I.
At the edge of the maggotscape lie modernist cautionary tales in striped yellow black. Future proofed sign types adapted from brethren advising against proximity to radiation. Warnings on the energized particle rerendered, exchanged for destructions not only inflicted upon the flesh, but made from it.
Atomic emission’s sloughed tissue and failing organs supplanted by orgiastic botanical contaminant (host cortices scrambled, cellular mechanisms deposed). By the despairing poisons of freshwater cnidarians. Vomiting, delirium, induced by envenomed macro predator (perfect teardrops of neurotoxic coagulant falling from saber fanged mouth) rather than radiative holy fire. Trefoil of ionizing blade for curling hazardous flower. Gamma ray for fungoid bloom. Decay not atomic but of carcasses freshly killed.
A semiotics denuclearized and made nucleic.
The dimensional carnage of ruined flesh depicted in planar, matte icon. Torn limbs flattened into avoidance insignia, saw-toothed free from blocky, rectilinear torsos. Displaced viscera prophesied in thermoplastic marking paint.
Signages unfouled by the scent of death.
Sigils shrieking silently, “Beware!”
Beyond these ideograms of repulsive might, esteeming no deeds and shunning, their creators hoped, every traveler, were contrived the spatial hostilities.
Thorn garden of blunted rancor, planted approximately as halo, as glare, in neck-thick protrusions of concrete and oxidated steel. Caltrops of giants, spines committed somehow each at an angle toward the throat. Among them, tower chimes wavering in voices of the fears of prey.
Deterrent architecture wreathed in mists of millennial lifespan, depressed from hydrologic, evaporative destiny via molecular-scale petrochemical cage. Heavied fog the color of naturalistic inversion: ill-omened bioflavonoid ochre. Pollinators repulsed, symbioses fractured.
Stench which required no human engineering, of ferment and caul and casings shed.
Lain, this all, to circumvent that only mortal, local sin: veneration.
After all a shrine, even to horror, still lures.
That which enclasps the maggotscape arranged instead as mundanity to horror. Temporarily dehumanized zone set upon by thousand-year engineered gaze to impede rather than exalt. Horror intended here to camouflage itself within the mirror of the world. An open air vault standing in resemblance to its landscape rather than as distinctive spectacle. Wastes uninterred by meters of granite, soil or seawater—cordoned off and left simply, alone.
Yet within boundary lie demarcation’s perversities: provocation and deterrent, emitted in parallax. Partition designs into itself fabled allure. Labyrinths may guard only the valuable. Walled and hidden danger always worthy—at very least worth the populating constructive glance of those who erected their facilities of concealment.
Barrier as phototactic lantern—tempter of vandals, attractor beacon to iconoclasts.
Barrier as obstruct—path and terrain cleaved to realty, desire into stockpile.
These are the inverted language of maggotscape, where forbidden and valued exchange position with respiratory ease.
Thus came anterior genesis.
Then, at the beginning, there was not the word, there was the matted sucking waste of artificial bioavailability. Ecology that squirmed in sequestered writhing mass. Nymph weighted land, oviposited with wriggling generosity. Land of geographical stagnation, evolutionarily athrum with identity and futures of the teeming.
Never any somethings from nothings—instead and only the brazen sufficiency of reproduction.
In this the sacrificial oasis resides hallowed ground upon which mammalian mothers of anthropic myth fail further in their summary of nature. Concurrent thrivings of an insectile, bacteriophillic whole could never here be mispresumed. Queens absent vertebrae and maternality. Neither matriarchs attendant nor conquer empresses—the birthright of these endless mothers? Fertility assumpted, offspring produced unceasingly and without delay. Hereditary divinity or colonial seizure lacking purchase of any kind against unbound layering grime.
And wading slander within.
Botfly larva, life cycles surely incomplete, of what they will parasitize unknown. Soft bodied caterpillars begin to fatten, refusing metamorphosis. Dislocated eel gobies squirm in their eudaimonia of slop, far far from crushing benthic homes. Flatworms allied as omnivorous rolling swarm churn over themselves toward corpses, fungi, eggs laid, in meters-wide locomotory parade. Fruiting bodies polyp from mycelial mats in the image of stalked censer, river delta, architectonic spandrel, microcrater (gel glop filled and complete with nervous radiative ejecta). Spattered lagoons scummed by processes adjacent to decay hold white jutted bones of exhausted trees, yellow gray jaws of clotted beasts. Algal cosmopolises and brine shrimp colored most brilliantly in ultraviolet, aquamarine.
Discarded researches from the original industrial waste there too. Lacking either in morphological rigor or economic rigidity and unable, in either case, to be manufactured at dividended, shareholder satisficing scale.
