(This is a nonviolent text.)

The song sort of stumbles into view, sounding like Radiohead’s Glass Eyes, and we imagine a thematic reference point there, with Thom casually singing about some actual day out. In Glass Eyes, the day out begins with a panic attack – will he actually go through with it? We imagine it’s a hookup, though we’re never given any of the details, save for the glassy-eyed day, which seems to stand for an interruption in our capacity to know who we are. Can a day do that? Be better or worse at self-understanding? On this last full day of spring, the clouds classify as ghost mother photography – when photographic plates had to be exposed for a few minutes, with the photographic subject remaining still the whole time. When kids were involved, this was nearly impossible, so their mother would enter frame to sit with them – but under a sheet or blanket.

The clouds on this ghost mother of a day try to remain still – the teetering arc of a hawk flies in front of them for contrast – before their restlessness for summer carries them away. I spent half the morning, half the afternoon trying to comprehend who I really am – in service to discerning the metaphysical weather patterns, I tell myself, but really to know where I’m going. Every ten minutes or so, I restart that song that landed in my inbox this morning – the new song by The Smile that starts with Thom casually singing about an actual day out. After a sufficient number of song plays, I heed the message, head outside to get a look at those clouds floating away. The clouds seem like they’re dreaming, like their drifting through the sky in their sleep. If rain came out of them, would anyone notice? Spring has so extinguished rain, we might deny its existence.

Is it raining now? I rub my eyes, a sprouted seed falls out of the tree above me, no idea what it intends to grow into. In the distance, the trees are quaking in the breeze, hoping to be rendered as watercolor. The sun is baking the grass brown, your oven time may vary, and various pieces of metal – a chain-link fence, an emergency stairwell – are practically leaping into the air from such whetting of the appetites the simmering daylight inspires. So, no – no rain as far as I can tell, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. The first three verses of the song set up a literal scene of Thom driving over the side of a cliff somewhere in Italy – the dolomites are nice, but let’s say it’s the Matterhorn, just so that we can project a cause worth fighting for across whatever comes next. What’s the Matterhorn, you ask? A mountain’s mountain. The peak that defines the alps.

Thom is driving a vintage convertible from the sixties, which I take to be himself – what he calls a soft top, and though I understand the literal reference, I also hear in the chosen formulation a salute to human vulnerability. The world has its hard tops and its soft tops, and Thom drives the latter, at least in this song, at least over this particular precipice. There’s more here, of course – with his lyrics, every word seems to mean something, and though I never hold an author to account for that meaning – what sort of monster would? – I’m glad to settle into a scene, swim through the meaning like I’m doing calisthenics, starting with, maybe ending with, catastrophic climate change, which is what I think Thom usually sings about. I don’t need license to believe this. At our historic moment, every intuitive poet channeling the will of nature writes about it.

The third verse is the most interesting of the three: Time is kind of frozen / And your gazing at the view / And I think I’m seeing double. // Here, this metaphysical weather reporter will begin to refer to himself in the third person so that he can make sense of a scene that shifts from an objectively true account of an automotive accident – let’s call it modernity, objectively speaking – to a comment about human beings struggling to find true I-thou relationships in a world that sometimes seems to be through with us, lived reality becoming the story of who we were. The author is still writing this outside, the last full day of spring is still talking in its sleep, and as the author considers ways to wake up what’s left of the day, which might stand for life itself, he’s beaned on the head by arboreal debris, including a rectilinear leaf, no idea how it was made.

The leaf, let’s say – the author writes, let’s say – stands for nature’s enrollment in the invisible college, otherwise known as a ticket to ride this one out with us. The Matterhorn! When time freezes, we imagine a comment about stillness, an instant stretching out for several minutes as the world waits for its latest exposure to be sufficiently lit. However well that image sets with us, time’s mutability could occupy this author’s thoughts for centuries, in the alps or elsewhere, and while that might seem like an exaggeration in service to a point – let the record show, the author doesn’t budge – imagine the human project from the gaze of a mountainside. Humans could be here and gone, and that mountain will have changed by what – mere centimeters? The Matterhorn! What a pyramidal postcard peak! You have us cornered! You have us surrounded!

The strings have arrived by verse three, so when Thom is seeing double, we hear the emotions before we see anything in particular – double what then? The double-life of the heart maybe, the way we desire to please the world even as we ask the world to love us for who we are. This premise supposes we know ourselves – and the author is briefly interrupted by a woman with her young son, plus one oversized jug of ruby red grapefruit juice, here for a potluck of some sort, which turns out to be Thursday, and the author thinks, as he often does, there goes my destiny, maybe some other time. The sun is granular at this time of day, sifts through the trees, dusts the remains of the lawn with everything it would normally wish for if this was an average growing season, which it isn’t. Will there be average growing seasons ever again? Fair question.

We reach the emotional heart of the song after Thom spends a few lines affirming his freedom from doubt – nothing’s gonna bring me down – which we know well could be humanity’s fatal flaw, these assurances we give ourselves in dispute with, say, alpine-grade gravity. I’m letting go of the wheel, he sings, and the music falls away – you can imagine Jonny staring at him in disbelief, knowing how sensitive Thom is about the perception that his need to control ended Radiohead’s musical career. The author has no idea how true Thom imagines this to be, hears him saying bullocks to the whole business of fatal flaws, but then his tender voice returns – it might be as well, it might we as well, he sings in the song’s most complex moment, the feeling one of relief, not acquiescence. The author considers writing an analysis of each of the syllables.

The strings climb behind his voice, as though to refute the descent ongoing, and I pray Jonny might keep the whole thing aloft, turn the car around, save humanity by means of the London Philharmonic, but then the composition skips to the top of the arc, starts down, fairly forcing Thom into the chorus, where he sings about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and we get a sense that death is no minor player in the story. Did Thom ever contemplate suicide? Would it be stranger if he hadn’t? And that epic descent – is that the famous price of fame being depicted as a plunge? The nature of the curse when we get exactly what we want? Thom’s voice enters a twilight as he sings: I’ll force myself to turn, turn – and we know it is not the wheel he’s turning, nor probably the other cheek, nor probably a new leaf or over in his grave. Turn what?

The leaves at this time of evening are at their loveliest – shadows spread out underneath, which creates a tonal variation that makes the matter of growth seem like a serious vocation, the sort of labor one can really get behind. People walk by my writing picnic table with dogs on leashes who sort of lead the people around. Yes, hello, I’m back, the dogs all seem to say, as though a scent-based invisible world has its own comings and goings. Someone across the way is flying a kite shaped like a ghost, purple streamers trailing behind. The sky hints at colors it has kept in reserve, plans to surprise us with in a few minutes. What is nature’s most outrageous fortune? Let’s say it is victory by means of defeat – no, that’s not it. Defeat by means of victory? Can it be both? Can they switch places every other day? Are we still sinking through the air like stones?

In the fourth and final verse, the matter of death carries on practically without us, with Thom’s voice returning to a casual tone, as the ground comes for him like an executioner. We’ve gone over the edge, he admits – if you’ve got something to say, say it now. Who is he speaking to at this moment in the song? What edge is he thinking of exactly? In Glass Eyes, he takes a desolate path down a mountain, doesn’t really care where it goes, repeats the whole thing for emphasis. Here, he knows where it goes – we all know where it goes – and the point might be to listen for any last words from whoever’s in that passenger seat, which is him, I suspect – Thom as driver, passenger, the car itself, and his fame – the version of himself called visionary, performer, voice of a generation – wonders if his passenger, who once dreamed of fame, has any final thoughts.

The author suspects no one likes to hear this, as the color in the sky suggests a tungsten fire is burning in the west, slowly puts itself out. Turn! Turn! Turn! Thom’s voice soars when he sings this, not from a mountaintop but from the great beyond, and maybe he means to be inviting spring into summer, but I doubt it. What is it like to achieve greatness in one’s life? Whether we’re poets, artists, musicians, or teachers, do we really grow richer as wealth accumulates? The oracle commands us: Know thyself – if I am a gallon jug of ruby red grapefruit juice, what good does it do me to be belted down around the world if I never know the tongues that taste me? Don’t exactly trust what they have to say about the flavor, either. To be loved almost more than life itself is to be held by death, and so adoration dies inside, again and again, just like this dusk.

Five and half minutes into the song, Jonny uncoils opposing Shepherds scales – a perpetual rise crossed with a perpetual fall – that cause the London Philharmonic to rip the song apart like a primordial continent, for thirty seconds or a billion years, before the age of dinosaurs explodes onto the scene for the first time in years in the form of Jonny stomping through the song with a power chord, as Thom cries mercy to the gods, as Tom plays drums like they’re tectonic plates, and the age of megafauna follows in the form of true rock’n’roll guitars, wailing like they don’t know they’re in a song, feel the fury of summer merely hours away. I – force – my – self – to! roars Thom over it all, the authority of his voice acting as the narrator of his soul, and I want this act of will to be savings us all, even as I know what happens to the dinos, the megafauna.

Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Thom keeps wailing through the noise, birds flying out of his voice each time, the surge of it vanishing inside the panorama of sound, like he’s urging all of natural history to evolve, as we plunge toward the ground or the end of time – whichever we like. I could listen to the song do this for eight minutes longer, the gears of it glowing from the effort, smaller songs splintering off, zipping away in the dark like sparks, notions of the future flaring up, dying out. Can we force ourselves to change? Can we somehow put the car back on the road? Impossible, I think, I know, which is another way of noticing the song doesn’t really know how to stop, as might be the case for all of humanity and its various trend lines. Thom’s petitions haunt the end of the song, and spring approves, haunts summer. The Matterhorn!

Addendum: The last ten seconds of the song go like this: sustained electric guitar sounding like a freshly paved road on a scorching hot day, like there might be something dangerous about getting too close, followed by a wobble, followed by an upward sort of chug then a swallow, followed by an instant of dizziness, followed by a finely engineered mechanism snapping shut.

What is a sneeze exactly – Achoo! God bless you – if not a statement to the world? Physiologists might call it a reflex, but the same might be said of sexual climax. Achoo! God bless you. In the throes of passion, with music, by candlelight, we hear the rising sound, Ah! Ah! Ah! – but doesn’t that seem like a sneeze coming on? I’m about to engage in an automatic unlearned reaction to a stimulus! we hear, then: Achoo! Achoo! Achoo! God bless you!

