~~ organism http://www.alansondheim.org/organism1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/organism2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/organism3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/organism4.jpg ...microbiomes, yes, organisms are collocations, loosened communities, matrices. but there's more to it than that, time plays a factor, temporal striations: what constitutes an organism, form or formlessness in time, undergoing sheaves of potential structures. high-speed photography brings this to bear on the world; in these images there are forms at the edges of waves, similar to those i've found at the surface of the ocean. the forms are composed of surface-tension skins, molecular interactions, similarities throughout their bodies which exist for only a fraction of a second. but this is not to declare them dead or inert, anymore than clays can be considered such. we've read endlessly about formlessness, but this high-speed melding creation, creating, creativity, surrounds us, is within and without us, within and without the very processes of our worlding thought. i'm in awe, always, of these creations, of the intense and intrinsic beauty of our planet, even now, in the midst of a granular destruction unsurpassed in its history. these forms rival the burgess or chengjiang strata; in a sense, they are emptied of all life, but in another sense, they are replete with it and among it. this may be the only hope left in the world, although most likely not for us, and not for them, for anything or anyone, either. instead it's a hope that beauty will continue even if unobserved, that the shuddering and markings of the planet will resonate for billions of further years. so these images of organisms are a harbinger of a futureless future, a world as if we were still around, a hope as if there were still hope, for something emergent on the horizon; we have never read the signs, nor comprehended the little we have seen, these evanescent, transcendent, and transitory forms among them. http://www.alansondheim.org/negative1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/negative2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/negative3.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/negative4.jpg ~~ organism _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