Tar pits of coagulated substrate, intended once as biogenically homeostatic, regenerative asphalt—doomed now to mire. Leech neurons, Turing incomplete but firing all the same, of grade school arithmetic talent. Hemiparasitic bioweapons that ravaged formerly the dietary and economic staple crops of foreign powers blithely choke wild rice, crabgrass. Spooled bacterial factories, genetically condemned to produce the legalistic building blocks of financially extinct genomic materials scams. Proprietary nucleotide chains, junk alleles, to have been inlaid among the innocent genetic code of domesticated fauna—sufficient grounds for patent reclamation transfigured, now, into heritable bioflourishing accelerant. Meat and offal and bone, marketed previously as lab grown and freed entirely from cruelty, twitching, rotting, in profane mimicry of animal life. Household, doubly omnivorous piglets which once, cutely, ate vegetable peelings, discarded plastics, polystyrene, root now among their artificial wombs—congealed substitute for an instinctively recalled migration, back, toward spawning grounds.
Fated all now the same: pour from loom-mouthed outtake ducts toward their various resting places of gravitational minima, sup gently upon those selfsame stagnant pools.
Maggotscape lacks at all a furious core which adulterates or empowers its surroundings entire. Then, merely habitat. Archetypal. Crawling things at the bottom, flitting things at the top.
Intact histories of the biosphere seeping through, summarized in disjunctive clarity by artifice oasis.
Everything feral.
And what insect or bacterium is not?
Descendant vulture, migratory flamingo sequentially clothed in the ever more exotic pigments of local crustaceans, bats which feast, keen eyes made loathsome by phosphorescent symbiote—present these all as visitor.
Subordinate to the clonal fecund density of the resident.
And when this secreted hollow pupates, and secondary chrysalis occurs, putrid and unremarkable in its reformation among so many others, these lands will again be different.
I will again be different.
II.
A We are ecology of exterior, Slough; is homeodynamism of interior, Farmer.
Here, spirited relations between agrarian and soul of the land are fully concretized. A We is no individualized accompanier, inventing holiness or deed that they may look upon their fields in wonder; are ganglia sunken into the very loam. A We bleeds into earth, in transposing necessary fluid of the wound, in blotted, cohabitative featherings of consciousness.
Most elaborately unnatural of individual.
Most dissident frothing aspect of landscape.
A We does not proffer naive naturalistic reverence, could never represent (visuopolitical obsession itself long atomized into rot-surround) those determinations of every grub or protist or spore. But what evil had spined pigweed committed that it should not as well be cultivated as amaranth? And why was the violet honeybuzz disallowed to weigh verdicts of the councils that condemned dandelion, thistle blossom, white clover?
In the purported hierarchy of creation were contained only things which eat and which were eaten—sublime, conquering fray concluded as the permanent curse of all life. Meek grass eater and fearsome huntress. Immobile greenery, appetitive fauna, lifeless ore.
But this world lacks category, contains more than any pyramidal diagram. An infernal constellated layering of resemblance, statistical likenesses and localities ungroupable into the neatened syntax of human fiction.
Revealed by entropy’s aleatory dominion is not the seething of the severed ant that bites its abdomen and the twitching abdomen that stings its head. Nor fully characterized and glorious red, of tooth, of claw, accounting for every corner and struggle of the interspecies arena’s tropospheric confine. Neither churning irrational oneness nor taxonomic principality.
Instead the notion: nothing is entirely itself.
Supposedly universal relations between farmed, farmer, predator, prey, do not refer even anciently. These deep, false binaries have been for all time smeared by the scavenging and hunting jackal, decomposer, endosymbiotic tube worms of the trench, insectivorous flora, and all the rest.
Within that supposed hermetic binary too, all collapses. The hypercarnivore that grazes. Cervids feeding upon carrion and foliage both. Extensive, leonid idling and the herbivorous aggressions of the bull.
These are biological reality of which A We is smudged reflector, are pan-located environ. Hazed spread-between: neither omnivorous admixture, nor novel, sudden entity rooted in phenomenal nowhere.
Perverted anew was that falsified order.
A We did not quell the riot and strangle of the damped conscientiousness of rootstock, cilial network—sun feeders and corpse sprouters resting beneath. Did neither champion the individuated, burning in caloric conflagration for knowledge or forgiveness or the neurochemical possibility of love.
A We is uprisen slough; are wetland itself. Tender of our own equilibria. Slop half-submerged seeking complete safety and released tension from themselves. Nonsense proverb, embodied contradiction from which any indication may be provided or sought. Bearer of a new logics: A We seeks havens from A We. Is predator of the self, seeker, cannibal, autophage; are autotroph, decay and all base and worthless fundament upon which the superstructures of life depend. Burdened dread of slaying oneself, these innocents; selfsame traumatized hunted, fleeing their own mandible, siphon, claw.
In this land which is called universe, entropy’s mythos persists inexhaustibly—suprapredatory force upon the sluggish, as-yet-uninterrupted, catastrophe of biology. Nature thrashes against an actionable world leaking at every turn in waste and heat. A reality of unhelpable confronting violence that assures apathetic uniformity—total, eventual. No closed loops, no self-fulfilling divinations, no tautological maintenances by which information or lifeform or potential may be spared from inevitable running down. Clades all wage the organizing resistive struggle, the temporary overcoming, the incomplete repulsion of thermodynamic decree.
