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===Being an Epic Alien Self-Accounting on the Threshold of Contact===
For Cultures of the Imagination 2012
===I===
:Double stars and a third red dwarf at a distance.
:Around the yellow star, Three planets, close.
:A quartet of moons, held tight, make up the entourage of our dark blue gas planet
:– Kachol.
:Kachol’s moons’ orbits in turn dynamically complex,
:moving through a many-gravitied space.
:First Moon a blue-grey Mars, nearly all ocean
:Second Moon a warm Titan, also mostly ocean
:– home to us, mostly, so far, but not our natal place:
:that’s Third Moon, another Enceladus, “teakettle” Moon,
:Its geysers pumping ice chunks and organic materials
:through the whole lunar system.
:Fourth Moon a retrograde potato – its role more contingent (you’ll see).
===II===
:In the Beginning
:we were thrown out of Hell and into the Garden of Eden.
:In the roiling and tidally unsettled hot ocean inside Third Moon
:our remote ancestor emerged.
:Extremophilic like certain Earthly analogues,
:certain ancestors, pioneers, turned out to be almost equally at home
:when steam-whistled through the cracks of Third Moon’s icy sheath
:to the unshielded surface. The ones who lasted
:quickly developed cases, hard shells tight against the murderous radiation,
:which proved handy when Third Moon’s next gift to them
:turned out to be expulsions,
:water geysers that propelled them, ice-bound, into space
:with clouds of vapor and organic matter
:to settle across the vast oceans of nearby First and Second Moons
===III===
:Now picture microbes intermixing in the great ocean on Second Moon.
:Besides its globe-spanning oceans, Second Moon’s other great surface feature
:is a massive impact crater in which waters also slosh,
:with its own mix of microbes, evolving semi-separately from the main ocean,
:but periodically mingling with it too, tincturing out both ways,
:over a shallow sandy region prone to be overwhelmed by occasional supertides
:– so there is mixing, but irregularly.
:The organic interlunar rain from slowly-evolving Third Moon’s geysers continues to arrive as well.
:The consequence of all of this is that organisms – microbes to multicellular –
:constantly encounter others, kin, but only imperfectly assimilable.
:Here then comes the dramatic pivot of the first act.
:Evolution, diverging between both moons and oceans, and within the great ocean too,
:also consistently brings the divergent forms back together.
:(It’s all liquid, remember: encounter is unavoidable.)
:Somewhere along the line those ancestral microbes
:learn the trick of encompassing another without disassembling it.
:Disassembly can provide energy and raw materials;
:utter unassimilability necessitates expulsion;
:but assimilation offers ''information.''
:What drives evolution for us turns out to be indigestion.
:Lynn Margulis showed you the story on Earth:
:how cells merge, one encompassing others
:stealing their DNA, making organelles
:like chloroplasts, which retain their integrity
:and keep on photosynthesizing inside their new host.
:“The tendency of ‘independent’ life,” she writes,
:“is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness
:at a higher, larger level of organization.”<sup>[[#Footnote|[1]]]</sup>
:Sea slugs do it too: eat algae and so learn to eat sunlight like a plant.
:Flatworms even eat each other and take over the eaten ones’ experience.
:On Earth this is (we thought) rare and strange; on Second Moon
:our home world
:it becomes the norm.
===IV===
:Indigestion, though, persists. Assimilation is typically not total.
:The challenges to life continue as well, and continue to vary
:sometimes wildly and unpredictably,
:while the organic bombardment from Third Moon continues.
:The result is something new for us, a distinctive twist to Margulis’s story.
:For us Graxians, symbiotic affiliation into new organisms is reversible as well.
:Eaten ones can break away.
:Eaters may dis-assimilate, reconfigure, and let them go as well.
:Thus we became shape-shifters.
:Carrying in each cell many genetic tricks gained from our allies,
:many shapes we can become.
:Each colony is like a human zygote, rich in stem-cell possibilities,
:never to be nailed down or finalized.
