Vertigo
The dominant sensation I am dealing with these days is one of informational vertigo. As an avowed pattern sniffer, I am increasingly having trouble shutting out the data chatter and opening my mind to the big picture. But maybe that’s the point. On the one hand we have the epidemic phenomenon of constant partial attention. News floods in from the web, satellite TV, piles of newspapers, magazines etc. The phone rings constantly. Correspondence needs to be answered, bills need to be paid on-line. But how does one maintain balance? Filtration is the key, but already that is differentiating the continnuum. The ‘deep pattern’ is created through integration. The neural equivalent of the ‘smart mob’ organizational strategy, (which incidently is the one bright spot in the search for replacements for heirarchical organizational forms.) The constant chatter of cable network news contributes to what the venerable Walter Benjamin called ‘The State of Emergency’, which basically functions as a form of fascist social control. Pausing and reflecting have become a lost art and we are in fact encouraged not to do so because when we start to put together the many tiny sound bytes of our perceptions, we might not like what we see. Hence, my interest in deep time. In the nineteen eighties, I embarked upon a rather (arguably) Pyrrhic hobby of propagating slow growing desert plants from seed. Some of these have taken seemingly forever to reach any size, and need to be given long dormant periods, or they will turn into a rotten pulp. Throughout the wars, epidemics and climate change these little nubs of UWTB (see 5/22/2003 )inexorably add on infinitessmally small layers of growth, occasionally gracing us with an ephemeral flower. One of my favorites is the bizarre, Euphorbia obesa, a spherical little xerophyte from the baking shale rubble of the South African Karoo region. They are flowering now on my window sill, males and females on seperate baseball-shaped plants. In the absence of South African desert insects, they need to be hand pollinated with a little sable water-colour brush. I have managed to collect their sparse seeds and have propagated them into more little plants. Many of these plants are extremely endangered in the wild but have been saved from extermination because of the efforts of extreme ‘otaku’ horticulturalists. It’s something anyone with a window sill and an interest in ‘deep time’ can do.
Whales are alleged to think in “deep time”