And so if death must be the price for life or lives, to which nature chants a trillion univocal confirmations, then let at least its circumstance resemble self mutilation rather than carnage.
Revolting, A We escapes nearly the condemnation of exploiter. Exploitation incurable, and what drug or preservative or system might betray or stave the death of heat looming beyond and over all—eventual entropic failure, to wipe clean each biological slate.
As far as A We is allowed, A We are flourishing.
And so A We are decay, invented.
And so A We is seed bearer, cultivar.
Is environment’s subordination for individual survival; are flaring menageries of else carrying with them only slightly less than the supposed totality of animal and vegetable and mineral contention.
Is decider; are relation and murk transubstantiated into body. Allegory of consciousness, consummate predator, reified admixture of dirt and water and clay and mind. Muddied absolution: this bonded soil and devoted observer.
A We are the once again again rebirth—defecate the fertilized successor into oneself.
What will grow?
What will?
In all there is turning. Turned out from gardens and into organisms.
A We is ended history and are the merely heaping of soon to be bedrock upon scattered fragmentary fossils of whatever lived. Roil of prehistoric clamor, transgressor and transcriber of this yes the first of remnants from a world that turns.
III.
Heat has come as heat does every year but these years especially and more.
A thousand thousand thousand rings the planet has by its path stacked as epicyclic monument to lucent dusk. An entire dusk. Holograph to time imprisoning momentous light—light escaped from red rising din and fallen heavily upon the earth.
Disc of bloated ichor—she wallows low in thick skies.
Nigh exhausted lies her core of elemental commonality, transmuted in furnaces which, if this hell of worlds has hells, then her’s are closest. New fuels dredged, chromosphere raised. Wanderers mercurial and beautiful subsumed by red sun swell. Sequence maimed of temporality by depth or death. Once transactionary, minute, bright coinage of nearly every life, now ascended and collapsed. A covering bathing gore, a gore of light.
Deepest and most final now, present same as ever seeping. There, between inverted obelisks of abiogenic memory and evolutionary destiny, hanging from nothing at either side, which weigh and pin an immobile and laminate moment.
Moment of An I, borne down upon by dragging stases and sequenced extinction. Moment that beneath these dull gravity continues to plod, to remake itself at every instantaneous observance.
Time in this place idle as those fixed opposing monoliths, fleeting as the proliferative weight of human lived experience. Add in sequence those observant ape lifetimes, hugely watching consciousnesses of a hundred billion lives, and find the nonexistent past and multiplied present: viewpoints which temporally multiply, outweighing the universe’s age, main sequence lifespans of any sun.
Everything but eventual depleted future.
Relative affixture or invariant accompaniment? Either of time’s considerations bear the ultimate pollutant: value.
Under doubled resistant metaphors of weight and time does the stalk of An I begin to flower.
Budding of inviolate length. Through atmosphere which came then too in carbonate ramp. The hothouse realm, the greenhouse world suffocating even those most decadent of hypertropic flora. Out from vapor: gaseous clouding weight of steamed oceans heaved from their caverns toward the sky. Pressure that came, tens and tens of atmospheres that brought their own desolation.
The crush ecology. Doomed paradise felled to time.
Fallen all, except this blossom last which knows. Punctuation on a long line of neuronal organizations that may judge.
Now is the world of elaborate remains.
An I—last of those first pupated corpses slogged from the oasis, set aside collective that outcompeted even the most forward-presuming human vision. Chewed free from the self and exited packed atmosphere, sank into loose sands.
Last will, last growth.
And what indeed did grow?
Lingering productions of all and every biological character gathered for worship—biologically real output of every biome seized, adopted wholly into ecocomplex.
Gatherers at rooted base, maintainers at infloresced crown. Ringed sprout of An I, dead at the vacuum and still so alive at the root.
Predators hidden from the winds beneath flattened carapace, impelled now to symbiosis. Vast excavations to attach and stabilize. Caregivers for terrestrial spongiform assemblers, laying again and in sequence hardened spicules from which and in total form An I.
Abyssally gigantified plankton, risen with sea vapor, to drift, to sing, upon the thick fluid of sky. Inheritors flitting toward more rarefied truths. Facts of the matter exospheric, dispersed. Solar winds feasted, satellite debris lain originally to rest millennia ago, exhumed now from distant cemetery orbit—synthesized, this all, into petal sail a hundred continents wide.
An I, sessile savior, siphonophore of elegant disposition, gliding the world outward, from doomed and into habitat. Dragging life’s cradle from her dying, as the bloodied limbs grasp and wane from her dark spotted and sickly surface.
Growth cycle that is not a cycle, a growth finality.
Mount to time. Monument to scarred worlds. Moment of evacuative extension.
Messianic wing to haul this first and last of homes finally free from the weight of light that drowns.