Bacteria (1) Microbes, orbs, the perfect spherical intervention. We come in glistening order, an end-specific entropy of growth. Empty us of simulation and you will see the clawed pieces scraped back from reality. No interest in the little generations of pathogens. The spectacle of membrane after membrane peeling itself back into form forms, like a sugar crystal. We move in cytoplasmic light, the casing elastic as memory tracing the runes of humans we slip in and out of their skin without, within the hidden borders counting a page leafing collection of copies, the multiplying fish tails we flail in the broad blood sun of the skin’s meridian a future in lime green ink and a twist that we are antibiotic pupae, lost eggs in miniature-- pastelled, ecstatic.
Bacteria (2) Remember us? In cytoplasmic reveries we drift in your kitchen. The keepers of alcohol, we distil the magic that smells of wine. We are annihilated in great numbers, an industrial wipe-out of lemon-scented death. They do not grasp our benefits to health. Granules store food in little bubbles. We are sweetness and feed upon sugar; a nucleus is the eye of our governance. I am looking for optimum temperatures; my sole aim is reproduction and for that I must warm my cockles. Have you put me in the fridge? I fear for my life, my enzymes.
Resurgence, n. An increase or revival after a period of little activity, popularity, or occurrence.
Abstract: 'Ecosystem' as base root metaphor. In the stories of the ancients, the sphinx was a deadly speaker of riddles. The Greek anti-hero Oedipus, that ill-fated wanderer who has unwittingly (and rather unfortunately) ensconced himself into the collective mind of human culture, began his descent into unreflective arrogance by answering the sphinx’s riddle. So too could it be suggested that the practices of philosophical and literary enquiry are littered with infinite chasms which threaten to wholly engulf the self-assured seeker of knowledge. As one trawls through the depths of human dis/ingenuity, one necessarily encounters an organically incongruent swathe of irresolvable tensions. Not the least of these concerns the question of consciousness and its role in the ongoing story of organic life, and particularly its prominence in the development of homo sapiens towards something virtually unrecognisable to our closest primate ancestors. It’s within this long misunderstood capacity, to seemingly fold our perceptions in upon themselves, that there arises a tendency for compulsive reimagining, a splintering and splitting-off into private worlds. Of course this is humanity’s blessing in its potential reach for adaptation towards unique circumstances, and its curse in the possibilities for self-obfuscation, both of which are contained within our shared response to this chimerical gift. It’s not without good reason that thinkers since the Enlightenment era have emphasised religious thought as the root of evil. Centuries of imperialism and bloody, brute domination have continued the roll-on effects of our instinc-
tual tribal and animal tendencies. The manner with which different social groups defined their relation to the inexplicable mysteries of life became semiotic totems of the foundation of social bonds—those whose being and expression opposed these formations threatened the admission that their constitution and arrangement was altogether arbitrary. Fear of the ‘other’ became fear of the certainty that one might become similarly ‘othered’ were one to stray too far from the implicit outlines of these unspeakable, irreproachable, impossible constellations. But in condemning the tendency for religious thought (or, to be more broad, the capacity to think as one will), is not this same mechanism for ‘othering’ not repeated? In denouncing ‘religion’, do we not also risk abandoning the capacity for all myth, philosophy, theory—metaphor itself? And are there not equal risks in resigning ourselves to praxis devoid of a yearning to understand? Science is impossible without metaphor in the same way that sense perception is lost without a framework within which to organise and reapply it. All of the problems of fundamentalist, doctrinal, fetishistic thought boil down to one’s insistence that their particular understanding of life’s paradoxes are ‘truth’, and that another’s understanding, by its very existence, threatens that truth. Maybe our compulsive post-modernist recoil is a reaching for the heart of something ancient. Namely, that dictum which seems to lie at the heart of all religious—and intriguingly, also scientific—discovery which states simply, know thy-
self. Know thyself, and you increase your capacity to know the world. Know thyself, and you gain some (albeit small) chance for the possibility to others. The doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest’ is a fool’s rendition of evolution, unless by ‘fitness’ we mean those who have been given the space to learn how to adapt. This learning does not emerge through oppression from above as some seem to insist; ancient weeds cover earth containing the bones of dinosaurs long-extinct. Evolution emerges most fluently in that undefinable space between forest and garden, in that place on the edge of consciousness and dream. Whatever we might mean by ‘nature’, perhaps it’s this fundamental distinction that separates humanity from its origins: the belief that we ‘know’ with certainty. Maybe, like all of our mythicalcreations, the sphinx is best understood as a projection; another devil from whom we either cower, resign ourselves to the impulse to dominate and destroy, or learn the limits of our capacity to know with certainty. Teach your children science. But also teach them to listen to the dream and, on occasion, to surrender to the mysteries of life, regardless of how you (or they) choose to define them. Learn to meditate. Serve your mitochondria. Reintegrate the circuit of humanity back into its surrounding habitat We were never expelled: the ecosystem surrounds us, if only we can learn to see it.
Bibliography
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Contributors Eduardo Franco Angel, Yarlen. Cover Page. www.efangel.com | www.instagram.com/_yarlen_ Maria Sledmere, Bacteria Poems. Pages 14-15. https://musingsbymaria.wordpress.com Liz Herdson, Various Bird Illustrations. Pages 18-19. www.littleskydesign.com.au. Kaly Arroy, Sustenance. 2017. www.instagram.com/leudaimonaart Margarethe Kollmer, screenshot from HD film, The Thing Is. 2017. Pages 26-27. www.margarethekollmer.com Jon Anātman, Abstract: ‘Ecosystem’ as base root metaphor. 2017. Page 29. https://exexegesis.wordpress.com