blood, sea

     

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In 1976, the Italian writer Italo Calvino published a famous collection of poetic prose, t zero. The story “Blood, Sea" recounts a sequence of events narrated from the first-person perspective of a blood cell, alternating with a story about human protagonists, told in the conventional perspective of the third person. 

In the story, among a lot of other astonishing relations, Calvino explores the fact that the water of the earth’s oceans shows a mineral composition which strikingly resembles that of our body fluids. The blood plasma is the sea in which life once began. This ocean still fills us, as it fills all other lifeforms. 

Calvino imagined a narrative told by a blood cell, a cell which is suspended in this primordial ocean within our bodies. He told a story from the perspective of life itself, or rather from the perspective of the life-giving ability of the primal fluid and its invitation to make intimate connections. 

He spoke from the standpoint of an outside which is also an inside. Calvino invented “Biopoetics” avant la lettre. He envisioned a first-person account of what is not human through our shared qualities, through our participation in a vast web of transformations. 

For Calvino, the poet, it was only evident that we are able to make statements about this network of changes and exchanges because we are a part of it, and we are concerned by it, as we are by our own fate. 

Poetic creativity is the power to know something through intimate participation. Calvino is a poet, and as such he knows about the fact that true novelty in this world, and also true experiences of connection, only arise through the exchange, the breakdown and recreation of what is real.

—Andreas Weber

Biopoetics

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Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.


—Deepak Chopra

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I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.

That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, 
and my blood is part of the sea.

There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

—D. H. Lawrence

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aspects of open space

  

Cueva de las Manos, Cave of the Hands, Argentina

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Trungpa Rinpoche once said, “Emotions are composed of energy, which can be likened to water, and a dualistic thought process, which could be likened to pigment or paint. When energy and thought are mixed together, they become vivid and colorful emotions. Concept gives the energy a particular location, a sense of relationship, which makes the emotions vivid and strong. Fundamentally, the reason emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is that our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.”

And strangely enough, these experiences of the six realms - gods, jealous gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell - are ‘space’, different versions of space. It seems intense and solid, but in actual fact it isn’t at all. They are different aspects of space - that’s the exciting or interesting part. In fact, it is complete open space, without any colors or any particularly solid way of relating. 

That is why they have been described as six types of consciousness. It is pure consciousness rather than a solid situation - it almost could be called unconsciousness rather than even consciousness. The development of ego operates completely at the unconscious level, from one unconscious level to another unconscious level. That is why these levels are referred to as loka, which means ‘realm’ or 'world’. 

They are six types of 'world’. Each is a complete unit of its own. In order to have a world, you have to have an atmosphere; you have to have space to formulate things. So the six realms are the fundamental space through which any bardo experience operates. Because of that, it is possible to transmute these spaces into six types of awakened state, or freedom.

—Chögyam Trungpa

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The world is not populated by singular, autonomous, sovereign beings. It comprises a constantly oscillating network of dynamic interactions in which one thing changes through the change of another. The relationship counts, not the substance. 

And to make this relationship possible, it is necessary that the two sides touch each other, that they nestle into one another, penetrate one another, grind themselves against each other. This is the fundamental erotic that constantly makes new things out of other things.

—Andreas Weber
Matter and Desire

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I promise to make you more alive than you have ever been.
For the first time you will see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you will hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor. 

For the first time, you will note gravity’s prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings. 

I promise to make you so alive that
the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you will feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.

—Nina Cassian
Ordeal  
Michael Impey and Brian Swann version from the Romanian 

 

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All is allegory. Each creature is a key to all others. —J.M. Coetzee

 

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Biology is discovering subjectivity as a fundamental principle throughout nature. It finds that even the most simple living things —bacterial cells, fertilized eggs, nematodes in tidal flats—act according to values. 

Organisms value everything they encounter according to its meaning for the further coherence of their embodied self. Even the cell’s self-production, the continuous maintenance of a highly structured order, can only be understood if we perceive the cell as an actor that persistently follows a goal. Life always has an inside, which is the result of how its matter, its outside, is organized.

 

—Andreas Weber

The Biology of Wonder

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The conscious self is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.

—Northrop Frye

 

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Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. —William Blake

 

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Much of Earth’s life moves and communicates on a time scale 

humans cannot hope to comprehend. 

—Mose Feldenkrais

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The plant that directs its growth tendency to the light does not understand the arithmetic of wavelengths; it simply perceives light as good in the form of a positive affection. 

Today’s botanists have used ingenious experiments to confirm the subjectivity of plants. They observed that identical plant clones — multiple vegetative twins whose DNA sequences are identical to the letter — behave differently, even though room temperature and substrate moisture are the same. They are clones, but their bodies unfold into individual shapes. They individually choose between different options.

Every sprout has its own preferences. Each is an individual, not simply an automaton carrying out a genetic blueprint. 

Intelligence, according to the meaning of the Latin verb intelligere, means to be in between, to be able to choose. It signifies the ability to make a decision, and hence the judgment of a distinct self for whom a choice means something — survival, growth, flourishing. In this sense intelligence and life are one and the same thing.


—Andreas Weber
The Biology of Wonder, excerpts

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