Theres a field of grass, big bluestem, Euphorium, Bidens, a prairie patch, a remnant of the once great body of humus and roots and stems that was the Midwest so long lost almost gone completely like the passenger pigeon but this, this is sill here, and you are here now.
All is quiet.....or is it? Turn up the amplifier. Now the grass swishes loudly in the light breeze, leaves sawing against each other like knives against a honing stone. Now other sounds are clarified, this grinding gnashing the chewing and sucking of so many grasshoppers and plant bugs and buzzings like generators of honeybees. Turn it up even higher, the noise becomes a roar and soon even quieter rustlings are acknowledged, the movements of worms underground, the growth of apical meristem, the slow disintegration of mineral to soil to element.
Our eyes are now microscopes, peering down on a single blade of grass down into the texture of the cells to the chloroplasts streaming in circles around their nuclei, long ago drawn into this dance from solitary existence. The million billion bacteria on the leaf surface are dividing and dying and transferring genes only to be devoured by a grasshopper in the next moment, its palpi pushing the fibers inwards to the mandibles and foregut. Hold a handful of soil in hand, and gaze deeply see the thousands of mites and beetles and springtails and protozoans in that tiny pocket of air and water between the grains, that interstitial world of microscopic proportions.
And the chewing and the dividing and the swishing and the turning and circling mime the workings of our own lives except it is silent, we are unable to communicate with this creature the prairie that continues despite adversity, we are mute.
Mars? Europa? There are aliens among us, hiding in plain sight.
:mittens:
This was lovely!
Fucking awesome. 10/10. Would read again.
that's good stuff, Kai! thanks...
it is, in some way frustrating that we are on such a far end of the scale of life, as we know it. we are aware of these things. worlds. creatures, that exist around us, between us, within us.... from our size to many orders of magnitude smaller. but even the largest creatures don't seem that terribly larger than ourselves.
but, imagine what it would be like for us, as sentient and communicative beings to be somewhere in the middle. looking down at the creatures whose entire worlds are wiped out with a smudge of our thumbs, or a drop of rain... and then to look up, and see the great creatures above us. blind to our struggles unless we are placed into their apparatus for investigation.
ruinous. i don't think we could handle it. perhaps we would not have developed the senses to see such a horrible truth.
or perhaps we would simply have developed senses with a blind spot to shield us from it....
hmm...
Quote from: Iptuous on March 21, 2010, 05:20:45 AM
that's good stuff, Kai! thanks...
it is, in some way frustrating that we are on such a far end of the scale of life, as we know it. we are aware of these things. worlds. creatures, that exist around us, between us, within us.... from our size to many orders of magnitude smaller. but even the largest creatures don't seem that terribly larger than ourselves.
but, imagine what it would be like for us, as sentient and communicative beings to be somewhere in the middle. looking down at the creatures whose entire worlds are wiped out with a smudge of our thumbs, or a drop of rain... and then to look up, and see the great creatures above us. blind to our struggles unless we are placed into their apparatus for investigation.
ruinous. i don't think we could handle it. perhaps we would not have developed the senses to see such a horrible truth.
or perhaps we would simply have developed senses with a blind spot to shield us from it....
hmm...
Cf. Gulliver's Travels.
If you'd turn up the sound volume on the micro world, wouldn't it be mostly drowned out in thermal noise?
Isn't it possible to filter that out?
...very James and the Giant Peach-esque, Kai. Love it.