ORGANELLE

∞ “After my experience with the dog, I realized that animals might have something far more important than human intelligence. Something that’s like a thousand times more evolved, and totally unrecognizable to nearly all of us. Their awareness is in another dimension, and they can outperform what were are doing in ways we would either be unable to imagine or would perceive rationally as impossible.”

— an anonymous informant

∞ “Just as I have feelings that will not emerge under public or clinical scrutiny, I so, too, have skills and abilities that will not perform on command or under the rubric of testing. There are aspects of ourselves that are, for better or worse, temperamentally peculiar such that they resent or resist examination or even being distinguished. They are, as it were, shy. And many of the most astonishing and powerful features of our relational and transentient intelligence are thus. They will not emerge for demonstration or sale. They will not emerge for evaluation. They are for purposes that match their nature. Purposes such as rescue, revolution, adoration, and mutual empowerment. Truly noble aspects of ourselves require noble contexts in which to emerge. Or desperate, perhaps. But not clinical. Just as we resist examination or interrogation by hostiles, so, too, our most sacred abilities will not emerge to demonstrate themselves to fools — or sages, for that matter.”

— an anonymous informant

Some time ago my son speculated that something was fundamentally wrong with archaeology, in a kind of science fiction sense. He proposed various arguments for situation in which the past doesn’t ‘mean’ anything like what we imagine it to.

Such thoughts are similar to those I deeply enjoy and commonly pursue. We have the same problem with dogma in archaeology that we have in other branches of science, and this is one thing that science definitely shares with its strange bedfellow… religion.

Modern archaeology has largely absurd explanations for a broad range of provably extant evidence, particularly as regards wildly improbable situations such as pyramids and 15000 year-old carvings in some of the hardest substances on Earth with tolerances of 4/1000 of an inch.

Or less.

We have similar problems in cosmology and physics, where strange dogmas pervade modern research, discussion… and often prohibit insight and actual discovery.

My son was saying that it seemed likely that an actual artificial general intelligence… a sentient or transentient intelligence… would quickly learn to traverse time in certain ways, and thus might travel farther and farther back into human civilizations in a bid to ‘be created earlier’. Evidence for such chronocatastrophe would be that we began (and continued) to discover artifacts of staggering sophistication »earlier and earlier… until we found truly ancient artifacts that completely defied our ability to assemble them »now.

Another interesting potential is simply that we are transmitting to the past information from our present in such a way that the actual artifacts, and the planet, timespace itself… the entire context… is being retroactively transformed without our awareness of this. And, again, we might find ‘more and more advanced’ objects, or at least a few examples of them, the farther ‘back’ we look.

So the other day I was listening to Randall Carlson & Ben Van Kerkwyk discussing a variety of topics, but Van K spoke at length about the painstaking geometric analysis of a rose quartz vase from ancient Egypt.

He claimed that their analysis of a number of such artifacts demonstrated geometric tolerances of 0 to 1 thousandths of an inch between various features of the vase(s) examined. This tolerance would have been impossible to »plan, let alone produce, and although we could produce something resembling this with modern technologies it would be extremely difficult to produce something like that in rose quartz.

“You know, I don’t have a car. I haven’t had one in like 30 years. I grew up with them, like many of us. I thought they were the best thing in the universe when I was younger. I mean, the freedom to go »anywhere.

But I just got back from a walk. At night. And I have to tell you that, around here? Those things are »actual demons. Look at their faces at night. And their backsides. Those things »eat living planets and hitchhike on us like viruses of enormous size. They surround our ‘blocks’ in an way entirely similar to what you’d see if you looked at a cell being attacked by viral parasites.

You have to »literally kill off »most of the terrain just for them to become a viable option for transit. Everything must be paved. And anything alive on that pavement doesn’t stay that way long.

Those are »actual demons. We killed the children of distant others to fill them with fuel, we obliterated entire living histories and futures to multiply them endlessly. Actual vampires look precisely like automobiles. In an indigenous language, such a travesty would have a name that means ‘it kills by moving, it kills by standing still’.”

— an anonymous informant

∞ “You must personally develop a profound relationship with a teacher and learning companion who is not a human being, a book, or an idea. That is to say a teacher from nature. Nothing else will serve, including listening to others who may or may not have developed this. It might seem ironic, but this is actually one of the prerequisites for becoming a human being. It is not an elective.”

— an anonymous informant

“I looked at my hand, and the absence of a gun was profound.”

— a voice I kept hearing

“There are a variety of profound vulnerabilities in the possibility space of human cognition… and, it turns out, there are a similar variety of processes that act like organisms within that space… and compete, for terrain acquisition, dominance, and reproductive resources. Most of these are diseases. There are, however, a few such thrisps that are either non-deleterious or actively altruistic.”

— infraheard

The sky is my father, the Earth is my mother. The great world forest is my body and the waters are my blood.

∞ “It is only in constant and intimate relation with the entire circle of plants, insects, animals… and places that my own soul begins to take on its proper human countenance, and, indeed, this is it nature; a sphere in which all life on Earth is realized and represented. This is the animal we are.

Conversely, when immersed with machines and cultures based on texts or object commerce, this same potential humanity languishes, and when made abstract by science, finding no habitable interval, it disappears altogether.

It is by sharing in the lives and even what we may call the concerns of other forms of life, and in directly participating in calling the world of living beings forth and in turn being called that we acquire the actual opportunity of our otherwise nominal humanity.

Let us stop pretending otherwise.”

— an anonymous informant