and various ideas have been bandied about (especially in science fiction) about how it could be acheived... There have been a thousand conjectures about the methods, about how it could go wrong, all the grizzly and unfortunate problems underlying the concept of a perfect society. I was thinking about it in relation to The New Millenial Project and my "History"'s take on it, and was reminded of a rather good passage in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (read that, by the way)

Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximising the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it [...] Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. thus for every substance they recycled
K = I - e/E
where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K=I-1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the biologists' favourite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existance on Mars

The lesson that I took away from that (perhaps weirdly) was a clearer idea of the value of asymptotes in planning things. And this afternoon whilst walking around and enjoying the bluebells and trees and what have you, is that Utopia, as a concept, is an asymptote line runnig through the plotted goals-vs-sucesses of every society.
Just like thanks to the laws of thermodynamics there can be no such thing as a truly closed system, thanks to some very deep traits of human behavioural evolution I don't think there can be any such thing as a 'perfect' human society - a true Utopia - without severely compromising the values that such a system claims to stand for, most significantly a sense of freedom and personal value for individuals... But as the biologist's favourite hobby demonstrates, you should always keep trying to get closer to the unreachable.

Reinventing society and economy, reformatting the human body to whatever purpose, enlarging the subgenual prefrontal cortex, whatever... None of it will bring us a utopia, but despite the final bar being an infinite distance away, it can always bring us closer. That's got to be a nice thought... right?

Gotta write this down...

Okay, sod asteroids, I'm back with a vengeance and an idea (or possibly an elaboration) I just had.

Spent the evening so far reading some quotes, listening to some great music and talking to a magnificent person (ye know who ye are), when, just as I was about to head up (indeed, should probably be in bed right now), the various threads of themes I've been pondering for a while have suddenly coalesced into an Observation.

People are Conway Patterns

To cite my main references in quick succession, I'd like to highlight Martine Rothblatt, who I think coined the word 'beme' and shares a lot of concepts with my personal take on transhumanism, a recommendation that readers go and muck about with Conway's Game of Life until they can see what I'm on about, and as personal experience reference my entire recent life

To start this possibly-rambling (I'm tired, might edit this in the morning, might not) observation off properly, I'd like to quote that eternal pre-emptive plagiariser of other people's statements, Oscar Wilde:

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Now, good old Oscar most probably intended this as a witty remark degrading the so-called simpletons around him for their un-originality, in his self-proclaimed, we-all-want-to-punch-him-really sort of genius way... but I think he may have touched upon an important point of human psychology.
What is the essence of a person, an individual? it's the thing philosophers have been wrangling with for the last seven thousand years. Some don't even try and chuck it all onto some kind of "soul", others will enthuse that it's the memories of the person's previous present that governs how they respond to it in it's current form, and I'm probably somewhere in this group. some will say that a person's particular way of thinking and reacting is determined by a specific personal quirk of the neural architecture, like a thumbprint or a retina or an iris.
I posit that individuals are collective of ideas and memes, ranging fractally in scales of big ideas and cultural buzz and sub-concepts gleaned from throughout their development. These patterns of qualia mutate and interact with each other, occasionally merging and destroying each other or fusing into a larger meme-plexes that in tern wander off and interact with each other, cradled in a set of ridiculously simple rules.
Anyone who's had a really good muck about with Conway's Game of life and has a good observational mind will know exactly what I'm talking about here, right down to the analogues of 'glider' patterns. A sophont mind is, essentially, a very large semi-contained conway-esque fractal of memes and ideas with wonderfully hazy boundaries as to where it ends and others begin. To use Martine Rothblatt's term, a beme (I like that word, it sounds enough like 'meme' to establish the connection but can also be split down to 'be me', which is a perfect summary). Think of each idea as a black box on the grid, a box which in turn is a full grid with it's own patterns of boxes, and so on. If certain boxes are in the right place at the right time, a new one is spawned from their being there, which interacts with them to spawn new complexes, perhaps involving the original boxes disappearing. Each beme, each complex, occasionally gets it's boxes, ideas, in the right configuration to spawn of a collection of boxes off in a 'glider' pattern that goes off and eventually hits another beme and starts interfering with it in new and wonderful ways... and you quickly see a rather nice complexity-theory driven model for human sophonce creep up and bite you in the frontal lobe.

It has a wonderful synergy with evolution and computer science that appeals to all my main interests, and applying the analogy/model to things brings all sorts of new insights into our society and, to some extent, human behaviour. The whole veiw kinda reminds me of Anders Sandberg's notion of neo-taoism for the fictional colony of Penglai in his rpg setting... actually, Neo-Taoism is one of the major patterns in the complex-storm that's been dancing and evolving its way into me having this idea over the course of the last three days.

Dispite my current exhausted-but-loving-it state and the fact that I really should have turned in an hour ago, I'm really exited about all the prospects this thinking model implies, expect further musings and mini-posts over the next few days as I develop it.

will do more tomorr- *collapses*

Endeavour Stage 2, or, Buggering around with massive rocks

For any of my imaginary readers who aren't familiar with the weird ideas of the That Lot, as of some time last Wednesday (starting with a throwaway comment getting out of hand and working up from there), me and a few of my friends have been designing a micro-nation, or rather a sort of Micro-meme-polity, not tied to any particular land. Think something like The Culture, except with an anarcho-democracy instead of the Minds, a much more open approach to morphological freedom, and an approach to external contact more similar to the Zetetic Elench (if you haven't read Excession, what I'm on about is that instead of buggering about with other people's cultures to make them 'better', we let them influence us a bit, learn from them). It's been named The Endeavour.

