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life

Page history last edited by ShareRiff 9 years, 8 months ago

Wikis don't replicate or substitute for the experiences that prompted the syncopative brilliance of DuBois, Ellison, Benjamin, or Scratch Perry. But wikis teach that even the smallest gestures of every day writing ask us us to learn how to play a part, that is, to listen to the “rests” and allow our words to become part of a larger syncopation. Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan ask us to listen to this “rest of life” in the epilogue to What is Life? where they consider homo sapiens, but not for our unique characteristics as a species, but as a part of an endless series of dissipative structures.

 

Homo sapiens tends to dissipate heat and accelerate organization. Like all other life forms, our kind cannot continue to expand limitlessly. Nor can we continue to destroy the other beings upon whom we ultimately depend. We must begin to listen to the rest of life.

As just one melody in the living opera we are repetitious and persistent. We may think ourselves creative and original but in those talents we are not alone. Admit it or not, we are only a single theme of the orchestrated life-form. With its glorious nonhuman past and its uncertain but provocative future, this life, our life, is embedded now, as it has always been, in the rest of Earth's sentient symphony. Now, as before, life is empowered by the sun. It is a phenomenon not only molecular but astronomic. Life is open to the universe and to itself. In the tradition of Charles Darwin, Samuel Butler, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Erwin Schrodinger, we can ask with curiosity but can answer only tentatively and with humility the question of what life is, hoping, with you, that the search continues"

 

 

Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, "What is Life?" (p. 246)

 

Life's syncopation depends not so much on a distinction between homo sapiens and all the rest, but homo sapien's ability to listen to the rest of life, which means we must tune into the rests of life. The seemingly boundless infinity offered by wiki's open edit screens would seem to mean infinite expansion, but as Govinda makes clear, intuitive receptivity is the mode of Life's commons. Dub science teaches us rests (taking turns, basically) are elemental to life's syncopation, which depends on playing a part in the scattering and gathering of the refrains and patterns of Earth's “sentient symphony.” Wyrd!

 

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