Chrysaora fuscescens

Last week I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I might lost myself for a bit while watching some male seahorses tether themselves to seaweed fronds and each other, nuzzling their very pregnant bellies together. But for the most part, I was able to keep my wits about me until I came upon the lit tank of Pacific Sea Nettles.

I love jellyfish. As I knelt inches from the glass, watching their pulsing and undulating forms move through my field of vision, I began to feel as though my heart was filling with a mysterious fluid and beginning a slow rise up through my throat. I began to drown from the inside out.

I knelt there for so long that one of my shoes broke. I had the vague sense at some point that it would be good idea for me to leave, but didn’t feel I had any command over the strange mammalian, land-dwelling body that I found surrounding me.

As I began to breathe myself back, I felt at once a deep sense of belonging to the earth and also a profound sense of being alien, ethereal. What were the odds that I would get such a chance—to inhabit this place—in this way—and alongside such creatures? I watched the jellyfish and understood that they were very much doing their job of performing the curious and delicate mystery of being alive on this planet. And this, in turn, made me want to do my respective job on the other side of the glass just as beautifully.

To be of the earth and to be human is an incidence so rare, so random, so fragile, and so precious that it warrants only one possible response from us: to do it well.

Dreaming M.J.

I had a very vivid dream this week, the week of Michael Jackson's death. In my dream, humans had evolved into forms that were suspended in something of a sensory-emotive virtual mist. Nothing of form or visual cues indicated that we were still human, or especially related to humans. Only a certain sense of familiarity or practicedness helped me recognize my new self as non-alien.

The only language spoken was a series of passwords that functioned as a system of consent for marrying together our psyches within the ether-net. I watched as flexible fluid windows united and parted by folding in on each other and then peeling away, all within a web of space indistinguishable as either virtual or actual.

To say we were composed in parts both human and computer sounds too crude. Notions of part and whole were of little use for understanding these forms. Our existence and co-existence were virtual. Potential. Happening in the space of their own unfolding. Our password invitations were each unique and composed of a purely emotive language with a sort of rolling, lapping sound that landed pleasantly and pleadingly at the edge of consciousness. Mine was a sound I recognized as a sort of new name for my mother. It was the only word I could say.

This was not exactly utopia--this sort-of-bodied sentience suspended in gauzy spiderwebs of telo-internet melting into perfect crystalline consensual enagagement. I recognized from the human quality of the experience that we were not enlightened. We had just come up with new ways of doing the telling and the listening—of paying attention to each other.

The day after my dream, my movements through the world carried an investigative quality. What I was investigating, it felt, was the project of coexistence. I wanted to listen and I wanted to tell, and I only knew one way of asking how. kaythingsswoombordmoydoosbp. Requesting permission to connect.