:We do retain echoes of two early body plans.
:Fractal, each forms a basic skeleton,
:one with leaves filled with smaller leaves, fernlike,
:the other with Three tentacles at each node (the Sacred Three!)
:each connecting to a smaller node, or to a shape-shifted module.
:Beyond this, though, fluidity reigns.
:We are mutualistic, shapeshifting communities always deciding what to be next,
:with constant renegotiation of shape and configuration at multiple levels
:and continually attracted to affiliation at higher levels.
:The fractal form is open-ended toward ever-more levels of generativity:
:the pattern can be given with maximal simplicity yet can generate infinite complexity
:both at the same level of specificity and many levels up or down.
:The shape of flagellae may mirror the architecture of a colony.
:Buckyballs (a perennial favorite) can be infinitesimal or huge,
:colonies of smaller buckyballs still.
:And thus our life grows not like a treeform, solid branches with no turning back
:but networks, rhizomes, horizontal not vertical, constantly turning and re-turning.
:Forms and threads diverge and re-converge,
:all with an inner logic
:but in all directions at once.
===V===
:“We eat; therefore we are.”
:Eating is knowing: assimilation, encompassing, merging.
:Divergent organisms form alliances;
:you think they are eating each other;
:but they’re actually assimilating, learning.
:Tasting and being tasted.
:Everything at all scales is in a certain sense alive, a distinct living thing,
:but also a re-assimilable part of larger communities with their own living distinctness.
:Eating the old way only happens when someone / something
:is too boring too keep around or learn from
:(or, yeah, when the eater is impossibly hungry).
:Good is: dissimilar enough not to be edible,
:but not so dissimilar as to have nothing to offer.
:Communication becomes something more like communion.
:Awareness straight to awareness; complete, beyond signs or signals or words.
:In short: Graxes ''grok!''
:Moreover, this strategy is not merely a passive one: soon it becomes a mode of relation.
:Material is exchanged all the time.
:Think of ritual mutual consumption as a regular mode of “meet and greet”.
:Bits of yourself become couriers, carrying thoughts across to another.
:Eager, ready, fluid, always re-configuring.
:Eating becomes knowing becomes re-production
:(literally: making ourselves over again.)
:We go in for mimesis too. Knowing another may mean ''becoming'' the other,
:or rather, in some part, more like them, at least for a time.
:Our ancestors might even grow a new module (or Three – you’ll see) in the style of the Other.
:Whole waves of new pattern thus emerge and migrate through the population.
:Some vanish with little trace; others persist and ramify.
===VI===
:With every organism a unique collection of organismic modules,
:both the individual and the self also become fluid and less categorical.
:Without species we don’t even need sex, exactly.
:Recombinational possibilities are everywhere,
:and so is pleasure.
:Selves are polymorphous but not perverse.
:(Indeed, to be ''mono''-morphous is the real perversity.
:Cloning yourself is a kind of incest.)
:Health-wise, what would be “sickness” in a being with more definite boundaries
:is for us, naturally, a challenge to constructive assimilation of the invader.
:We become stronger by allying with it, taking it in –
:think of “infection” as “infuction” as well as “inflection” –
:while, conversely, persistently afflicted components
:might eventually want to rearrange themselves, or re-affiliate elsewhere.
:On another scale and in another system, maybe they are exactly what’s needed.
:We don’t die, either, at least usually.
:There are accidents, sure.
:Colonies get squashed occasionally, and individuals fall away.
:But more commonly a recognizably functional whole persists, just with shifting parts,
:and even the parts are immortal, in principle, like Earth’s bacteria.
:We’re pretty good at just about everything, meanwhile,
:as long as we can shape-shift organs for it.
:Sense organs for instance develop and reorganize as needed,
:like eyes (light and pattern sensors in various spectra)
:and ears (and organs and limbs and all manner of clappers and resonators to generate sounds).