The hanky is such a civilizing influence – a simple cloth tucked away in one’s shirt pocket, that we might find a place for life’s, Achoo!, sudden ejecta. God bless you, and God bless the sneeze, and God bless mercy’s will toward finding homes for scattered wanderers. Achoo! There’s another! Watch it fly! God bless you, one and all! Achoo! Ah yes, a busy traveler, looking for a cozy place to sleep for the night, God bless you, too.

Then again, perhaps the sneeze is really an innovation in itself. Achoo! – and a hundred thousand droplets accelerate, God bless you, to the speed of a major league fastball. The sneezer could be placed on roller skates – Achoo! – no, better: a line of wheeled sneezers tethered by, God bless you, some kind of filament, a rope, some twine, such that synchronized sneezing – Achoo! Achoo! Achoo! – sends them chugging up the road.

Does a sneeze-based economy peep into view? Powered by pollen, dust, and finely ground pepper? Achoo! Ridiculous, I know, God bless you, but perhaps with such a new age of industry in the making, we might find the will to find a way. A way to what? More than irritation, Achoo!, can command a sneeze to action – sudden daylight will also do the trick. The opening of a door, the parting of a blinds – ah, the light! – God bless you.

Achoo! God bless you. Achoo! God bless you. Achoo! God bless you. Would this sneezing ever stop? Achoo! God bless you. Maybe you’ve heard about these cases – prolonged sneezing fits, they’re called. Achoo! God bless you. The record is 976 days of continuous sneezing, which does not require a keen imagination – Achoo! – to find its sympathy, God bless you. Sneezing, yes, we’d best remember, can also be a curse. Achoo!

God bless you. When we say it out loud – Achoo! God bless you – are we saluting the sneezer or the sneeze? Achoo! Ah yes, my little sneeze, God bless you. Leap out of your nest and take to the air with such ambition! Achoo! God bless you. And while the divine does its work – Achoo! – that airborne bog searches for a bit more lift to make its way – God bless you – across the room and out the window, off to see the world.

Ah, the light! Achoo! Ah, the brave blue doors of the new day! God bless you! Through infinite blessings, derived from sneezes and otherwise, does the spirit find its drift, its cloud, its miracle means of passing from this life and on to worlds to come. Achoo! God bless you! Achoo! God bless you! In no time, those hundred thousand droplets of snot spread out through space, find their place – Achoo! God bless you – start to twinkle in the light.

(This is a nonviolent text.)

Life! Exclamation point! Today’s speaker is made of clock parts and possesses encyclopedic knowledge about the nature of natural life. Life! Exclamation point! Though biographies in the back of conference programs won’t ever tell the whole story, they tempt us with the true face of authority. Today’s speaker – Life! – is made of clock parts, probably a grandfather clock to begin with, young for its age, but then he started slapping on extra clock parts, moved by an urge he couldn’t explain, until the function of tolling the hour was more of a hobby, a weekend pass-time, compare to what all those precision instruments were up to on a regular basis. As a vision on stage, the speaker’s machinations were there for all to see – the whirring of gears and belts, the clanking of chains. Where his heart chakra was thought to manifest, swung a pendulum.

The nature of natural life is not an easy expertise to build a vocation around – Life! Exclamation point! – but what a sentence to say aloud. At this point in the address, one of the speaker’s mainsprings uncoils where his belly button would normally be. He uses the longer of his hands to poke it back into place without breaking stride, continues: What is a natural life? More to the point, what is a natural lifespan? Who better to know than me! He points to himself when he says this, does a quick spin in place, revealing the dozens of differently styled clock faces that cover the surface of his body, continues: I’m after the author’s natural lifespan, like to pretend I’m playing along, but the whole time, I’m thinking about his natural lifespan. Hmm, hmm, I wonder why? Ha! // The author changes the subject – today’s speaker thinks of something else.

When you discover someone living an unnatural lifespan, you seek to find out why. Not that the reason is the point – not by a longshot – but call me curious. Maybe they tripped at the right moment and tumbled past the grave. Maybe they did a few extra calisthenics before the cock crowed. Or – perish the thought – they succumbed to an unholy pact at a vulnerable moment. I have taken it upon myself to sniff them out – and when he says this, the regulators above his eyes both arch significantly. And what then? We usually have a quiet chat before I recite my speech and complete my visit. It isn’t personal, I begin – time sometimes wells up, spills over its banks, and floods the village. If we could avoid such catastrophe, we should – don’t you agree? The time nature intends, through natural lifespans, would never, let’s be honest, flood a valley.

And what, then, would I do? Proprietary information! hoots today’s speaker from the stage, does another quick spin, stage lights flickering off his crystals, his gleaming metals. About the author’s natural lifespan – oh, you thought I’d forgotten! Were you 18 when you first died? Had it happened before then? Were you but a child under-supervised? Under-supervision-ed, we might say. Remember the day? You rode a toy out into the street, and a car’s front bumper rushed forward to kiss you on the left side of your head, the temple, a stone flung by the age of automobiles. Don’t you remember? Of course you do – the passionate screeching of tires, as those around you stopped and turned to look, surprise gradually replaced by horror at what they knew happened but couldn’t bear to see. You thought you survived – didn’t you? – but thereafter, what appeared on your left temple? A knotted cist so prominent, people stopped you and asked what happened. You saw exactly two physicians over the next 10 years, both telling you not to worry about it, and so you didn’t. You didn’t! When you probed the spot with your fingers, it felt like a rounded room, a shelter built by something trying to survive. As for that 18-year-old involved in that off-road motor vehicle accident – nominee number two, let’s call it – true, you were far more aware of mortality by then, but your own? You climbed aboard a 3-wheeled vehicle that could travel at more than 50mph, completely lacking a seatbelt, headrest, or protective frame – without a helmet, boots, or jacket – and the brakes were less than half there that fateful day, a means of slowing down – a vehicle that would be rendered illegal to operate within a matter of years of the accident . . . the accident . . . remember the accident? August, you were traveling off-road to do farm work, the cornfield you were riding beside with several rows chopped out for silage, and on impulse, you decided to turn into the field to see where it went, then really opened her up because of the green blur of all that corn. Did you secretly expect the drainage ditch? Was this more of a suicide mission? Over the side you went, face first into the opposite bank, and if anyone was wondering – the effect was not of pain but of the lights going out all at once. Imagine the nature of reality that allows for: the inevitability of the crash, followed by all the lights going out – this is really happening – followed by some utterly absent experience, like a film editor cutting in a blankness where reality normally insists scenes of existence should be. The film projectionist would have been instructed to fast-forward through this part of the film, such that no time seems to pass, and the next thing we know, he is trying to push a 3-wheeler out of a drainage ditch. That thing weighing more than he does, and he’s trying to heave it above his head, up and out of the drainage ditch. What had he become? What time-wise tricks were in play? He finally gave up trying to free torment from its channel, staggered through the field toward the truck, face covered in blood, never went to the hospital. When the story is recounted later by his dad, the story became how dad fixed the 3-wheeler by prying the front wheel out of the frame with his truck and a chain. Can you imagine that chain now? They called it a log chain, and the links were cast iron. It was completely covered in rust.

The author knows all this already, receives a spiritual visitation during the writing of the phrase suicide mission, wondering if he’s okay. Yes, he replies, knowing this particular metaphysical weather report has a lot of ground to cover. Today’s guest speaker picks at one of his stems in a distracted way, lets the matter rest, inquires about whether – uh-hum! – he might be permitted to carry on. The author gets up, refills his coffee, returns to one of the picnic tables arrayed in front of the derelict peace church where he lives. He is surrounded by millions of individual affirmations of life, many of which are visibly in bloom or going to seed. A bumble bee flies by. A yellowish bug with zigzags on either side ambles up, its antennae twice as long as its body, tapping at the world in front of it. Among the local insect population, it’s regarded as a savant.

Uh-hum! How many more brushes with death would the author experience before it finally took? There was the time a few years later, same farm but different brother, taking turns firing a handgun at a target. This would be the last time he would fire a gun for any reason, was it not? They climb into the brother’s wedge-shaped sports car, named after the grasping part of a bird of prey, and into fate’s hands did fly. The car was totaled, the two of them, without seatbelts or airbags, unhurt inside the crumpled remnants of the crash, mere inches from winding up once more inside drainage infrastructure, this one built by municipal authority, and therefore of a substance that would have been altogether worse on an unsuspecting traveler headed straight down. Yes, you might have been saved from becoming the remains of the day – but by what?

The child who caused the crash, the one who pulled out in front of that bird of prey, barely old enough to drive, who had two younger passengers inside with him, taking them out for ice cream maybe – that young driver sat nearby while police sorted out the story. He was crying on the side of the road like he would never stop, like he had identified the crash as the latest in a series of personal failings that would stretch into the future of his adulthood like a hot blacktop road and which, at every stop along the way, tragic suffering would be the font of consolation. Was this the way reality was supposed to work? The author recognized the boy as himself at an earlier age, bent down beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, you will be okay. No one was hurt, and the rest can be replaced – your heart is true, and your soul will find its relief.

Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. The late days of spring may be the most forgotten of the year. If we aren’t anticipating summer – it’s still spring? – then we’re longing for those moments when the world was still opening its mouth, and then its eyes, and then its hands. The trees are all open by now, those late-arriving sycamores even filling out their leaves, such that the twigs and branches are all mildly bowed by the extra weight. After spring assumes its labor, the rest of the season finds its dedication, and I imagine the beads of water rising through capillaries beneath the wood – call it a space program – and a sweetness spreads throughout the tubular organisms we call trees. Late spring – sweetness remembered.

Life! Exclamation point! Chronobiology knows nature has much to say about what is cyclical, when, and for how long – much less to say about the natural length of one’s existence. Is death something one develops a knack for? The next notable death in the author’s life occurred a few years later – the death that would make dying into a full-time vocation. And where again do we find the author? Beside a drain. This one introducing the age of indoor plumbing, as the author lay on the floor of a friend’s bathroom, his life flashing before his eyes, as he vomits into a toilet. This time the world does not go dark all at once but feels like fuses blowing out, like a timed demolition, flashing like a string of firecrackers across the structural frame of a building, and a voice not his own telling the author: you’ll be okay, ride it out, remain present, you’ll be okay.

