Saturday, July 31, 2021

life is full of

 Life is full of transient, self-abuse rituals. 

My job is one of them. 

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Life is a genetic hologram

" Life is a genetic hologram." 


Those were my words posted October 28, 2018. I had thought of them on the way to work on a warehouse. I am working on one now. It is summer. It's hot and sticky. I hurt. My skin is burned. 


Life emerged in the oceans from rafts of biofilm, churned by wave action, bathed in the sun's radiation, and free-associating with the countless molecules first forming in this aqueous medium. Biofilm is a loaded word, perhaps. What I have in mind are chains of persistent bonds between molecules that can form under the heat, wet, and sun of earth's ocean several billion years ago. There, amidst these persistent chains various haphazard 'colonies' of molecules with mutually supporting relationships became a continuous, existing tapestry of molecular 'soup,' for lack of better words, a biofilm. This biofilm, surrounded by ocean and the countless new and varied molecular structures it carried, offered the conditions for countless trillions of molecular combinations until novel and persistent ones occurred. Some of these disappeared, never to happen again. Others, did not. The proteins that make us 'life' are one such fruit the grew from these conditions. And there, in that ancient sea, amidst those 'rafts of life' self-replicating proteins--an unseemly feat of uncountable, random chemistry experiments--emerged. Life at it's most basic is just that, chemical interactions, atoms arranged and re-arranged by floating in an aqueous matrix and bonding with other atoms. Their bonds are determined in part by a knack of the geometry of an atom's shape or the fit of it's molecules to others by shapes that mimic locks, keys, simple snag points, and static charge. Therefore, we can say that life is ultimately about fitness. A lot of molecular 'fit ups' had to have occurred and found to be successful for a duration of time for this model of life that we witness to emerge and remain. 

Since life is, at its base, chemicals then life is OF the world on which it exists. Life becomes a 'chemical condition' shaping the chemical foundations of the world itself. Where it once required the passive effects of floating in an ocean being bathed in novel molecules, as life it persist as a coherent 'place' in the world, as a cell, by seeking out those specific molecules that allow it to exist and to replicate through time. Given the persistence of this form of life and its very close interfacing with its world, as changes took place, a diversity of life emerged. 

To cut to the chase, all life on earth is a 'projection' of this basic chemical impetus for molecules to 'fit' with other molecules. And in all the varied and interesting ways that life exists on earth it is simply a projection of that basic condition of the universe, for atoms to join other atoms, as if the total contents of all atoms in the universe were once a whole. That 'spiritual atom' aside, life is a condition of temporal persistence by way of replication through time of a more complex arrangement of molecules in search of those molecules that will sustain its existence in time.