Towards a New Science Fiction

Part I

Silene, the flower that was frozen since the Ice Age 

Picture: Jacinta Lluch Valero

It's going to be necessary for us to understand the pages we're on together and apart--to differentiate between the pages we're reading and the one's we've already eaten and digested readily for so long, we've already paved the calcified gutters of our literary community with our own sedimentary excrement. When our golden yearning for the stars came from youthful innocence--that was one thing--and permissible, to a point. Now that we've all grown older together, if one can't see the stars themselves represent the tangible beauty of death shining out loud in the eternal dark, like diamond points reminding us human mayflies out here on this lonely periphery just how much time has been really left for us all, then I'm sorry, but I can't join one on their beautiful quest for a colony on Mars. But I do wish all those who venture with such daring my very best. After all, our limitations should be boundless in the cosmiverse.

The isolated frontier of existence relates from our own angled lines of perception stemming from the inverted reflection cast off the back of our retinas and bouncing off the coronal apex of our event horizons, not onward and beyond our solar system into the glimpse of a premature death, but rather, refracted back inward down through our atmosphere and deeply further into the microcosmic membranes of our blossoming world here and now. The blessed balanced moment poised on eternity's cusp. 

Just like the question of whether extraterrestrials exist, we cannot begin to hope we could understand each other unless we've all been qualified together as to the usefulness of the proper application of such terms in the first place. It would serve us well to agree that comprehending the alien flies in direct contradiction to what that word implies. Anything alien to us by definition could not be even conceived as having anything familiar to our sphere of awareness, therefore rendering the quintessentially 'alien' as a philosophical concept at the least, or a sort of  'spectrographic-beyond-our-frequency' idea at the most; either way, although it may remain interesting to wonder whether it could even be possible to have a translation of the alien rendered into terms humans could begin to comprehend, just as surely, if we chose to, we could opt to not aspire to waste too much of our time and energy earnestly contemplating the possibility of, say, breathing solid rock for instance (not that such an allegedly preposterous notion couldn't necessarily hit pay-dirt) and neither would we necessarily bother to waste valuable life experience on further pursuing any notion of the alien whatsoever--if we can agree that the secondary definition of 'alien' were to be applied roughly as "life forms operating on such an inherently different system than ours as to remain altogether unrecognizable to us."

The extraterrestrial posits another matter altogether: that of scale, and our tendency to limit the scale upon which we really exist. We like to think of our own planet as the totality of our location in the cosmos, and therefore it may escape us that sentient hominid beings very much like ourselves could be common throughout all galaxies in the universe, for all we know. Such a distinct possibility could render Homo sapiens sapiens of Earth in actuality the common denominator for most advanced civilizations across the universe.  

From what I've been able to gather, my own contemporary's apparent unwillingness to accommodate for such a normalized possibility as this may be relegated to a lack of imagination, or perhaps mere apathy has seized the lot, or maybe we're all too distracted staying focused on what lies directly ahead of us to bother with such notions, I can't tell for certain. As for myself, I concurrently dream of our golden aspirations to the stars, but not without a slight degree of bitterness, as I gaze out my window toward the trees' outline against the backdrop of night.


I feel certain now that this, our home planet Earth, remains the single most important, vital element in all of our daily lives regardless of how much psionic energy may escape us in the form of frustrated ventilation through dreams. That a good portion of us take those fevered notions and enact them proudly throughout our lives to gain the notoriety of honor among men remains something that I neither dismiss nor neglect to apprehend in my own daily rituals keeping up with the pace of the modern world. Let's just say, to keep it simple, that I try not to think about it, that much. The looming human bulk, encroaching as an ever growing shadow at dawn. If anything, it helps spur me to my feet.