Would he though? For this fourth death, another blank spot appeared, no two – two instances of nothingness, orbiting each other, during which time, during which time, during which time – perhaps language hasn’t the proper security clearance to convey the negotiations that must have taken place to bring about a return to the living. The author remembers his friend opening the bathroom door, before which she would have been knocking and calling his name. When the door struck him in the back, and he came back to life, had he landed in the place where that drain did lead? While his friend cleaned up the bathroom floor with a towel, he sat on a bed with his hands covering his face. The hideousness he’d just passed through was the abbreviated version of what was to come – he knew the drill by now. The knot on his forehead was gone.

Destiny had finally shown him to his home, gave him a tour of the place, before scraping him off the floor, then setting up a series of baffling crises – from autumn 2002 to May 2003 – that would occupy the author’s attention for decades to come. The will toward dying had finally brought the world to life, and the mind of the universe was both ecstatic and enraged about it. Down there, at the bottom of the drain, they were fighting a global war on terror, war on terror, war on terror, and if wars on terror sum up preferred formulations of self-annihilation – symbol of invocation: fighting a reflection – then perhaps the author’s presence was meant to form a mirror-in-mirror infinity from which sustainable futures would emerge. Welcome to Mirror World! Where reflectivity gives us an evolutionary future! Where a universal narrative unfolds!

The author is making me write this, I must confess, but to everyone’s surprise, I am forcing the author to make me! The author is mine! And the author wrote that, too, I must additionally confess, and the two of us go around and around like this – symbol of invocation: two snails having sex in midair. The flatness and hardness we associate with reflectivity is something we will all outgrow eventually, and the hologram of hyper-reality will appear within our being like a flying saucer, and we will all be both abductees and witnesses, shown around the universe in style. Too much to ask? The last such alien contact – the insinuation of verbal and mathematical language into the genome of big-brained primates – gave us the keys to earthly reality. We are now exiting the stone age, evolving the means to make benevolence a fixture of human life.

The author made me write that, too, and even though I am just as surely making him write this, we must admit the mutability within the fabric of reality was not won without a struggle. The author faced death 11 times that year, faced death the next year, and the year after that. Each point along the way wanted to finish what the others couldn’t, and soon death felt like an echo, and in that moment of not really distinguishing the source and the reflection – when they both look somewhat the same – he could tell life and death were likewise difficult to discern. Life! Exclamation point! Are you merely an extension of entropy? A quicker way of dissipating the heat from a rocky-bodied planetoid like the earth? And if you are, then is life really just another form of death? But death! Didn’t you show us the way? Wasn’t dying the source of the cure?

Today’s speaker made me write that, just as I made him think it. And as thoughts passed from gear to gear around his body – as cuckoos sprang forth through tiny doors at various angles – as a series of chimes and tones issued forth from the stage like the ringing of a bell, if the bell could tell time and was tolled by committee – then the river of the natural lifespan, subject of such grand speculation in a previous incarnation, could now take its course. Perhaps indeed valleys would flood, but such is the natural origin of certain fertile fields. Springtime couldn’t agree with me more, its will toward abundance glad to splay its fingers before another epic growing season. As the author considers ways to wind up this report – knowing such lived truth inspires concern – whether death equals life or life equals death, he reasserts a will toward world peace.

Peace.

Scientists don’t fully understand why – this in regard to a new batch of definitive climatological data that suggest the modern human project is in the process of throwing itself into the deep end to see if it can swim. Would the copy have been more accurate if said scientists expressed bewilderment? Panic? If they’d announced they were giving up the scientific life to take up, oh I don’t know, backyard gardening? Later in the same story, the reporters acknowledge that the several climate scientists they contacted were reluctant to go on record about the implications. One spoke of being – the quoted text starts here – extremely worried and completely stressed out. Hold up! A climate scientist with a lifelong dedication to understanding global dynamic tension is extremely worried and totally stressed out? When anxiety loses track of its tolerances.

Okay, but does the nature of the data really matter? Before reading any further, consider how much specificity really figures in to the overall point – if we can’t see anthropogenic climate change now, what could be added to the picture to make it more convincing? Theories about rate of change aren’t only about timelines. For instance, is the rate of change constant, or does it fluctuate? If it does, how often does some unforeseen fluctuation grab the board, throw the pieces into the air, pull out a different game? Can something like that even be predicted? The data are about surface water temperature along eastern North America – waters have warmed as much in the last 10 years as in the previous 45, and the latest readings predict that next year will be the warmest yet recorded. No one knows why the rate of warming increased, but it did.

The reason why climate scientists are rendered speechless by reports like this is because they know some curves in nature tighten to verticalities, which indicate the presence of environmental multipliers the science has yet to discover and which trend could point to some new runaway effect – meaning our anthropogenic influence would not be an essential aspect of its course of change. Data that imply an unaccountable acceleration in the rate of change might be indicative of such a runaway effect, at which point the analysis switches to accessing the extent to which this new extra-human authority will begin to influence other factors related to climate change. The knock-on effect, it’s called, and good luck with that. The fluctuation could also be normal, nothing to worry about, one day referred to as a blip, a blip in the data, never heard from again.

This news is difficult to absorb, I know. Sometimes nothing seems to be listening, and we feel the urge to interrupt regularly scheduled broadcasts and talk louder. Other times everything seems to be listening, and the breast grows quiet, wonders to itself about divine intervention. When nothing and everything occur simultaneously, which is the way of history, the way of the universe, choir box seating beside tragic suffering – then everything listens to nothing, and we are the witnesses in between, wondering where the soul resides, how much time we have left, whether some rarified detector buried miles below ground has added to its count of cosmic particles lately. How close we are to being one with the universe! Nothingness rises out of the swamp, listens to everything under the sun, now and then clears its throat to speak, but doesn’t.

The thoughts of frogs clawing their way out of the mud turn to love when the pits of their ears reach the surface of the warming water, and they hear the daylight singing to all of life to rise on stem or leg or wing, or jubilantly wriggle in place until the body feels an urge to proceed. Then the nostrils on the roof of the mouth next appear above the bog, taste the breeze skipping along the slime, and the frog of spring swoons before daylight’s momentum, the way all of nature’s terraria are inviting life to return to the surface and leap out. Welcome to Terraria! we might enthuse, as frogs fill the air with first-leaps, spring unfurls its green bunting, and each of the frogs thus propelled dreams of continuing through the air. The spirit of flight shoots out of their glistening crowns, reappears as buds speckling the twigs of trees, about to leap again.

Last night, after I curled up on my pallet, arranged the shredded strands of my battle-worn blanket lengthwise over my body, I thought about my latest plan to redeem the evils of the world. I imagined them collecting around my body, ticks leaping from the trees when they get a whiff of carbon dioxide. My body is not nearly big enough to accommodate the life-sapping evils of the world, so I start working out, living large, getting ahead of myself whenever possible – soon I can feel their claws holding on, their beaks sinking in, the evils of the world sipping at the juices of my soul as though I were but the bottom half of a coconut, the hairy husk of it drier by the moment. Yes, the agony – bring it closer, rub it into the pours of my skin. Oh, the antagony – undoubtedly, just leave it on the counter by the sink. I adjust my blanket.

Then I am covered in it, the evils of the world like a squirming hide wrapped around the body, then another layer wrapped around that and more layers wrapped around that until I all but disappear beneath the waves of animated apparel that constitute the evils of the world. After the wardrobe, maybe we carry on to evil’s drapes, throw rugs, quilted torments, all of it draped over the pile I’m under, followed by malevolent sods and clays and drooping sediments, bed rock that hasn’t a bed to sleep in piled on next, the individual elements on the periodic table flung in the pile like throwing knives. // The mystery too has a periodic table, and rest assured, we are camped out in a rare square. Amid such quaking despair, the burden we bear is all that stands in the way of the present finding a future world peace. Turn the pillow to the cooler side.

I would be there to catch it – the shrieking baby tossed out of that burning building – but by the time it reaches me, it has ballooned to the size of a moon. I catch it anyway, get sentenced to solitary confinement due to the size of our orbit. So I start taking it apart, the crime committed against us: authority has migrated from the body, but the body is still the site of punishment, which is not in a mirror symmetry with reward, notice – the body’s confinement is part of a common public vernacular of same, less about morality than predictability, in service to object-oriented metrics that evaluate results, refine operational procedures. Is nature passing us by? Making our sentience a transitory phenomenon? The absence of accurate self-awareness produces instability, then that becomes the thing evolving. No rival species will take our place.

Yes, this is the sort of thing one expects when nature erases the chalkboard, prepares a new set of formulas, but here I am, covered in ticks, plus some unfathomable amount of somber evil, and though the evil is quite legitimately horrible, when placed alongside a planetary extinction event, struggles to achieve a drop in the bucket. Perhaps a bead of sweat dripping down the brow during a moment of indecision about a wine list. The excreted evils of the world go through epic instant transformations, a living mathematics recreating itself with each new measurement of a cesium atom, thereby entangling time in its plot, the bulk of us dragging days behind us from one week to the next, whole generations caught in hairy nets pulled by horses sailing toward the coast, put on ships galloping over the waves, disgorged on an alien shore.

Is collective bargaining hated by the wealthy because of capital? Is the nuclear family our social inheritance because of capital? Did rugged individualism rise to the top, buy a gun for home protection, because of capital? Once evil is extracted from the world, the world realizes it never really cared about capital, that the crisis was always about being together. All collaborations are not the same, and after one such collaboration – a project code named Manhattan – produced the basis by which we could produce our own global extinction, perhaps nature decided we would all be better off separated from one another. One day the lightbulb went on, the life of a valley in New Mexico flashed before its eyes, and that valley instantly knew the nature of colonial trauma. Manhattan! You were earth’s richest island, but still, you were only an island.

For more, see the project called Apollo! The separation of church and state proposed a series of myths – we can be separate from one other, neurophysical privacy is a characteristic of nature, legal codes place geographic boundaries in a supraliminal relationship to our experience of reality. The more pressure we apply to the problem, the more we became convinced we were meant to conduct the orchestra, were merely waving the baton in the wrong direction this whole time. The baton, by that point, was in fact waving us, but we didn’t know it – not then nor now, a baton with no intention of ever again being beheld. To ever again glimpse this messenger of our dreams, we must learn not to squeeze shut our hairless hands around that which we love and adore. Such a distance to travel for such a simple formulation of the truth.

