What can be done with twenty-three words.  A bet, 26 letters, what can be written.

Boing

Boing

Boing

Buckminster says that if nature allows a thing, then it’s natural.  Which is a radical thing to say, and far wider-reaching than a conservative view like that of Michael Reynolds of EarthShip genius, who says that tires are man’s available natural resource.

Then I wondered whether anyone today could withstand a glimpse of the built Earth environment 1000 years from now.

I squint and dive deeper into the idea of the sphere, and I make drawings with a careful drafting hand in my imagination. But they become a vision instead, with the usual realistic light and shadows, colors tuned otherly.  A tensile web of spheres moves and opens and closes out of materials with qualities we currently think are impossible – rigidity and liquidity as one, metal and gas as one – that blooms with the sun, our built environment transfers energy from the sunbloom to the netherparts on the dark side, because it is all one unit, duh, and this built environment causes the one, two, or three sunblooming skeleto-webs to appear, at many other scales and distances, to be the individuals of humanity, not the billions of human flesh bodies. Humanity makes its shell, and there aren’t very many of them over the planet because it works on account of the sunbloom energy transfer – it means the bigger the better.

Looking out the window to my neighborhood street I begin a little maudlin sentimentality about the abominably inefficient buildings we make for our homes.  Right down to the thing’s relationship with gravity, which was the seminal point of examination regarding the physical object of my MFA thesis.  The vision returns, the domiciles, the buildings, and the energy grid are the same thing.

Outside night darkness is permitted because of the material’s ability to opacify itself entirely on the nightside for the benefit of the plant nads.

It is a reflexive material, it acts on itself.  The common language 1000 years from now will have reflexive verbs and it therefore will not be so very difficult for its speakers to imagine a material acting on itself. This reflexivity is related to Buckminster’s wondering about how many points of light are pulling anyway and how that becomes a one thing, and that is to say the material isn’t alive er but it senses and responds on a model of life intelligence, generates itself, and in fact it gets built after a certain point outside of any economy on account of the fact that waste is sorted at the molecular level (i will get muse for this Nostra-minster spree) so that water and air filtration/sorting/re-circ are understood as parts of the system, not add-ons.  There’s no add-on.

Then of course there are probably a couple colonies because man loves it that way, let’s play like Us and Them, two systems that handle things differently.  But shortage is not the nightmare. The difference, because we woke Dick up, is that one does human genetic engineering and the other doesn’t.   and we find out!, we find out that the engineering one needs something biological from the non-engineered humans, and it steals it in the systematic way how things get made in this 1000-years-from-now world I am looking at despite having almost no such thoughts at other times.  The Mariner hath his Will.  It steals it, some sort of umbilical fluid, something you’d notice, by way of  _____ (for this blank, Dick thinks of yellowing boxes of forgotten ideas)

and the fact of the theft is the last remaining sin.

I wouldn’t have to say how it mixes all together with the robe and the time and the boxes of papers, and the dial-a-mood in a you-never-thought-of-it shimmer half-past possible.  And so what is to be done and I can’t believe I had to learn it all upside down and left-handed.  All of it.  the Mariner comes to me as a giant face in the clouds, holding me down with one eye, grinning, his bejeweled, windblown fingers waggling under his chin.