I can't help but see the zoomed-in microscopic world of our human microbiome, along with the mycobiome--into the seething cauldron of the ongoing eukaryotic and prokaryotic dance of evolution that has been ongoing inside us from the beginning. Our realm of neural pathways remains intrinsically connected along a complicated unfolding web work of synaptic leavenings whose sum effect, besides playing key roles in producing ourselves, and our progeny, on a chaotically resplendent world of titanic opposing forces constantly clashing to create order from the storm, seems to be the consequential inflicting of this wonderful and harrowing thing called imagination on us, which, as true to the source-code that inspired it, reflects both ways, as it were, and like the proverbial double-edged mirror image, cuts one only to have them not notice the bleeding until it's far too late to stop it. For these and similar reasons, the fashion to carry on "blind" throughout all this disturbing history has grown stronger among men, or so it seems to me. Until comes the day that blindness itself so entirely consumes the race of men, that their ordinary 'day-sight' becomes mistaken for 'true-sight'.

PEERING IN

From the Outermost Dark, as we focus our attention on the matter at hand, the compound matter focuses on our land, its gaze from a different spectrum than our own, passing unnoticed at the molecular zone, as our greater telescopic view into the dark beyond the Kuiper belt gradually illuminates and clarifies the blackness awaiting in the Scattered Disc, imagine what we may find even further beyond at the great spinning walls of calcified and spent former planets flung from the heart of the Sun, having reached the outermost interpenetrating blades of whirling stones weaving a spacious webwork in holographic precision in a buzzing cloud about our star, a cosmic blender preventing any entrance or exit from our system, if you will; and if you won't, that's all very well and blunt yet it misses the point of exercising our imagination to fabricate alternative explanations for the unknown however unlikely they may be, consider it the poetry of the mind you may find right at hand, if only your body could accept your brain's command, so if it whispers from the shadows in the darkness of your room, when the sky outside your window is starless and bible black, when we realize the aim of the search for alien life may be directed in the obverse direction than it should, you begin to understand our own bodies are the worlds being successfully explored by the host of transient microbes interacting within our living guts, so take a deep breath and hold your horses and hats because the storm's brewing up the mother-lode of a terrific dose of climactic retaliation against our bothersome infestation, that has grown intolerable because we as a nation or a people among countries on a world whose sentient populace remains bent on reproduction at a rate which cannot intercept the machine of industry upon which our breeding both relies upon and has been made possible, remain a perpetuating cycle having followed the generating rhythms still pulsing from bygone epochs in our own history and that of those who came before us here on this very same planet, and if we don't gather together our best minds and able people to seize the reins of the day for even one moment, our own transfigurations will have passed us along the way and the quiet murmuring of our collective memory will float by in silence like soft pixilated clouds containing the roiling formations of the briefest suggestion of faces in grimace and grind, I think you will find that by then we'll have been long gone without a trace having left behind just a curious and scabrous terrain with odd formations jutting in scattered groups of constantly buried decay under the same exact wind that's been blowing through our lives as if we weren't even here for the past endless succession of centuries in the first place. 

Crucial Biomes: A Virulent Update

 A while back here on this blog whilst suffering and raving from the effects of strep throat, I wrote a fevered entry considering that sicknesses such as these caused by invading viruses might better be accepted as a natural, if not altogether satisfying, upgrade process necessary to establish our maintained health as we live and grow together with the microbes and fungi in our guts which cohabit our cellular fortress of human flesh with many varieties of bacteria and yeast which feed off each other and otherwise interrelate in such a manner which keeps our wellness of being in check.

 Having read up on various books and articles on the subject, along with having pondered over the nature of the microscopic realm and its direct relation to our wave of electromagnetic radiation we are currently processing here, detecting a narrow portion of the spectrum as natural light with our eyes, I've been left to realize many separate things which indubitably turn out to be comprised of each other after all, much like that vessel we have come to determine as "human" except for having limited most of our scope to the exteriorization of the form.  A thorough research of both the microbiome and mycobiomes thriving together in our bodies should go far toward painting the picture of ourselves as actually being less human insofar as our remainder is concerned; there have been estimates from as little as fifty percent of our biomass being what we normally consider as human--the bone, flesh, nervous system, tendons, marrow, and blood--to as little as ten percent (suggesting a remaining biomass ninety percent of which is comprised of bacteria, viruses, and fungi).  This only leads us to speculate as to which figure amounts to being the more accurate?