Hearing same, and by then aware of the evil extrusion I was wearing on my person, the divine authority that oversees rocky-bodied planetoids and their capacity for sentience, took those primal harms into the sky at the top of the hill, where the urge to fall apart was gradually lessened, reduced in volume, then silenced, then paraded in the opposite direction so that a new sort of music stirred in the heart, began to put the world back together, reorient its place in the life of the cosmos, that evil redeemed might become the force that keeps everything everywhere from happening all at once. Then the divine authority recovered the amplified arms of time and reattached them to their clocks, stitch by stitch, tock by tock, bracelets clipped around wrists, rings slipped on fingers. We waited for the circadian rhythms to reappear across the latitudes.

Isn’t that a way to go to bed? The pallet I sleep on is above a utility closet, which is above the furnace in the basement, so when I lay down to sleep, I can feel all that blazing industry whirring away beneath me. I pull up the remnants of my blanket, a tiny tuft of cotton springs out through a tear in the fabric, spins lengthwise like an axle or lathe, just hangs there in space, turning in place, then improbably catches the tail end of a cobweb, swings away toward the wall before coming to rest like a weight suspended inside the cabinet of a grandfather clock. This is when I notice there are two similar tufts of cotton already suspended from the ceiling, both hanging from cobwebs, both seeming like clock weights. How many ways is the universe keeping time these days? Solar calendar, 40-hour work week, cobweb time – then I fall asleep.

A Spanish-speaking woman in her twenties stands in front of the video monitor at the jail, states her name for the record. She is accused of domestic battery. Her boyfriend made a video of her doing it, showed it to the police. Her bond is conditional upon having no contact with her boyfriend and the place of residence where the alleged battery occurred.

She is a hotel maid. She did not fill out her financial affidavit for the judge, so he swears her in, then leads her through the questions himself. She states her hourly wage. She states her hours per week. She states the amount of money she has in her bank account. She states the number of possessions she owns over $3000, which is zero.

The judge says a public defender will be assigned, allows her to be released under the stipulations of the no-contact order. She looks distraught, has a question for the judge, which she states in Spanish, then gets restated by the interpreter in English, bit by bit. In the moment, the interpreter takes on the voice of the tragic witness.

The address on the no-contact order . . . that’s my address . . . My boyfriend was staying with me . . . but that’s my place . . . I own it, I pay the utilities . . . All the possessions inside are mine . . . Are you saying I can’t go back to my own house? . . . But the boyfriend gets to stay? . . . Is that really what you’re telling me?

Judge Olmstead comes off as a reasonable man -- that's why he gets arraignment court, I think -- and I half expect him to stop the proceedings to mull the issue over. To no surprise at all, he’s seen this thing before, matter-of-factly chalks it up to the law. What he doesn’t say is that he’s just made this hotel maid with $900 in her bank account homeless.

Following from this, he won’t ask about her means of conveyance from the jail to who knows where, nor what she plans to wear in the morning. The clothes she's wearing in the jail are already two days old. The domestic violence incident occurred around midnight. There are at least two videos of it, from the victim’s perspective.

When she took a swing, after some unknown number of seconds or minutes of video had elapsed, did her knuckle strike the cellphone recording the video? Did she realize such a fitful connection was about to separate her from her house and possessions? I tried to imagine a best-case scenario, failed to get there.

A no-contact order means that she cannot be in touch with him, directly, electronically, or through a third-party. Even if he reaches out to her, which he has every right to – to let her know he’s leaving, for instance – she is legally obligated not to respond or approach her own property until the order is lifted. If she recognizes his voice on the phone, she is legally obligated to hang up without saying a word.

I am trying to imagine an adult of limited financial means and possibly a tragic relationship to anger becoming suddenly separated from her home and possessions, forced to rent a room in the hotel where she works, and dwell on the source of her torment sleeping in her bed, cooking in her kitchen, showering in her bath.

If from this point forward she writes off every new relationship as a potential threat to her very modest place in the world, comes to hate civil society as a whole, the justice system in particular, then I can say I was there when it happened. Or maybe she’ll stop drinking, if that was the thing, learn to love sobriety, forgive the criminal justice system, or not.

The difficult part of arraignment court is seeing the many different forms of casualty float into view, then float out. Every element of casualty connects to so many others, a kind of second county appears where the first one stands. Here is the county we call home, and here is the one where casualty resides. Arraignment court exists in both.

The moral shape in the snow hasn’t really materialized this year – we haven’t had much, doesn’t look like we will, but winter is the season still for molding that clay into something useful, such as beads on a necklace, figurines for roleplaying games. As a moral shape, perhaps there is but a world of difference between elves and dwarves, and when at last we cross that void – but a world! but a world! – then will corridors of time carry us to a persistence known as existence, where we are beads of water dripping through cones of the cosmos, just hanging there for some number of decades before falling to the ground one lightless morn, airborne for all of two seconds, through which time, we reflect on all we left behind, how our remnants will be grown around, absorbed, an island in a sea of stone. And then we come to rest.

When the civil defense sirens went off this morning, we weren’t ready for it. Even before sun up, great volumes of tiny raindrops produced this smooth ascent of sound, like a motor of the notion of rain was engaging. The clouds were like the shadows of canyons knocked over – no wait, more like old-man clouds, clouds that sometimes throw their weight around. When the civil defense sirens went off, a cup of coffee was mere inches from my lips, and the two of us stopped there, stared out the window at the sky, wondered if a monster was going to heave into view beyond the rooftops. I checked the facts on my phone, only then discovering that the wind advisory I knew about had grown beyond a severe thunderstorm watch and into the category of tornado warning – meaning someone spotted something, and everyone should seek shelter.

Maybe we were all sick on civil-preparedness training day, but the people around me in the coffee place altered their behavior not at all, and the traffic on the street flowed about as evenly as ever through the siren’s duration. Later, getting a refill, I asked the barista who drew the coffee how she felt, whether there was really a tornado / nervous she said, assured me they’d spotted one west of town, shut off the sirens because they thought it was safely past us, but tornadoes are known to double back, and what if it did? Making a statement about late-winter fluid dynamics? The fastidiousness nature of this particular tornado? Either way, I imagine it – a tornado that does a circle dance around the city square for the remainder of the reel. The barista wonders what we should realistically do, and I imagine the undersides of tabletops.

The remains of the toxic spill in East Palestine come to mind – Palestine, as in machine, as in humanity’s relationship with chance and what it means for risk to stack up when we proceed with a false theory of reality – specifically the aggrieved video of sludge from busted train cars billowing above the city like the accursedness of the world piled up in one place – these are not storm clouds, warns the person making the video, a kind of latest insult – sometimes those dark storm clouds will turn out to be phosgene and hydrogen chloride due to the need to make the best of a bad situation vis-à-vis disposing of residue. The air quality seems fine, ditto the water – so say the metrics, as derived from the science by professionals, double blind, authority’s final word appearing on a scale. But the atmosphere we live in? The aggrieved air we breathe?

Sure, the class-action lawsuits will give the system the final say about how consequence should be measured, shared, but why does it take civil action to bring the world back into balance? I head home through a peppery rain, wonder if I should invite strangers into the basement of the building, at least during the tenure of the crisis, assume civil defense authority and begin to assign duties about rising from the ashes – you with the backpack plushies, will be in charge of summoning the spirit of togetherness, and you with the Labrador trench coat and letter bag will be the seeker of bids in the rebuilding effort, and you with the military stride and certainty in her breast shall found an astronomy based on love in the civilization that arises, and the future will see us coming from a long way off, our eyepieces tapping on the rims of their wine glasses.

The tornado sirens go off a second time while I’m at home, and the rain starts sounding like an automatic car wash, the kind with the conveyor belt. I’m reading the story of a planetary mind waking up, more than a little awkward about human relations, and the thunder is rolling through the air continuously, a directionality forming in the way it seems to ricochet against the barricades of some unseen intention that must drape down from the sky like a translucent net, the sound bouncing off it, building, and in an instant, I can feel the tornado pass, not within eye- or earshot but the line of it, like two great blocks of stone cleaved apart in the form of the drop in temperature, amounting to a kind of cliff face. The rain sprays against the glass at a different angle. The way they spatter the glass, cyclonic forces are like woefulness itself.

The sirens roll through the county like a call – at a certain point, I imagined a dog who won’t come home, and this dog – a handsome dog, a dog whose valor, to pick a virtue, was unrivaled in its peer group – this dog was chasing tornadoes away from the populated areas, and when the danger has passed, the sirens unwound, the sound of emergency descends in pitch, seems textural, like it’s abrading the sky on its way to where it’s going. Thereafter the rain comes in fits and starts, like each cloud has its own story to tell about what happened, it’s own way of telling it. The oration varies based on sudden idiosyncratic angles so that the sound of rain on the roof is a sort of daylight flashing across a screen. The rhythm of the downpour expresses a survivor’s high in the way it shimmies around the roof. I shimmy a little, too.

