Graxes Rock — revision 11442

__NOTOC__ ===Being an Epic Alien Self-Accounting on the Threshold of Contact=== For Cultures of the Imagination at the 2012 [[Contact Conference]] ===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>