Not that it matters in the least.  Whatever the percentage breakdown may be--for all we know, we're talking about only four species "competing" for domination of the whole gestalt (that which we term "human")--if we are comprised of both species of fungus, bacteria, and various viruses as well as our own biological, bipedal mammalian selves--we could be caught up in the very midst of an evolutionary war of random selection which could just as easily, by any slew of factors imaginable, eradicate the 'human' element entirely leaving an entity best described as one third fungal, one third bacterial, and one third viral (our human aspect having potentially been conquered).

In this regard, we must insistently glimpse ourselves in the mirror and repeatedly ask, "Who are we?" again and again and again, because all the monsters of the human nightmare could be no more removed from ourselves than a single gamete or chromosome away.  We may actually feel their silhouettes closely resembling blurred outlines behind frosted ice. As the ice slowly melts their images gradually come into better focus.  Lurking just beneath the subconscious is such an old fashioned way of putting it these days. It's becoming more readily apparent these monsters of natural selection are not merely and quite actually under the skin but only a thin barrier of evolutionary molecules away from taking over completely.

 In such a future, there would be nothing left of human memory to even house it. Unless. . . Unless you happen to be a Welterwarren--a consciousness which has grounded and solidified itself to the point it may now pass from any form to another without undergoing erosion of any sort (rendering something like anamnesis a moot notion).   It remains unknown how many human souls today are inhabited by the Welterwarren.  In different epochs of humanity's vast and sprawling dominion across Time, these individuals often became confused with the stories and legends about them their presence generated.  You see, in virtually every case, the listeners of such tales were bound to interpret them in the malevolent light they were fashioned. Associations with werewolves, vampires, ghosts and the lot may be relegated to this area.  It is better understood when viewed through the illuminated microscope of the lens which studiously peers into the realm within our bodies which encases both the microbiome and mycobiome, among our bodily interior terrain.

 These interior micro-worlds intertwined with the makeup of our own bodies remain the only thing as close to those life-forms we so explicitly seek to find in the polar opposite direction; yes--I speak of our search for extraterrestrial civilizations in the form of SETI, etc--and while not intending to disparage this noble pursuit in the least (expectations must be kept at zero) I do feel very much compelled to point out that there's an absolutely great chance indeed that these micro-realms right here on Earth and in our own bodies in fact perfectly meet the very definition of what we so blindly seek in zealous ignorance "out there" which is a phrase I use cautiosly because it serves to pin-point precisely the nature of our problem of assumption:  for all our common understanding of just exactly what outer space (not to mention time) happens to be, we must admit to ourselves both the possibility that we got it all wrong as well as the possibility that we haven't yet gotten it right.  Point in fact, if all those stars out there in our galaxy are occurring in time along with us just behind us in fact and the farther ones are even closer toward the beginning of time then we might as well admit that when we go out at night in our world to look at the stars we may just as well be looking in to the heart of where we originated, that umbilical abyss at the center of the electromagnetic spectrum just staring back at us like an unblinking Eye or otherwise equally mysterious Black Hole the Big Bang emerged from.


 The point of this update is to readjust my own dial back to the obvious microanalysis of our human condition being something we've apparently mastered over a staggering amount of generations insofar as we're concerned, yet what may amount to the blink of an eye in terms of the intimately bound yet still extra-terrestrial species our own identities are comprised of: Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Viruses, etc. Ironically, their very alien nature from ourselves becomes processed by our minds as somehow nonetheless being not merely terrestrial in origin and existence, but by providing their habitat with our bodies we've in addition to this insulated our own cognizance from the dire realization that potentially our own worst nightmares as cultivated throughout the history of film and literature reside in perfect duplicity within our own genome.  The monster's not in the closet it's right there inside and surrounding our own DNA and ready in the twist of an instant to morph us out of the equation and miraculously not only replace but continue the very legacy we helped to start.

photo by Shasta Lawton

WHERE THEY ALL WENT

I want you all to imagine we are outside, at night.
Now, point your index fingers at the stars.
What you're seeing is the spiraling tail of creation's
first manifested light going back to the beginning.