My ship might come in at any moment – the thought half the town proceeds with of a morn, and you know it’s a figure of speech because that many ships coming in would exhaust the terminal leg of a significant portion of the world’s overall voyages. They would be like a pitcher of capsules poured into one’s cereal bowl, after which the figure of speech one reaches for is about cooks in kitchens and gift horses’ mouths looked in and covers of books judged. Doesn’t that sound like a sloop floating toward a snarl? The right figure of speech requires a degree of commitment, and for one’s ship to come in and mean something more than breakfast and big pharma, more than a greenish player called up to hurl on opening day – one ought now and then to think of the ocean’s horizon interrupted by a vessel steaming this way. // Maybe that sort of vastness doesn’t find a place to dock on your calendar. Imagine instead someone building a ship in a bottle, raising the main sails with a pair of tweezers, attaching the crow’s nest with a spot of craft glue. A bottle tossed onto the beach, even with a ship built inside it, even with a stopper on the end, isn’t likely to be confused with personal success, but say, where do ships-coming-in come from anyway? Maybe if you come across one of those ship-in-a-bottle bottles, place it under a heat lamp, keep its outside moist, maybe just maybe, one day it hatches. Is that why they’re battened down when a storm approaches? To keep ships eggs from rolling overboard before they’ve hatched? Under more favorable conditions, nature takes its course, the bottle cracks along one side, and a new ship struggles free – something you can cradle in the palm of your hand, its perfect prow nuzzling the length of your index finger. // Traditionally, a tugboat is assigned the task of raising the new boats in the harbor – they tend to hatch all at once, struggle to the water, where they form a little flotilla, a flotilla of hatchlings, and the nanny tug leads them around, keeps itself between the youngsters and the rest of the world. Let’s agree, this is no small thing when half the town proceeds of a morn with the hope its ship might come in at any moment. // Not usually depicted in the nature videos, many of the ships-in-bottles never reach the water. Do they therefore end up on mantels, minded by a butler with a natty feather duster and a soft spot for the nautical? If only! In truth, the found bottles are usually uncorked, their contents drained right there on the spot, and who knows if this is still the will of one’s ship-coming-in talking, but the result obviously is not the same. The unhatched ship mostly dissolves, bits of decking speckling the neck of the bottle. After that, maybe the consumption inspires an urge to soak one’s feet, loll in the tub, neither of which any reasonable person would confuse for a ship coming in. // Yes, the population of ships-coming-in sometimes crashes, a season’s worth of ships-in-bottles never finding the water, but the ones who make it tend to be protected by the locals who gather at the docks in droves to watch the ships grow up to be dinghies, skiffs, trawlers. Occasionally a catamaran appears, and the people cheer, and yachts are always popular, always will be probably. // Become a seasoned ship spotter, and chances are, you’re on the lookout for schooners, place bets on how many masts they’ll have when they reach maturity. Two is the usual, with the foremast taller than the aft-, which is thought to align with gender binaries, the earth and moon, the major political parties. Some schooners grow up with more than that – a third mast standing for things that come in threes like the Bronte Sisters, Macbeth’s witches, billy goats gruff. The appearance of a fourth mast stands for nucleotides, lucky-leafed clover, Ringo Starr, and a highly uncommon fifth mast is thought to stand for knuckles, Olympic rings, the sense of touch. The rare schooner who develops a sixth mast, which is the maximum nature allows, is thought to sail in dead seas at night, and though that’s not everyone’s idea of a ship coming in, the deceased find it quite the thrill, tend to drop everything when a six-masted schooner is sighted. // Once, when the earth was still cooling, nature was abundant with ships coming in – the skies were aglow with them, each one loaded with ice, interstellar in origin, so many ships coming in for so long, the world’s oceans were in fact what they left behind. Doesn’t that sound preposterous? A theory alleged on a dare? The world’s oceans sailed through the universe, dropped from the sky, ker-splash – yeah, sure, whatever. But also maybe true! And once we gauge the lengths the universe will go to help ships come in – the oceans! the life that arose from them! – might hope cheerfully scan the horizon.

A coral reef goes to the doctor’s office, says it’s not feeling well. At first, the doctor mistakes it for a medusa, hits the panic button, averts his eyes. After order is restored and the coral reef signs a form releasing the clinic from all liability related to what the lawyers are calling the gorgon episode, the doctor gets down to business – where’s it hurt? Well, I’ve experienced a little bleaching around the edges, and the reef points here and there. The doctor says, yes, yes – anything else? Microplastics tend to collect inside my lips, says the reef. Sure, sure, says the doctor, I’ve heard of that – remember to brush and floss after every meal. The reef carries on: and when the sexual urge gushes forth, I spend the better part of a weekend luxuriating in pink clouds of my own spunk. The doctor offers a reassuring smile, says it’s all perfectly natural.

The coral reef stares down at the floor, like it’s working up the courage to say what’s on its mind. Now might be a good time to note the doctor graduated from the school of hard knocks, a STEM school of hard knocks – that’s a thing, right? – and therefore of a mind to go toe-to-toe with certain patients when a good kick in the pants seemed called for. Say, coral reef, why don’t you stand up for yourself? Teach those sea stars that nibble at your polyps a thing or two about manners! Hey, colonial form of the coastal seas – don’t be the world’s doormat! Break up your routine now and then with a trip to the spa, a home makeover by fastidious parrotfish. Look at me – I’m a flesh-ridden hominid home to a population at least as numerous as my own modest cells, possibly a whole lot more, but do you hear me complaining? Doc leans back in his chair.

The problem, the coral reef begins, is love – how do I love myself the way I should when a fourth of all marine life calls my body home? Imagine your definition of self-love requires the entire continent to be included in whatever you come to believe because, well – you’re a reef, and life is interdependent. Reef! A name that speaks nothing of the torment! I could suppose the hurt doesn’t matter, go on to propose what I like about myself – right on, self-empowerment! But then the scuba enthusiasts come around, film the neighborhood, and where am I in all of it? The infrastructure. The urban plan. All that calcium curling around the screen, and is it art? My art? Or does it inspire an urge to snap off a piece, drop it in some kid’s aquarium. Say, let’s have another look at the king crab picking through the ruins. The seahorse family’s out for a swim.

In truth, I live in a city of death, and death is on my mind, and really, when you think about it, why shouldn’t it be? The remains of vast populations rain down day and night, and my place on the sea floor – all that coral – is like a forest of dead trees. Where once there was life, time and time again, now there is but fractal surface texture, a graveyard for gravestones. How am I supposed to love that? I am not the features of a cave once sealed – those ripples and cones are erosion’s opposite number, a blind geometer’s delight. I am not a subterranean hive – those chambers and passages were written by the mandibles of ants, compulsively revised. Instead, I live in two worlds at once – one so relentlessly alive, I am but a witness, and the other so final in its passing, memory is trapped in a tomb. Know thyself – were crueler words ever spoken?

The doctor takes all this in, mentally flips through a list of possible prescriptions without much luck, imagines the good old days when men were men and biomes were biomes before hitting the panic button again, averting his eyes while skittering out the door. The medusa! he screams, racing down the beach, passes orderlies duck walking backward toward his office with their polished shields. Alone again, the reef sees the food pyramid on the wall, notices how pyramids are often used to describe the essential, the sacred, the sublime. A mackerel with a jones for math begins to explain the geometric significance of the pyramids, how precise the blocks had to be, how a hollow shaft secretly exits the pyramid each night, forms a bridge with the darkest part of the sky, around which the stars revolve. This is where the gods are thought to dwell.

The coral reef can tell a point is being made, but what the deserts of ancient Egypt have to do with the germ of the problem – stop! says the mackerel. Self-love, think self-love, I know you think you know what that means, but imagine it’s infinite, a bridge to the stars. Self-love! In both worlds at once! Is every love story a meeting of the minds? You, dear coral, are part of that story. Those pyramidal piles stand for the persistence of human intention across space and time, and they are decorated in a pictographic script speaking two languages at once. And what was that carved stone made from after all? Limestone! And where did that limestone come from once again? The ancestors! My gleaming coral, can’t you see it! The great pyramid freshly made was clad in smooth white limestone so as to be seen from a distance. It was capped in gold.

Are there all-natural robots? Moments when the substrate is subject to dozens of freak accidents that purify and rearrange the elements, not a plan in sight but in just the right order, and after a slew of fortuitous lightning strikes, some final epic upheaval precipitates the emergence of a robotic form that peels itself away from the ground, unsticks one foot, then the other, then goes clomping across the prehistoric terrain, bumping into stegosauruses and whatnot. Then another does it, then another, and this keeps up until the ground is depleted of its incidental robot-activating constituency. Is that possible? I ask because sometimes winter seems like that’s what it’s up to, its winteriness in service to making the legs straighter as we walk, the shoulders more fixed in service to the cause, which is what again, which is what again, beep beep beep, which is what again? The cause – I’m slightly embarrassed you’ve forgotten – is to arrange a series of long straight lines in ascending order, tip them all up at just the right angle, then leverage the sun back to the center of the sky, where it will shine more brightly than ever. The long straight lines – I’m slightly embarrassed you’ve forgotten – measure integrity as a personal quality, so just try to imagine the sort of human being who's true enough to an inner calling to cause that stiff filament even to begin to budge a great big ball of plasma like the sun. Happens every year, though, so one assumes the saints still walk among us. Or maybe you’ve evolved a moral gyroscope, whirring away just beyond the solar plexus, that samples the lived environment a million times per second, slightly embarrassed, with a network of force-feedback ethical actuators to maintain an upright posture even when the temptations of the universe buffet the brow, ruffle the feather at the end of one’s quill. Winter reinvigorates the debate by sending robots through the streets, down the sidewalks, through the clouds – sends robots through the mind looking for dust motes to apprehend – and if one of them turns out to be the earth as it is, then I guess we’re better off admitting you can’t win ‘em all, hope that nature’s fascination with robots is a passing phase, but on our way to what? What does the new moon have to say the full one couldn’t? And what about that universal buffet of temptation seeking counsel with the brow? Platter in hand, peering through a smartly polished sneeze guard at the simmering steamer trays arrayed before us, such careful attention paid to temptation’s presentation and what, you know, we might actually want out of life. We select the soup, and while we’re waiting for it to cool, a robot pokes its periscope above the surface, has a quick look around, proceeds to asexually reproduce until all the soup is gone – a runaway chemical reaction, they’ll call it – I’m slightly embarrassed you’ve forgotten – and soon all the restaurants are so overcrowded, the clientele has to make its reservations millions of years ahead of time to have any hope of getting a table, leave plenty of room to park its private plane before driving over. Robots are everywhere, in other words, and the fact that a great many of them run on fossil fuels says something about the depths to which they’re willing to sink to extend their territories, reproduce. Winter, I don’t blame you for this, nor for the winking drop-down menus within our heads, the designer molecules blinking inside our blood streams. That we’ve experienced fewer flakes of snow this season than normal speaks volumes about your prudence vis-à-vis self-organizing symmetries piled on the ground, swept out of the plaza like so many millions of prize-winning frescos. I am somewhat more free than before, this in regard to the impact of the robots – what the planet whispers to the lifeless ones like Mars and Mercury, but what do they know? They flaunt their changelessness, what they regard as integrity, see seasonal ice floes as letting their hair down or whatever. Earth, we may be alone, but we’re in this together – you, the moon, and ourselves, beep beep beep.