:We smell and taste too – filtering the water, for example,
:itself a thoroughly communicative medium,
:full of the tang and tangle of each other as well as the persistent space rain/scum
:(Third Moon ''still'' tea-kettling) and dissolved minerals.
:We can be like salmon, able to taste the one tiny stream of their natality
:even in the vast ocean.
:Indeed, in time, minerals came to be a main food source,
:Seabed, shores, and dissolved minerals are OK too, and they’re everywhere.
:We know the elements in the way Earthlings might know flavor and spice.
:We also live within other sense dimensions altogether:
:electrical sensitivities, for one, and the capacity to tune to harmonic resonance –
:music, melody and harmony, embodied in the sympathetic vibration of our own bodies.
:Communication, you can see, takes multiple and shifting forms.
:Many prefer a double stream of couriers as the most perfect means to transmit thought,
:but there are clickers and squealers too, sounding like Earth’s dolphins;
:tentacle-wavers forming word-pictures clearly seen by sonar,
:others bioluminescent or inky like Earth’s cuttlefish.
:Communicative preference even marks out different social groups –
:but none of it especially fixed, naturally!
===VII===
<blockquote>“Grax” is a biological term that, according to Rupert Sheldrake, describes the action of individual bacteria, or slime mold or anything coming together as an intelligent community to address a challenge that cannot be resolved alone. Myriad expressions from Arab Spring, American Autumn, to Occupy Everywhere announce, “We are in a period of Global Graxing!”<sup>[[#Footnote|[2]]]</sup></blockquote>
:A world, then, of loosely affiliated, fractally structured floating assemblages
:(and eventually some on land, it’s just that there isn’t much dry ground
:and new modes of exchange and communion must be developed to work in air)
:of smaller and also highly complex organisms,
:exchanging materialized information, meeting the needs at hand.
:We don’t live in cities -- we ''are'' cities, graxish together-gatherings.
:Work-groups form and dissolve graxishly, buckyball hive-minds made for big tasks
:We don’t live in communities, we ''are'' communities.
:We don’t live in nets and networks, but ''as'' nets and networks.
:We don’t even write history, we ''are'' history,
:with materialized memories that can last thousands of years,
:through countless splittings and recombinings,
:and symbols, which last longer still, written with our own cement-like excretions
:(you would call them mere wastes – and waste them).
:We don’t even make tools: for the most part, instead, we make ourselves ''into'' tools
:Some of which extrude, but even then they’re us, just sitting still holding water or whatever it is.
:We don’t have farms, we ''are'' farms,
:growing fields of microbes on the inner walls of special modules.
:When we need to build a wall, for a time we make ourselves the wall,
:We scaffold it up from our own bone like coral, then separate and leave it behind.
:(In fact we even make a project of preserving earlier forms in this way, another form of history,
:“fossilized” extruda, ready and able to be revisited and reclaimed at all times.
:Reefs, yes, but more:
:mausoleums, libraries, monuments, whole alternative pasts – and futures.)
:From Organelles to Cells to Organs
:From Organs to Colonies to Unions
:From Unions to Workgroups to Nations
:Layers of organization come to supervene on others without locking any form in.
:But (again to be very clear) these are only terms to identify relatively more developed or intelligent layers,
:new “wholes” a level or two up or down (or around).
:Any analogy or terminology for task-related affiliation or organization would do:
:Couriers may also be considered an Organ’s or Colony’s Truckers or Spies;
:we have the equivalent of Motorcycle Gangs, Refugees, Migrants;
:Brigands (associations of outcasts that may forcibly affiliate or waylay, hijack, raid);
:Syndicates, Colleges, Coteries, Pods;
:Congregations, Coffee Klatches, Posses, and Bands;
:Crews, Teams, Retinues, Troupes;
:Splinter Groups, Conspiracies, Task Forces
:– and a thousand other and ever-new forms of purposeful but impermanent assemblage.