None of us can quite work out whether we're taking this seriously or not, but in any case it makes a wonderful excuse for siliness, thought-experiments about land which might teach us a few planning skills, writing up strange legal documents, giving each other silly titles (with associated Special Hats) and some fun speculative fiction about what might happen if the Endeavour was let loose on... well... anything bigger than a feild or two.

Plans for actual land for the Endeavour range from fairly feasable ideas of getting a few obscure feilds somewhere and setting up an earthship village, to my personal favourite "For when we've got a bit firmer footing" plan of colonising a big ****off asteroid. I've personally taken it upon myself to try and work out how we could go about actually doing this (with us somehow actually getting into space being a given). And I thought it might make for a fun blog post or two (maybe some stuff about proposed Endeavour demarchy systems, gift and barter economies, and conlangs later too... a theoretical entity like this can make for quite a fun sub-plex)

I've only recently taken a real interest in asteroid habitats (as opposed to slighly more ambitious constructs like Niven rings and Banks orbitals) when I heard about Cole Bubbles, which have an aesthetic I'm very fond of.

Essentailly, back in the early 1960's, when Men were Men and Aerospace Engineers dreamt BIG, Dandridge Cole of Martin Co. suggested making artificial-g colonies from nickel-iron astorids. Process was simple: drill a hole to the center of the asteroid, pumo a boatload of water in, then seal up. Then, using truly huge mirrors, refelct sunlight onto the asteroid until it nearly melted. The water inside would boil, and what with the nickel-iron alloy being soft and malleable, it'd blow up like a balloon... When i read about he concept and saw some of the rather ispiring illustrations, especially the ones featuring the landscaped interior. Strikes a personal vibe as well since it looks a bit like a scottish glacial valley from the 'gound'

As wonderful as the idea is... I'm skeptical of it in its simplest form. The steam would find a way to vent out of the rock waaay before the iron got soft enough to start expanding through pressure. It could potentially be done with some ridiculously intense magnetic manipulation, but it would take far too long. Put it in the 'if we discover force-feilds' pile for later.

Personally, I think a better idea would be to hollow out an existing really big C- or M- type asteroid with a rougly spindly shape, like 216 Kleopatra and terraform the inside surfaces once you have a large hollow cylinder. This would take a lot longer for the initial mining but does reduce the need for finding some way to contain superheated steam from rushing out of a huge rock... you could possibly even combine the two methods with an M-type by expanding some sections and mining others depending on the consistancy of different materials.

Later in this blog or possibly subsequent edits of this post, theres a lot of material that will be useful in plannig the terraforming process that I've downloaded but have yet to read. Expect:

Spin dynamics vs. human adaptability

Atmosphere

Laying down the ground

Water cycles

The Luminaire (artificial sunlight)

Dwellings, transport, etc.

Fun! (detailing the sorts of Wild Hoopy Stuff one can get up to in one of these habitats... this is the Endeavour, after all)

Corpses (a cheery title)

I choose this as my first musing because I've been thinking about it for most of the day and beacuse it's the subject I've chosen for my new college main project (we were given the subject of "The Living and the Dead" and they'll see what we do with it, basically).

Corpses, essentially, are animal organisms whose nervous systems are too badly damaged (esp. The brain). We label them as 'dead', though in fact this is so far from the truth that it boggles me... Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of biology knows that a corpse is teeming with life, continues to be part of the biosphere (anyone who's read John Stewart Collis' "The Triumph of the Tree" may remember a rather illuminating bit about a cow's relationship to it's feild), indeed, eventually becomes part of the medium for new bodies with fully functioning nervous systems, a sort of materialisic reincarnation. Coral reefs could be described as remarkable biuldings made up of corpses (perhaps eerily paralleled by certian architectural oddities such as this chandeleir in the czech republic). An idea for a quick, simple, possibly slightly cheapskate artwork would be to scoop some soil up from a local forest and label it 'graveyard earth'. It's bound to be true, eventually.

Another thing I've always loved seeing are the corpses of towns and cities, particularly the wonderfully evocative photos of Pripyat near chernobyl, with it's moss growing over people's abandoned posessions, its wonderful un-lived-in-ness that's so utterly alien to a city, it's surprisingly sucessful animal population, and - a find so wonderfully strange that it tickles my xenobiology branches - an adapted fungus scraped out of the reactor that eats gamma radiation. Also of note are some of the ghost towns of america (at least the ones where there's enough plantlife to acheive the metaphor I've been looking for in the project). These are relevant as the corpses of cities - It can no longer support it's nervous system (humans) but thousands of different strains of life invande and grow out of the crevices to slowly bring it back to the earth.

A new polyp is formed

Greetings, salutations, whatever, you currently-non-existant people.

This blag is, essentially, a place for me to try and compose my observations, impressions and speculations on the nature of everything into a form that might be roughly legible to other people - my normal way of expressing my ideas is by the use of very scribbly and slapdash mindmaps with quick fineliner sketches and branches leading off to single words like "BRILLIANT!" or references to people's blogs, classical poetry, obscure books, and anything else that I think plexes well with my current multiple streams of thought - and possibly even induce people to comment with corrections, suggestions of things they've read that I haven't, or even general opinions (though that'll probably come later when I've actually, y'know, written stuff).

I'll be endeavouring to make as many links to relevant online sources as I can per post, see if I can commuincate the plexing process sufficiently, feel free to suggest new branches.

And for any imaginary readers wonderign about the blog adress, yes, effervescent is my word of the day.