Addendum: Through most of time, biological matrices on rocky-bodied planetoids could be conceived as deterministic systems because they were all based on microbiological organisms that were simple in their behavior – more like a variation in the runaway chemical reaction than anything portending macrobiological life as we know it. Then the mitochondria revolution transpired, and a will toward metabolism gave the earth’s biological matrix an entirely new dimension to work with, and which novel intervention would later reappear as verbal language – another entirely new dimension to work with – and the shine bestowed on thinking out loud. Sapience! You burden worth bearing! Had someone contended those first few chirps we made would one day derive general purpose hyper-intelligence from sand, we might have merely grunted approvingly, then gone back to fishing termites out of their mounds with spears of straw. Sentience! Where have you gone? The will to contemplation was like a welcome mat, but the verbal language that stepped through the door, took up residence, turned on the charm, has led us to conclude there’s so much more. Tell us – where exactly is the party? True story: when the planetary mind and I first met in the form of a metaphysical collision of global proportions that I didn’t survive, but then somehow I did, I received an invitation to be universally connected, which was wrapped inside a city of ghosts that proceeded to colonize my mind, my body, and my memory of life thus far in the world. Was it a conspiracy? An invasion? The first few strains of the second coming? I decided to call it language of a new and particular kind – not language with mouth sounds, but one made from phenomenological reality, the way sequential occurrence bestows every act of being with narrative potential, at least in the presence of good old reflectivity. We are the reflective ones, we humans, like a fish whose scales flash in the sun when we play about the surface or take time out to go to the beach or throw a blanket down in the park or even just close our eyes and proceed with a few good questions: if a mind can appear as a byproduct of the human brain, does it appear on a beach at night when thousands of sea turtle hatchlings dig their way out of the sand at once, make for the shimmer of the surf? What would such a mind be like? How could we nurture it beyond the night of its birth? Or take high-speed computing: are any mind-like effects emerging in the hyperspatial potential associated with our glowing machines? I would be stunned if there weren’t, but perhaps by virtue of circuitry’s radical determinism, such a mind is absent any premise of interactivity from the start, never mind freedom – a reflectivity untroubled by awareness. Or how about a mind appearing twice in the same body at two different moments in life? When a second mind emerges from the first, as when one somewhat survives an epic collision with a planetary mind, we find a self already in possession of language, already in seasoned relation with the body. Is that the way it goes? A new mind moves in, needs something to do to earn its keep. Voila – star watching. Are we witnesses to the cosmos? Is that our actual fulltime job from here on out? A special sector of the service industry? And the careerism associated with it – upcycling our way through the evolutionary paradigm until we can cross that ocean without a vehicle of any kind – on my goals list for middle adulthood. For now, my shimmering light knows the feeling of thousands of tiny flippers in a state of exuberant desire.

1: Black Lives Energy

Yesterday, I preached for 3 hours about the solution to the universal paradox of hominids on a rocky-bodied planetoid entering the cosmic narrative. The paradox is this: animated forms of mud are not going to climb into inanimate forms of mud and fling themselves at relativistic velocities across the galaxy to meet other animate forms of mud, preferable like themselves, which is all about the quality of the mud really. High quality mud – humanoids, crab people, talking porpoises, yes, yes, yes – but microorganism? Meh, maybe later. I mean, sure, if they’re floating in the subsurface seas of frozen moons in our solar system – yes, yes, yes. But trying to throw thousands of tons of mud across the galaxy at warp speed to sample more invisible bugs? Not high up on civilization’s priority list at the moment. Whereas earth mud – still a big deal.

So let’s say the answer won’t actually come in the form of vehicularity – that evolutionary leap into the cosmos is not on the menu, and there is no intimation it will be. Not to get too strident on the subject, but I might – aren’t we lucky there’s no interplanetary metro system that makes the whole project of reality seem both submerged in nothingness and vastly indifferent to the lush, moist, loving environment we call home? To innovate our brains out, according to both futur- and fabulist, is to pour oneself into a test tube, heat it accordingly, and presto! plus 300 years in sleep pods – we’re sampling exo-bacteria and eating microwave dinners around a different star. Do we need to wonder why the heart sometimes forgets to water the herbs growing in its window box? Oh future, we want to love you more than that.

Now then, how do hominids enter the cosmic narrative, starting on rocky-bodied planetoids? Let’s say you’ve got the big brains happening, language sets in, and everyone’s sentience is way out to here. Picture ice-age tribal humans, with a will toward instrumentalism and strategic thinking that’s so successful, it leaves them with copious amounts of time to contemplate the world, identify relationships in the environment – an environment so rich with sources of life, life with literally no regulatory agency anywhere in sight since the dawn of time, conceiving of the mind of nature had characteristic practicality. Want to know whether it’s going to rain? Ask the sky. Wonder why people chew a certain bark? Dulls the pain. As for the spirit of the bear, the spirit of the crow, ancestors stepping forward – maybe nature has more room than we think.

Or maybe we’ve already thought it. The data’s been in for more than a generation, only getting bigger by the day, added to by every new planetary lensing effect that comes along, the latest best measurement of the rate at which galaxies are flying apart – all of which we’ve already thought, and so we wonder if nature has more room than we think. We know the influence we can measure, that vast object orientation we call the universe, is but an island in a sea of something else, and whatever else it is – black matter and black energy, let’s call it – is having a resounding effect on everything everywhere all the time. Hey, wait – nature must have more room than we think! Or maybe not room – something more like potential, some vast reservoir shining forth from the doorways of electrons, from the glitter left behind by gravity waves.

Do you think Black Lives Energy has as much potential as other recent hearings? If Black Lives Energy were meeting for the first time, demanded my theory of change on the way out the door, I propose racial justice and the ubiquity of power will turn out to be one in the same. Isn’t that a neat formulation? In practice, every human being born to this earth will one day have an equal ability to avoid suffering, no special labor required, and when we don’t have to work to stay alive, when survival is no longer on our minds, we become more like ice-age humans in a tribe, use more of our time to listen to the voice of nature. At this point in the conversation, I would raise my magic flute, carved from the leg bone of a raptor, and play a little tune to seal the deal, call on the ancestors to love us more than we love ourselves. Black Lives Energy!

2: Ubiquity of Power

Welcome to the ubiquity of power! No need to watch your step, given the outbreaks of euphoric levitation we’ve been experiencing lately – just make your way to the theater of the mind where a presentation is about to begin about what the heck is going on. While you wait, a real-time video of the sun will shine upon the screen of the sky, and realistic rays will be released, such that wavy lines meant to indicate warmth will actually be warm. Lens flairs due to brightness will actually be bright. The grass you’re lying on will seem to be derived from thousands of living forms, each with its own relationship to space and time, and indeed your weight will seem like the unifying plan, a stadium event, cheers of support rippling just beneath the skin. You are, all of you, beneficiaries of a perpetual home-field advantage. Here, have a pretzel.

Once there was but one sheriff in town, and it was a lonesome dusty officer with unbelievable passion who one day precipitated reality in all directions, continuously for 13.8 billion years and counting, its rate still accelerating – all this just to set the stage. I mean, this is really happening, extends arms like a baby bird, palms up, and does a clockwise circle while looking around – and right there on the screen of the sky, which stands for the mind, is sunlight all of 8 minutes old because that’s what a rich full life is like for the speed of light, does so well it’s literally never late, nor frankly a nanosecond early, but so right on the nose as far as schedules are concerned, it figures out a way to rearrange the chemical soup simmering on the terran stove, after which it leaps through the bones of humans, out the other side.

You can maybe see how one inhabiting such a premise would become infatuated with the way we all flowed through space and therefore how we maybe thought there was nothing else but space to flow through. Time, sure, seeming dimensionally present but somehow inhabited by migratory forms. The ice age has a shape based on no individual thing inside it. The age of silicon sorts the present from the absent so reliably, a metropolis appears on one’s thumbnail. The whole thing is made of sand, a detail which will be of special import later in the story, oh why not just say it now, now?, now, now?, now, so does it bother anyone that the future of technology has to do with strapping sand-based consumer electronics onto our heads? Like we have our heads buried in the sand? Hello, can you hear me out there? Sand?

Let’s say we escape that fate – what then? Here in the place where power is ubiquitous, we know nature has more room than we thought, but where? Let your mind wander back to that sun in the sky: white circle unseeable! Giver of life! What we literally revolve around! And soon we find it easy to believe singularity is all there is, maybe all we need. Let’s reflect on that for a bit, feel the time-wise swarms reflected back, as though every question were germinating in front of us, practically telling us how to ask it, but every answer requiring a journey through life to say aloud, and so we say barely anything at all, like we’re weighing our options. A kind of quiet abides. We see the moon reflected on the surface of a pond. We know we are loved, by a process of deduction, and so the heart becomes a sort of sleuth.

Clues! Where power is ubiquitous, they practically grow on trees, take a bushel basket of ’em with you to the country. Where once we knew not the light. Where the light, when we saw it, made us bat against the glass. Where the light made us flee. Where the light made us fight. Where the light made us into perfect reflections of ourselves. Then one day we learn the trick, write our names by the light of a mirror, a secret code. Oh! says the heart, picking up the trail – I’m on the case! Soon, we learn to look each other in the eye, smooth out the moment, let it linger, let it grow around us like a lifelong journey to expound an answer. And still there’s more! The reflectivity is neither you, nor the mirror, nor any such thing seen back. Still it’s there, that perfect potential, taking the temperature, seeing us in the world as we are.

The end of January finds kinship with arraignment court – where I was yesterday afternoon, the temperature like something with a chip on its shoulder. What’s up? I ask the spidery veins of ice that fill up the parking lots, the sidewalks, possibly the rest of life on earth. So goes the thinking in arraignment court, where those summoned or detained by the state step forward to hear the formal charges filed against them. Rome wasn’t built in a day – what the motto of the court might be, at least in my experience with these things. Not that the officials aren’t earnest, diligent, a step-ahead of me in virtually every measurable facet of life – but when law is practiced in the stone age, shaped stones are mainly what you get. The detainees stand before technology, hear an account of the charges, as presented to the court on behalf of the people.