:Impermanent, remember, and not all-inclusive –
:for there are countervailing forces and tendencies too.
:We can’t get huge or ''all''-inclusive.
:Intelligence correlates with size, roughly, up to a point,
:but after that point, inevitably, it works the other way around: greater size slows us down.
:Bigger becomes dumber – so smaller modules vote with their feet, so to speak, and just leave.
:Couriers take time,
:and things happen while they are en route, while they are passing on the road.
:Maybe they even re-affiliate (voluntarily or not) on the way
:and never show up at all.
:As we develop, it becomes possible to replace couriers to some extent with electrical impulses:
:leading to other forms of assemblage, in effect biological computers.
:Even electrical impulses take time, however, especially when transmitted
:as they typically would be for us, in shifting and makeshift linkages.
:Affiliation is in any case reversible (remember),
:while even the affiliative impulse isn’t the only one: there’s wanderlust too.
:Not to mention that the affiliative impulse itself may draw us toward ''other'' assemblages as well as our current ones.
:In short, no Borg here!
:Already a mere Trekkie fiction, as if it could be real even for you,
:that kind of hyper-collectivist fantasy is a Terran bugbear. (Own it, Terrans!)
:Recognize the actual face of Grax:
:many kinds of mid-sized and shape-shifting communities in many environments –
:seafloor, seashore, sea surface far from land,
:inside or outside the great crater rim –
:each with their own uniqueness and contingency,
:wary of larger others as well as attracted:
:a delicate, resilient, well-tested balance.
===VIII===
:Grax’s philosophical syndicates have come to know the Perfection of the World.
:It is our proudest knowing:
:the Threeish inspiration/aspiration of everything
:from our own bodies to the music of the spheres.
:The first realization may have been when we first saw Three moons in our sky,
:though we did not realize then that our world was itself a moon.
:Eventually we learned that so it is – four of us share the great blue gas planet Kachol –
:yet Threeness is preserved.
:Fourth Moon, the wrong shape and orbiting backward, we can declare unworthy,
:an interloper – and indeed it is,
:no child of our central giant world, but a visitor
:from the great figure-eight comet belt beyond.
:So: the Three ''true'' moons, locked in 4:2:1 resonance, orbit Kachol
:spinning in turn with two other planets
:in a great triangle around our sun, all sides and angles equal.
:Yet another sign of the Pervasive Three in the skies!
:At first we thought the sun was God.
:Later we found that the smaller sun and the bright star
:were dancing with the bigger sun around a central point.
:Threeness again, this time in the very sources of all light and life!
:At that central point is nothing we can see, but we now believe
:that God is to be found there, if anywhere.
:Our philosophy, then: everything in Threes, a triangular spectrum.
:Instead of true and false, we have nested Threes.
:Matter is a mix of solid, liquid, gas.
:Later we find that mass can be matter, degenerate white dwarf, or giant neutron-star nuclei.
:We ultimately learn that the universe is a spectrum of mass, energy, spacetime.
:We’ve long seen society as a combination of culture, locality, and religion.
:Most crucially, beings are identified as self, other, and/or connected module
:which can be parent (I am part of it), child (it is part of me),
:and/or sibling (we negotiate as equals within the greater whole).
:Of course the sacred Threeness may also need our help from time to time.
:The mere correction of error, mostly, like the ejection of the pretender Fourth Moon from true Moon status.
:Some of our body structure is fractal in Threes,
:each node circled by Three smaller ones, like the heavens,
:but some of it is not.
:When we first discovered the music of the spheres,
:some decided that their bilateral fern fronds must be ejected,
:even destroyed as profane and impure.
:Originally, to be honest, a tri-formed creature probably just happened to predominate,
:but we have followed fact with ''fiat:'' now Threeness rules mostly by design.
:Few bilateral structures remain.
:If one cutting tool is needed,
:Three are often created, even now, to keep the symmetry.
:Still, obviously, Threeness has its completeness, its harmony, its eternal dance of possibility.
