the complexity of a sphere

     

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The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every glimpse of a new aspect of it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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'Does it change the way the world feels?' i ask Christopher Toth. 'Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter — about what matters? Are you surprised that we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?'

Christopher nods. He thinks.  

... 'At the weekends,' Christopher says, 'when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.'

He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. 

'But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love.'

—Robert Macfarlane
—Christopher Toth, physicist
Underland, from Chapter 3, Dark Matter

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miracles of scrutiny

  

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In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, far away objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer. 

The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards, cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch. 

Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.


—Robert Macfarlane
Landmarks (treasure
Chapter 7, on Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
(another treasure

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When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. 

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it. 

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg
Meditations on the Tarot

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path(ways

 

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i walk with confidence

i do not get lost, 

my footing is sure, 

my legs are strong, 

i do not tire, 

my feet are comfortable, 

i go where i need to.

—shoe sigil blessings 

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In 19th century Suffolk small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for example. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the opposite direction. In this manner the path was collectively maintained for general use.


—Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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One does not stand still looking for a path. 

One walks; and as one walks,
a path comes into being.


—Mas Kodani

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we are never alone

This is a detailed model of one human cell, obtained using x-ray, NMR and cryoelectron microscopy datasets by Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill.

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"You are mostly not you,” microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in his fascinating exploration of the human biome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial.

—Nicola Davies 
Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes

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We are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards-driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit.

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.


—Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis — a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilised eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right — a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how those of our fellow species enrich and influence their lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom, while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist in every creature.

When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome.

This is a pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every one of us. Always a “we” and never a “me.”


—Ed Yong (treasure
I Contain Multiudes, excerpts

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art(work

   

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We’ve seen nonlocality pop up all over the place: in experiments on the quantum realm, in the paradoxes of black holes, in the grand structure of the universe, in the maelstrom of particle collisions. 

In all these examples, physics enters a twilight zone. 

Things can outrun light; cause and effect can be reversed; distance can lose meaning; two objects may actually be one. The universe becomes spooky.


—George Musser 
Spooky Action at a Distance

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Love is not exactly a relation between two people, but a relation between two multiplicities. And it is also a kind of construction, the construction of a landscape, of a universe that can include these multiplicities. So, in a certain way it is work of art. 

The loving subject is an artist, and I would say the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity but as an artist. 

Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations. There is a becoming-other in the very constitution of the other as an object of love. 

—J. Rancière
Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition

 

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Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

[…]

I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.

—Robert Macfarlane

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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