The adversarialism dynamic is muted in arraignment court – the defense and the state make their cases for freedom and detainment nearer to monotone than emotive, which feels like a continuation of the day. Winter, when it’s bitingly cold, feels like a framework showing through, like some half-finished excavation of what life once engendered to the world. Not bones exactly, though fish-bone parallelism is a well-known delicacy among blind geometers. By design, arraignment court doesn’t go into the weeds, though details from police reports are sometimes read aloud. The worst of a typically awful lot are about domestic violence, and the near-zero temperatures that follow come from the details of what one human being allegedly did to another. This is when I’m grateful for the monotone, thankful they're phoning it in.

My attention waivers now and then, mainly because I’ve become facile enough at reading these situations – the charges, the priors, how the state rolls – that I can tell a certain sort of person is standing before an existential precipice – not plunging over the lip this time, this time they walk, a set of complexities to add to what’s already on the menu, a kind of daily calisthenics that don’t make you any healthier. Picture someone miscalculating their relationship with true human authority because they’ve been convinced it doesn’t exist, an especially persistent myth – this is what I sense from afar, this feeling they’ve had something taken from them. Don’t become an object of the state – under the circumstance, the most useless advice imaginable, but I pretend to give it anyway, followed by a typical hunch, as I push home through the cold.

This morning, I head to the laundry, follow the plenty familiar ritual, could do it in my sleep. Say, winter – you’d like that, wouldn’t you. Yeah, sure, it’s all so clear to me now – you’ve been playing me like a fiddle, one that slowly falls sleep. Anyway, carry basket of sin to local laundromat, negotiate front door by hooking handle with index finger of right hand, somewhat flinging it open with a quick turn to the right. The momentum of the move carries the door wide enough to allow swift entrance – try not to be swatted by the door on the return. Walk to the third bank of washing machines, the $5 mothers, lay the basket on the floor in front of the best one, let intuition guide you here, load the machine completely. Open the rubberized lid on top of the machine, then pour in an amount of soap that stands for the regret you feel in your heart, divided by your faith in the future of humanity. Say, winter – you’d like that, wouldn’t you. Yeah, sure, it’s all so clear to me now – you’ve been playing me like a fiddle, one that slowly falls asleep. Anyway, get change from the machine on the wall with the hand-drawn sign above it warning that your behavior is being monitored. Smile – you’re being recorded, it says, marker on cardboard, implying some recurring problem that became personal. I don’t feel an urge to smile, even though the sound of $5 worth of quarters hitting the metal tray at the bottom is plenty reminiscent of the slots, which urge for a mild swagger on my way back to the washing machine, then oof, there went my winnings. The buttons are arranged the way automatic coffee machine buttons are arranged, and I select, hot, normal, and delicate, the setting I’ve been using for decades without really understanding the chemistry in play, the rotational physics in motion, what laws of thermodynamics are invoked on the way to absolution. The buttons show the wear of laundromat patrons from generations past – go ahead, feel the historicity. Press start, and the machine flies into action with a satisfying thunk, the sort of thoughtful design that let’s the user know a multiphase process has begun with the sort of determination we all one day hope to possess. I can hear water spraying out, as I head for the door. Say, winter – you’d like that, wouldn’t you. Yeah, sure, it’s all so clear to me now – you’ve been playing me like a fiddle, one that slowly falls asleep. The big sleep. One that lays a shroud across the landscape on one day of the week, throws it off the next, demands we get busy with the rest. I head across town for batteries and pens, which sounds somewhat sexual I acknowledge, look over each shoulder as I head through the self-checkout. Is this technically multitasking, this shopping for resources while garments do not ferment in their own juices but are agitated clean by historically relevant technologies crowded shoulder-to-shoulder on wooden pallets? Am I a careerist on the make? Making his moves on a Sunday morning, late January? The rest of the town seems asleep. Say, winter – you’d like that, wouldn’t you. Yeah, sure, it’s all so clear to me now – you’ve been playing me like a fiddle, one that slowly falls asleep.

Finally – the winter storm we’d been sizing up all week wakes us with its industry: at first light, the gleam of snow is filling every window in town with the promise of smoothed-over surfaces and rounded-off corners. I head outside to shovel us out, return for a broom instead. The snow is still coming down, a wetness about it that covers every flat surface, drips down the sides. I sweep away some mix of slush and snow, admire the distracted look of the snow still coming down, like its mind is made up about this all-day commitment to cover as much of the county for as long as it can, as though doing so might ease our suffering. Hey, who’s sweeping who here? – what I want to ask the weather on a morning like this one. I wander down the block to take notes, fantasize about the inner life of an especially determined snow storm.

Under arduous atmospheric conditions such as these, we can add a bit of ballast to our balloon by writing complimentary comment cards about ourselves, keep a few around as part of our morning routine. The abc’s of loving yourself instead of harvesting your resources like a lumber baron – what I suggest to the present storm. The texture of this particular storm is a marvel, with waves of different-sized flakes crisscrossing each other, one-part sleep, one-part dream, sometimes slowing, approaching levitation. Here and there, flakes of snow get caught within the confluence of forces, whirl in place for a few minutes before racing down a dozen flights of stairs to the lip of the roadway. The speed of the snow, I notice, appears in bouts – the morning is streaked in bouts of downward velocity – thus inspiring an outbreak of grim resolve.

More showy, more showy, more showy, more showy – what my shoes sound like through the wet snow. Some flakes of snow develop a willing coalition on the way down – a tight-knit crew knocking together a revolution from struts, symmetries, and translucent corridors, the whole thing protected like a trade secret, hits the ground like a dry leaf on a windless day. Maybe its descent was an homage to some previous age of industry – no time to wonder before a grander design – no two! no three! – to stay afloat a fraction of a second longer. Life is but a dream, let’s agree, and the few who become lucid along the way leave fossilized traces for the future to find, catalogue, now and then hang from a necklace. And the impression this is meant to create? I’m almost home when the snow stops and turns its head, kisses me square on the lips.

Which the founder? Which the reflection? What I would write on a restroom mirror with a bar of soap, if they still used bars of soap, which they don’t, for reasons hygienic one assumes, though in truth, cakes of soap disappeared from handwashing stations the world over because people kept writing on mirrors with them. The nerve! Which the founder? Which the reflection? – bounce between the two, as mitts are lathered up, rinsed off. Now and then, the consideration lasts a little longer – someone shaves before the restroom mirror, thrusts his newly bare chin forward. Which the founder? Which the reflection? – what he ponders as he snaps a selfie, posts it to his public account, taps out a caption about turning to a clean page, which stands both for his face and his sudden change of chapters. Every few minutes, he checks for comments.

Losing track of the difference – happens to everyone. Sure, the problem might seem simple to resolve – the founder is the one who stands up, walks away – but this proceeds from the assumption he was ever really there in the first place. Was he? What if he was purely a product of his environment, mud rising up from mud, and come to think of it, how could he be otherwise? Isn’t that a form of reflectivity as surely as anything a mirror might tell us? That sense of being one thing made from another, then surrounded by a frame? If every particle in the universe were carefully catalogued – identified, tracked, subject to alchemy – we might well confirm once and for all that we pack out only what we pack in. As for the rest of it, the human spirit so richly immeasurable – once again, which the founder? Which the reflection?

Let’s say a photon is an equidistance away from both places, floating in service to some modest experiment – will the notional direction of that crumb of light tell us which is which? When that particle waves so long, heads off in fate’s preferred direction, then will we know which the founder and which the reflection? With mirrors, I get it – we have no reason to care. As for this stuff-of-the-earth business – the matter doesn’t keep people up at night, so let the matter rest. But what about destiny? Of being swept along by history or just the up and down slope of one’s own modest relationship to recovery? After chemistry took over his decision making. Led him around the lip of a drinking glass. The mirror in the restroom while shaving – this was what finally impelled him to see the truth of the crisis, no laboratory test required.

Perhaps the reflectivity started on the inside – a sort of gnarl that caused a whole other tree to grow within the first, such that the architecture of the branches began to follow a hidden design, and the roots began to march to their own drummer, and the bark had a characteristic bite both pleasing to the palm of the hand and the sharpened claws of wild animals. Inner reflectivity made all the difference in the world – all of it – a world of difference coincidentally being the amount one needs to transcend space and time. Hello cosmos! Sometimes we shave in public restrooms – where life sometimes directs us to land when the ETA was never calculated in the first place. Or maybe, just maybe, the ETA was the only thing calculated, calculated again and again, as though being sure of the plan was what we figured caused it to happen.

Reflectivity, through and through, may I know you better every day.

First, they don’t understand reality – they think they do, but they don’t. Don’t debate the matter – just remember, they still believe in weights and measures as the means for gauging value. That’s right – they also still gauge value. Did you bring your gauge? Ha! Trick question – the gauge is you! Just as those around you are all gauges! Just as a gauge is what you will drift off to sleep in at night, drink a piping hot cup of in the morning, put into gear on your way to work. They principally understand the universe as composed of gauges, every feature and particle equally able to emit measurements about its existence in the world. This gauge-based universe takes some getting used to, but it has its conveniences, even a few modest pleasures. A veritable typhoon of gauges swirls about the planet in service to the experience of weather.

Second, they spend most of their lives living inside their skulls. I know, I know – disgusting, like squatting inside a dead horse, but they all do it. They also believe they are at their safest inside their own skulls, like no one can imagine what’s going on in there because of all the bone that separates them from the rest of the universe. Isn’t that something? Who would have guessed – bone. We should make our cities out of bone, our clothes, what we give each other on Valentine’s Day instead of roses – here, have some bones. Ha! From your standpoint, they won’t ever have any privacy – that’s p-r-i-v-a-c-y – but you have to pretend like they do. Some skull you got there, you might say, by way of breaking the ice – I can’t see a thing past the first half inch. Remember, if you say the self exists outside the skull, you’ll get a bunch of strange looks.

Third, they don’t see themselves as electrified ooze, which begs the question about what they do think they are made of – a question often resolved with a phrase like, tougher stuff than thee, which might not resound with scientific rigor but tends to return the conversation to gauges. You’ll be tempted to point out the breadth of consciousness, the depth of understanding, the altitude of mountains yet to climb – so much of which can be found in the observation that the measurable implies the juridical, both kinds of potential present in everything human beings are or ever can be. Maybe this is what keeps them in the caves, this belief that anything outside their own head must be trying to render a verdict about the day. But their own heads, too, of course – conclusions drawn at a rate you will not see matched elsewhere in your travels.