:Twoness is sterile; fourness reduces quickly to two twos;
:but ''Three'' – ah, the glory!
===IX===
:Graxian science, art, and religion smoothly merge
:– another great Three-in-One –
:and necessarily are thoroughly ''embodied.''
:Our music for example is a series of orisons to Threeness, while at the same time
:Threeness is also the music of the spheres.
:The Great Harmonic Ratios play for us each night and all night in the skies:
:all Three Moons a full chord;
:one Moon singly a third (major third when First or Third Moon;
:minor if only the now demoted Fourth)
:Two Moons of Three is the interval of a fifth.
:Your own Pythagoras discovered the same great harmonic ratios millennia ago
:but your own skies, too bad for you, never showed them like ours.
:Your Kepler thought he’d discovered the great ratios
:between the perfect Platonic solids that could be transposed between the known planetary orbits –
:the little-known impetus for his entire dynamic system –
:but it was forced, to say the least,
:whereas Keplerian perfect triangles clearly define our sister planets’ orbits.
:Meanwhile, along with the geometry in our skies
:there’s chemistry (alchemy too) in what you might call our gastronomy.
:We know the elements by flavor, by taste,
:and “refine” them internally with more specially-adapted modules, a bodily act.
:Or again: most of our electronics would look cyborgian to you:
:we make ''ourselves'' radio receivers and even computers
:A little metallic augmentation here and there is all it takes.
:Graxian economics is implicit in this kind of process as well.
:Since we don’t produce things, as a rule, separate from our selves/bodies,
:and since our mode of exchange is free and constant, as a matter of course,
:we have no money, no markets, no accumulated lifeless wealth.
:Even our excreted fossil memories are more like relics of the ancestors than economic goods.
:Our “surplus” is ''beauty!''
===X===
:But nothing stands still.
:We are, after all, shape-shifters.
:We also recognize that the cosmos itself,
:perfect as it is in its participation in Three,
:is also imperfect and itself shifting within that same Great Given.
:Long ago for example we knew that Third Moon was changing, volcanic, active:
:we could see the geysers.
:More recently we came to realize that we were looking at our own birthplace and birth-process:
:that Third Moon was our original microbial home.
:More recently still we realized that it continues to arrive,
:The periodic microbial rain, still unsettling and intriguing the microbial mix of Grax’s oceans,
:is Third Moon’s.
:It is not always welcome:
:actually the mechanism of the discovery
:was that Grax’s swings through Third Moon’s tea-kettled ejecta correlated to plague cycles.
:that some of that microbial rain can be deadly.
:Once we understood, it was not hard to make ourselves ready,
:to neutralize the unwelcome “rain”, or – better – transform it into something unexpectedly tasty.
:But the metaphysically unsettling residue is something else:
:a new understanding of the larger system in which we live.
:Other worlds are active and alive!
:We know, as well, imperfection and possibility in First Moon.
:It swings close enough to us, often enough,
:that we can make our surface features much like Grax’s.
:Sometimes we see First Moon meteorite impacts as well,
:and have inferred from our own good eating from impacts here at home
:that meteorites sometimes bring lifeforms that are again related to us
:but curiously different, like new spices, and a new kind of challenge to good digestion.
:Something else is going on, it seems:
:Third Moon is not the only nearby world that has life,
:and perhaps others, First Moon for one,
:have more complex forms than microbes.
:Our own affiliative impulse therefore invites, even compels, us to space.
:Those curiously tasty Others appear to be some kind of kin, after all:
:it seems that we can assimilate them, and presumably they us.
:Spacefaring, besides, is part of our past already (remember?).
:Perhaps even our deepest memory contains traces or recollections
:of the first pilgrimage from Third Moon’s Hell to the Eden of Second
:(though our skeptics insist, plausibly, that microbes have no memories).
