2. EARTH ENLIVENED
1 I hesitated initially to use the word “complementarity,” because of its history in the physics and philosophy of Niels Bohr, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics. For Bohr, complementary properties of an object cannot be measured or observed simultaneously, and that is different from what I have in mind. This is the best term to use here, though. For Bohr, complementarity is a relation between two properties of one object; here, it’s a relation between intertwined beings: organism and environment, self and other.
3. THE FOREST
1 Octopolis itself has been very quiet recently, with only a few animals present. The second site, Octlantis, was livelier on our last visit. Octopolis has declined and recovered before; I hope it recovers again.
4. ORPHEUS
1 Here is one description: “Both seahorses brightened in colour from a dark brown or grey to a pale yellow or off-white. They then turned parallel to one another, aligned head to head and tail to tail. Their tails grasped a Posidonia shoot, and they began to circle in the same direction, as if in a maypole dance, with the male on the outside. The pair intermittently released the holdfast and swam slowly in parallel across the bottom, with the male grasping the female’s tail. These two behaviour patterns, circling and parallel swimming, alternated until one of the seahorses darkened and ceased to respond to the other. The female then moved away, but the male sometimes pursued her, and she might briefly resume greeting before finally departing.” From Amanda Vincent and Laila Sadler, “Faithful Pair Bonds in Wild Seahorses, Hippocampus whitei.”
5. HUMAN BEING
1 Here are some comments from the political scientist James C. Scott: “Early colonial history is rife with indigenous resistance to the first colonial census; peasants and tribesmen alike understood perfectly well that a census was the necessary prelude to taxes and corvée labor. A similar attitude toward writing and record keeping permeates the history of colonial peasant rebellions against the state. The first target of peasant wrath was often not so much the colonial officials themselves as the paper documents—land titles, tax lists, population records—through which the officials seemed to rule.” (The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009)
7. OTHER LIVES
1 Here is a passage from Michel Houellebecq’s novel Serotonin (translated by Shaun Whiteside), about chickens in intensive farms: “the permanent look of panic that the chickens gave you, that look of panic and incomprehension; they didn’t ask for pity, they wouldn’t have been capable of it, but they didn’t understand, they didn’t understand the conditions in which they had been called upon to live.”