777
Throughout the world and time, allegorical journeys prompt the imagination of
every individual to prepare. Most wander off and disappear; are subsumed into the
greater body of a locale, like that of the “Ediacaran Gaojiashan biota [which] displays soft-tissue preservational styles ranging from pervasive pyritization to carbonaceous compression”
5
. Such are the states to which most life flees, following upon
its instantaneous ephemeralization in the guise of an individual. Added all together,
the life and death that constitutes biomass (organic, inorganic, and everything else)
sustains laughter, humus, hunger, apathy, anxiety, and sleep. But it cannot answer
the simplest riddle outside of biological peripheries. Such abiding surrealities—like
the distance to GN-z11, the most distant known galaxy at 13.39 billion light years
from earth—involve no dogma or theology. It simply is, lost in the faintly illuminated haze between poetry and science
6
.
88.2 To Die For
The same status attends upon each one of us, we amalgams of unknown trillions of
entities within ourselves (estimates range between 30 and 100 trillion human cells
in each body). Such beingness, always individuated, involves a continuum of mass
births and deaths, mass graves and silent exiles, the “discursive formations” posited
by Michel Foucault
7
and the unseen crevasse receiving the straggler. Or, in the
broader view, Spengler’s “decline,” Diamond’s “collapse,” all those pre-Cambrian
biodiversity “explosions” followed by mass extinctions. Those ecotones proffering
the most abundant swathes of life also harbor the perfect opportunistic pathogens.
What was a tropic now gives way to the dust bowl. Southeastern Australia, Central
Amazonia, the corals of the Caribbean, much of Finland and Siberia, Haiti, of
course—all in dramatic exfoliation.
Consciousness has nothing whatsoever at stake in this perennial battleground
of crescendos and decrescendos. Like the seasons of any angiosperm or gymnosperm, ovaries or strobili, all is conditioned by the type of seed and the preconditions, whether moisture, topography, altitude, soil type, co-commensurate
species, invasives, and proximity to human communities. Within those varied constraints and freedom, rebirths are as conditional the second and third time, as they
5 See “A unifying model for Neoproterozoic-Palaeozoic exceptional fossil preservation through
pyritization and carbonaceous compression,” by James D. Schiffbauer, Shuhai Xiao, Yaoping Cai,
Adam F. Wallace, Hong Hua, Jerry Hunter, Huifang Xu, Yongbo Peng and Alan J. Kaufman,
Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5754 (2014), https://www.nature.com/articles/
ncomms6754, December 17, 2014, Accessed February 2, 2020.
6 See “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” by Ron
Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, PLOS Biology, PMC, NCBI, PLoS Biol. 2016 Aug: 14(8):
e1002533, Aug. 19, 2016, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533, PMCID: PMC4991899, PMID:
27541692, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/. Accessed July 22, 2020.
7 L’archéologie du savoir, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1969.
88.2 To Die For
Throughout the world and time, allegorical journeys prompt the imagination of
every individual to prepare. Most wander off and disappear; are subsumed into the
greater body of a locale, like that of the “Ediacaran Gaojiashan biota [which] displays soft-tissue preservational styles ranging from pervasive pyritization to carbonaceous compression”
5
. Such are the states to which most life flees, following upon
its instantaneous ephemeralization in the guise of an individual. Added all together,
the life and death that constitutes biomass (organic, inorganic, and everything else)
sustains laughter, humus, hunger, apathy, anxiety, and sleep. But it cannot answer
the simplest riddle outside of biological peripheries. Such abiding surrealities—like
the distance to GN-z11, the most distant known galaxy at 13.39 billion light years
from earth—involve no dogma or theology. It simply is, lost in the faintly illuminated haze between poetry and science
6
.
88.2 To Die For
The same status attends upon each one of us, we amalgams of unknown trillions of
entities within ourselves (estimates range between 30 and 100 trillion human cells
in each body). Such beingness, always individuated, involves a continuum of mass
births and deaths, mass graves and silent exiles, the “discursive formations” posited
by Michel Foucault
7
and the unseen crevasse receiving the straggler. Or, in the
broader view, Spengler’s “decline,” Diamond’s “collapse,” all those pre-Cambrian
biodiversity “explosions” followed by mass extinctions. Those ecotones proffering
the most abundant swathes of life also harbor the perfect opportunistic pathogens.
What was a tropic now gives way to the dust bowl. Southeastern Australia, Central
Amazonia, the corals of the Caribbean, much of Finland and Siberia, Haiti, of
course—all in dramatic exfoliation.
Consciousness has nothing whatsoever at stake in this perennial battleground
of crescendos and decrescendos. Like the seasons of any angiosperm or gymnosperm, ovaries or strobili, all is conditioned by the type of seed and the preconditions, whether moisture, topography, altitude, soil type, co-commensurate
species, invasives, and proximity to human communities. Within those varied constraints and freedom, rebirths are as conditional the second and third time, as they
5 See “A unifying model for Neoproterozoic-Palaeozoic exceptional fossil preservation through
pyritization and carbonaceous compression,” by James D. Schiffbauer, Shuhai Xiao, Yaoping Cai,
Adam F. Wallace, Hong Hua, Jerry Hunter, Huifang Xu, Yongbo Peng and Alan J. Kaufman,
Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5754 (2014), https://www.nature.com/articles/
ncomms6754, December 17, 2014, Accessed February 2, 2020.
6 See “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” by Ron
Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo, PLOS Biology, PMC, NCBI, PLoS Biol. 2016 Aug: 14(8):
e1002533, Aug. 19, 2016, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533, PMCID: PMC4991899, PMID:
27541692, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4991899/. Accessed July 22, 2020.
7 L’archéologie du savoir, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1969.
88.2 To Die For