:In any case: our lives are in the visible midst of a vastly fertile and dynamic system,
:with close-lying tea-kettles and Other Edens
:and great blue planetary sphere of Kachol
:hanging over it all.
:Other Moons and beyond – not only our past, but now our destiny.
===XI===
:Outward then, Grax!
:Today we Graxians stand on the verge of venturing – again – beyond our home world.
:Indeed we therefore stand also on the threshold of the first great Graxian world project,
:the first great challenge, or great invitation, perceived by us as one world, together.
:Everywhere new beyond-oriented workgroups and syndicates spring up.
:In one great equatorial nation, inverted half-buckyballs form floating spherical “dishes” into living radio telescopes,
:seeking signals from elsewhere, and sending our own.
:Although there was initially some debate over what to send
:the eventual answers were satisfying, and the consensus holds.
:One syndicate sends music
:its own variation on the Great Harmonies
:with the invitation to Extra-Graxian Others, whoever might hear, to join
:– that is, to jam.
:Another also sends music, but closer to the electrical frequencies at which life itself (as we know it) resonates,
:with the hope of inducing or uplifting pre-living or proto-living flows on other planets or moons
:upon which our signals may someday play.
:Think of it as a form of Musical Uplift, or even cosmic seed-spreading,
:a sort of pangermia,
:except the seeds are harmonic, musical, electromagnetic:
:our own form of extending the “music of the spheres”!
:Graxian combines who have colonized the thin strip of land around Great Crater
:have extruded the elements to build vast metallic dishes
:and send out star maps along the radio waves, a cosmic “at home” card.
:Others, more ambitious, now contemplate the next step:
:launching actual probes out beyond Grax, aimed at First Moon especially
:and even beyond the Moons too,
:to Kachol’s sister planets, both of which have conditions much more like Grax and First Moon than Kachol.
:(Some say that even our star’s twin has planets and moons like Grax.)
:Our way, of course, would be to send couriers, small and variable,
:shell-shielded from cold and radiation, like our remote ancestors, to taste other worlds.
:Probes may be spit-wadded off our planet
:(it’s easy: gravity is low and the probes, being mostly microbial, will be super-light)
:and then make use of the regular sweet spots when Moons align, just right,
:to slingshot the probes faster and farther out.
:To report back they will need radio transmitters, again fairly small.
:Or it might be best to send miniaturized fractal modules able to use local materials to scale up:
:to build transmitters or even actual Graxians
:at whatever scale and with whatever complexity suits the new conditions.
:Shape-shifters even across space, we are!
===XII===
:The work is underway with typical Graxian ambiguity:
:mutualistic but also a little mutually suspicious (it never hurts)
:all at the same time.
:Individual syndicates and workgroups look skyward in their own ways,
:loosely coordinate, not at odds with each other,
:but not fully trusting or centrally mandated either.
:Yet the sense is unmistakable that Grax as a whole is stepping into the Beyond.
:It is the great project of our time,
:the re-assumption of our space-faring past,
:shape-shifting ourselves now with a cosmic imagination, on a greater-than-Grax scale.
:A glorious threshold, O Grax!
:A galactic graxing commences!
:Fellow Graxians, soon we will taste new worlds, new beings!
:O Grax, the stars await!
----
“Graxes Rock” is written by Anthony Weston with contributions by Ben Sibelman, as one way of compiling and organizing the beaucoup and intrepid conceptualizations of the COTI 2012 Alien Group: Randall Hayes, Michelle Merrill, Chad Rohrbacher, Ben Sibelman, Anthony Weston, and Mara Williams.
<div id="Footnote">
<sup>[1]</sup> Lynn Margulis, ''Symbiotic Planet'' (Basic Books, 1998), p. 11.
<br>
<sup>[2]</sup> Caroline Casey, "What is the meaning of 11/11/11?" ''Washington Post Guest Voices'', November 11, 2011. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/what-is-the-meaning-of-111111/2011/11/11/gIQAH3FWCN_blog.html
</div>