The beginning of what, you ask?
The beginning of our lives here.

Keep pointing those fingers at the stars.
These suns appear clustered together
inside the core of our universe.
Because our universe is expanding
into membranes.

See all those stars crowded together deep inside there?
For all life forms in this universe, a similar light display manifests.
Alien beings will point their skinny fingers at us
some long distant day in the future, and wonder.

The reason for this is because all life manifests across time.
Life eventually comes to open its eyes and peer inside
the deep core of this universe, blinking and thinking.

"With so many stars out there, where are the signs of aliens?"
We all ask this question, every extraterrestrial along with us.
The answer remains the same for us all.
The stars are merely sign posts along
the evolutionary gateways of death.

See the stars spread out across our skies and realize.
That is exactly where we're all going eventually.
To a place where our starlight will be left behind
shining back out at the new lifeforms trapped
on a planet appearing long after we're gone.

Inversion Tactics: Focusing

To implement inversion tactics (counterintuition) start at any base level.  For instance, we think of the universe as being enormous, therefore it must be the size of a singular pinpoint: an atom, perhaps.  We feel the vastness of space all about us with galaxies whirling into the deep far distances until presumably (according to the unflinching stare of the Hubble lens) we've glimpsed almost as far back as the beginning of time to what we think of as the Big Bang; therefore:  no space exists at all and this thing we're seeing remains inside us, fixed in absolute stillness, and what we're observing  is more likely forward to the ends of the multiverse which may resemble something more along the lines of a sudden embodiment.  The thing to understand is that speculation along these lines, while it may appear to amount to an exercise in futility—due to the apparent necessity of continuing to flip the inversions—the point remains that we must also remember to reverse that preconception and realize with dawning humility that no, an endless series of inversions is quite the opposite of what we should rely upon. Here is where balance may be restored—reflected along the backdrop of the human eye—an effect I'll call retinal refraction for lack of a better term. For those who feel to take this one step farther they must realize that flipping this concept will only amount to reversing the direction of the idea bouncing off being trapped within this isolated membrane, resulting in a continual clarification or something which can best be described by the word focusing.  Because we are the focal point of reality, that is to say, only through our own brains and consciousness may any such thing as "reality" (a lonely word we invented, after all) even be perceived. Once we've settled on this definition of reality—our perception of the experience of existence—may we make inroads to our condition here and now at the center. Implementing inversion tactics = focusing on what's real.

Lacuna Spawn

image courtesy of NASA

Imagine the vastness of outer space containing all the untold galaxies in the universe as one single continuum wherein each solitary constituent pinpointed by a star and further delineated by every last planet spinning in revolutions about these stellar spots as if they are each caught in the grand twisting flow of just one particular bifurcating river of time.  

Envision our group human consciousness sparked by the interaction between our planet's inner magnetosphere in revolutionary synchronicity with our own star's astrosphere and think of this flowering of ideas as electromagnetic campfires situated along the banks of the Amazon or the Mississippi winding deep through the wasteland of eternal night. 

The trick is to suddenly realize with a dawning comprehension as assured as the next forthcoming daybreak that these bonfires along the repositories of sunshine sliding along the lone river of time are phenomenological manifestations triggered and retained by the process of this estuary's exclusive transition along the proximity of its emerging course.   

Think of witnessing our great starry midnight as if having somehow peered into the black mirror of our collective soul swimming through unimaginable depths behind ahead and beyond not just our own capacity to exist but rather as that dazzling echoed incandescence serving best as the reminder we are now precisely balanced on the fulcrum of being alive.    

Make way for the headroom to recognize with supernal clarity that our common dream of achieving alien contact with extraterrestrials has more to do with reflecting upon our own mortality and remains nothing but a misplaced longing to establish meaningful contact with ourselves before at last being flung headlong from our very own starring legend.