What is the difference between life and non-living existence?
I can imagine a racist asking me, “if it was between you and the rock, which would you choose to live?” If they caught wind of this. With the same brand of racism that some animal lovers have when they can’t get down with Black Lives Matter, but they want you to care about the shrimp, or freeing birds from cages without concern for human abolition, too. These are my clouds when I consider how I consider nonliving existence to matter outside of ecological chatter and aesthetic pleasure.
I can imagine myself in the nature preserve of my hometown that is a desert that was once a marsh that came up out of drying inland sea, with my two little cousins telling them about the things that I have learned and observed from our mineral and rock family. Their crystalline structures that, even mechanically crushed, are maintained.
What is the death of a rock? When I tell them to value the presence and existence of both the living and the nonliving, I ask how can I show them?
Take up this rock, I say to the younger. And maybe not knowing better, he would throw it and smash it. In its smaller fragments, the rock is not made lesser. Whether or not homogenous in composition, it remains itself. Ground down, the rock knows something we do not about existence, about consistency and remaining yourself. About transformation across heat and pressure, sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous.
The rock knows it will remain itself longer than we ever can. We will not outlive or out-exist it in physical form. Then, one day, that rock will meet enough heat and pressure to be called something else, not because it has been labeled by a living being that can’t remember its last six crystalline structures, but because it has become something fundamentally different atom to atom. And maybe then, a rock can die.
…..
The sovereignty of hierarchy
Why does hierarchy reign? And what’s with the pyramid obsession? Why do people love triads and triangles, I’m tired of lines. What about saddlebacks, I mean saddle points?
What about circles and inflection? Imagining the 2D on 3D shapes! What about crossroads? What about a messenger? If a point is infinitely small and infinitely large and infinitely far, no not that, just around the street corner, far, then maybe a point is a sphere? Maybe a point is a mystery? Maybe the point is keeping mysteries alive. Not sure if I want to understand, might like to though.