11 december 2022
i've learned that the giant tube worms that live in and near deep-sea hydrothermal vents use hemoglobin in their little fronds, the same protein we use to carry oxygen. different animals have evolved various oxygen-carrying proteins, which results in a variety of blood colors. these guys are just as red as our blood, which is incredibly uncanny. their biology, substrate and environment is completely different from ours, they live in water filled with hydrogen sulfide and feed on bacteria which produce energy without sunlight; yet they have circularly produced this blood, linking back with us on such a specific elaborate aspect. idk.
i need to write about electricity pylons, fields, hummocks and lawn-mowing; a poem has been slowly growing, molting, and i have ideas on the elements i want to use:
- first person plural : a more general use should come (a wiki post about the nature of "we" too)
- plurals emphasizing the nonspecificity of place
- references to iconography, old things, structures, their drawings of people (specifically the depictions of humans and gods in chinese seal script : 天 "heaven" comes from the symbol fora person, with a large flat head)
- from there, the contrast between the purely functional nature (and more widely the extrinsic telos of human structures) and the spiritual, representative, fetishistic use of such symbols
- vines which will in the future grow onto these metal armatures
long ago in mesopotamia they used to carve in great slabs of alabaster human figures winged, in a dominant stance, fertilising self-braiding trees of life. a small piece of alabaster i also cut and wore into a small, flat figure of a leaf, with uncertain scratches, in the psych ward, high on quetiapine and exsolation.
cool word of the moment: man-of-war