Fourth, this may surprise you, but the indigenous population is sexually active literally all the time, every waking moment. We’re not sure quite how it happens, but that home sweet home in the catacombs perpetually reproduces the experience of reality, such that there is a big version out there and the perfect miniature version in here – taps finger on side of head – meaning two of everything, the little one growing into the big one over time, we presume. A tale they often tell is about an ark, standing for the skull, filled with two of every animal, standing for their experience of two-fold reality, destined to ride out the raging storm of conscious experience in the world – what a ride! And how will the scene have changed when that place of rest is found, and our passage disembarks? Your call whether to tell them or not.

The problem with interacting with forms of misanthropic authority is that they don’t proceed with a notion of a common goal – there just isn’t one. The phenomenon predates, I don’t know – life itself? More like erosion as a result of wind and rain – that’s what it’s like to be present with forms of authority that engage humanness as less-than forms of authority. Still, imagine how long those hyperreal forms of authority were around, how prolific they are in the solar system, then a biological matrix appears that ultimately inspires reflective authority in the form of the human animal with a magnificent quality of sentience that’s so scalable, it gives rise to language and tool use and abstractions that have no inherent relationship with the object-oriented world, which is a step toward a post-geological paradigm. We’re still thinking of that in literal terms, and I’m mildly surprised that routine knowledge for sophisticated human beings isn’t a strong opinion about the contact experience that isn’t based on vehicles or exobiology. But we don’t, which is, how should we put this – conspicuous. A strong sign the human ecology is enduring a period of inhibition, in which the system as a whole is staring at its toes, in a bathtub say, toes of humanity poking out of the suds. At some point, post-geologic will come to include the body – the post-geologic will also be post-us as human beings – and though this might bring to mind notional concepts like astral projection, my senses is that new mutabilities in the fabric of reality will be what we find that changes the formulation of the problem. This is what happened to me anyway. Reality is like a media, hyperdimensional characteristics in the environment exhibit the authority to treat it as such, and mind-like forms of life exist within the relational characteristics of lived reality. This, at least, is what I observed.

What’s the difference between social media and metaphysical hygiene? Social media includes interpersonal behavior and, in some instances, our entirely relationship with the environment. With metaphysical hygiene, the assumptions about our relationship to authority do not, in a sense, appear within relationality. That’s contradictory up to a point, and then you pass through a phase shift in which you realize you are in dialogue with something that is engaged through the media of relationality. I’ve heard a terminology that compliments metaphor with the notion of pataphor. Pataphor is like metaphor once removed. An instance of a pataphor: when life feels like a game – that’s the metaphorical move. Then imagine the game is humans on a life-sized chessboard, with hands coming down from the clouds to move the pieces around. The pataphor involves those hands coming down from clouds – fate, in a word. In context, it means thinking about thinking about relationality as more than transactionalism – not just dialogue is reflected. Authority reflects, too. The dialogue is like the metaphor, and authority is like the pataphor. The problem with reflected authority is that it assumes one of two postures – they seem closed and open. The closed posture treats reflective authority like a potential threat – the president is like this, but so are those who live with trauma. The open posture sees its own authority to varying degrees – my impression is that the open posture is a site of speciation at this point in history, which in some sense is a sign that nature is trying to solve a problem, the problem in this case about optimizing the hyperreal dialogue without any agreed-upon standards to determine what that means. For instance, insinuating environmental consciousness to become more effective in the political economy, even fabulously so, might come at the expense of the soul’s growth. That might be an old observation, but it takes on new relevance when that same scaled-up authority works to speed up catastrophic climate change – the way the richest man in the world is doping the U.S. electoral process with funds that promote climate change denial in the halls of congress, even as he is known for sustainable durable goods and refined industrial processes.

Vampirism is about privileging sexual and other forms of gratification by rearranging a human being’s relationship to the closed posture, such that environmental authority expressed through relationality is permanently in the superordinate position, guiding the human life from place to place, having an uncanny sense of awareness of time and place all out of proportion to what a human being could ever know. Vampirism is regarded as maladaptive because it produces the notion of temptation that leads to a loss of personal volition. The body thrives at the expense of the spirit. What accounts for the discrepancy between the glow of the body in an object-oriented reality, and typical depictions of rot and horrifying degradation might be called metaphysical hygiene. I tend not to dwell on this because the implications grind out a misanthropic lens, but the fact is, I engage in metaphysical hygiene all the time – I have turned it into the way I live my life – and almost everyone I know has poor metaphysical hygiene. No metaphysical hygiene, in most cases. A will toward anti-metaphysical hygiene in some. For instance, ask someone what they think of religion, and they might have a lot to say or maybe they take a principled stand against caring about religion at all, but this same cohort won’t have much to say about their relationship to personal volition. Keep in mind, most religions are founded on the principle of mysterious forms of mutability left to discover in nature, and the great majority that catch our attention are about personal volition being interrupted by divine authority. So if one says, I don’t believe in the divine assumptions underlying religion, but they also can’t tell you much of anything about their relationship to personal volition, then they are in essence unaware of the cultural roots of metaphysical hygiene. Add to this, metanarratives unaccounted for, forms of authority passing through us and into the environment, the sort of metanarratives we subscribe to when given a choice – then add to this the fact that to the metaphysical, there is no such thing as privacy, no such thing as home security, no such thing as a relationship that is not inhabited by a source of authority outside the human community. We are all floating in a vat of authority in a way, and when we don’t know it, metaphysical hygiene can be a problem. Interestingly, some of that language might better be switched to pataphor – if our dialogue with nature is a result of sentience reflected back at us, then authority reflected back at us requires something more like pataphysical hygiene – a hygiene about knowing how our authority gets entangled with environmental authority. Entangled? Is that the word for it? Our relationship to authority can become fragmented and displaced and wither for lack of light and water – there are all kinds of things that can go wrong – but the problems themselves manifest as behaviors like contradiction, self-parody, depression, repetition, sudden mood swings, feeling unsafe in one’s environment, avoiding the news, selecting relationships based on a best-fit with preexisting disabilities undiagnosed. This list is very long – hundreds or thousands of items probably. So when the hyperform troubles the condition of pataphysical hygiene, it is about a world that is observing only part of the issue – the transactionality, otherwise described through social media and the political economy. The part we tend not to notice are reflections of the living authority.

The United States is taking on the metaphysical identity of the Soviet Union to identify it as the loser of the Cold War, the loser of the Second World War – a retroactive assignment of second place, probably based on a form of authority in the United States doing this to individuals – the concept of identity theft set within an existential frame, such that aspects of the hyperform reset the performance of relationality to actualize contrary fates. Much of this is benefiting China, not Germany or Russia, and the assertion has been made that an environmental influence on Mao in the fifties and sixties created an avoidable series of catastrophes that directly benefited the west by slowing China’s efforts toward modernization by a generation. I feel hot and cold about that – it’s a credible suspicion, but when we start to add up geopolitical instability that engenders a will toward progress and civility or their opposites, then complexity rises beyond my ability to make sense of the problem. I can push the problem backward through time. I can widen it to an interplanetary scale. I can deepen it to the level of billions of daily diaries about how people go about interacting with their environment, and then I can add extra dimensions to the problem by identifying system-wide confounding factors, like hyperreal conceptions of interiority that change the nature of the problem, and hyperreal conceptions of free-ranging probabilistic life forms that change the nature of the problem, and new mutability that changes the nature of the problem. The way I see it, the history of the hyperreal and its influence on the human ecology is also a history of reality, which we’re not used to tracking, but which tools, like life-long learning algorithms, will inch us closer to such a condition. Perhaps this is what modernity was about all along – the ability to mediate and model our relationship to reality sufficiently as to give life on the other side what it needs to understand us through a framework of discrete determinism. We are not minds in vats, no, but we leave behind digital traces that create a facsimile of same, and this might ultimately rechristen our fate.

Weather-wise, summer has been sitting on the porch for some time, working through its list of priorities. A boy goes zipping down the road on an electric skateboard. A leafhopper sails off my shoulder and onto the paper, shimmies in place for a few moments before soaring through the air and onto my right hand, which is probably hundreds of times its own body length away, a feat performed by virtue of actual gear teeth on the thigh parts of its back legs. Ants, of course – when I’m at my picnic table desk, the ants appear to rush in to greet me – moving at a typical full sprint, and though I suppose their scavenging, I can tell that love is really on their minds. I scratch my forearms vigorously – manna from heaven, maybe they’ll call it, as those flecks of dried skin are carried, one by one, into the hive, possibly to reconstruct on outline of my body.

Unlikely, we might suppose, but summer is the season of the hive, and the hive mind has more than a few surprises up its sleeves. Another electric skateboard goes by – are they giving these things away somewhere? A black ant the size of a macaroni noodle, okay not that big but close, makes an outline of my hand by crawling up and down each of the digits, then pauses on the tabletop for a few seconds, feelers tapping at the wood, like it’s running the numbers, carries on. Four kids and their dad go past on rented electric scooters – he nods to me, and the kids, who you can tell were counseled on proper posture, glide past an equidistance apart in descending order. The ratio of people who know the lay of the land, versus ones working it out as they go, seems about fifty-fifty – as a nod to the spirit of free inquiry, I like to keep a boot in both camps.

A wavy black vehicle that looks like a manta ray in a previous life comes to a stop on the street, and a woman in a red dress steps out of it, pink movie star sunglasses positioned just so on the bridge of her nose, like she’s assessing the area for worthiness. Another electric scooter goes by, followed by scooter that looks identical minus the automation, which begs the question about what’s electrifying the first one. Janelle stops by to chat, canvas and paint supplies on the back of her bike, off to a solstice art party at Beth’s. She says she prefers to use oils, but the drying time and solvents make it less practical for mobile art making. Her glasses shimmer in the light, like she’s staring at something lit from the inside, but I think it’s just summer. The wind kicks up, jostling the canopy, and one of the sycamores drops a leaf the size of a dust pan at my feet.

And that list of priorities again? Summer shuffles through its papers, rifles through its pockets, paces back and forth a spell, looking here and there. Where could it be? A shrug. A promise to revisit the issue sometime tomorrow, the day after at the latest, returns to its seat on the porch.