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A gram of tea,
a day of pain
The sense one’s body
is elsewhere, and what
you inhabit a stand-in
made of cereal-box board
and masking tape.

Living things turned back in
Features softening,
wax in a pan
Scrubbing a pan,
the old gleam coming through.

Whistling in my ear
could be a kettle
in a distant room.

Left to my own devices, I was a poor eater, apt to rely on bowls of panicum mush, made with a kettle, standing in the kitchen or common area wherever I’d washed up, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other, feeding myself absentmindedly, avoiding eye contact. If I was feeling inspired I’d add a plegg, the kind that came vacuum-packed, ready to eat. I’d learned to seek out condiments that satisfy multiple criteria of palatability: foaminess and spreadability for mouthfeel, something to guide the panic down the esophagus, piquancy, acid, a touch of green. When I found one that worked I rode it hard, mourning its loss when, as happened with anything good, it ceased to be procurable from one day to the next. Hunger was constant, for everyone, even on the most lavishly provisioned retreats. Even C must’ve felt it: the abiding question, threading its way through one’s thoughts, what is there to eat? But something in my body recoiled from food. This too was universal, or seemed to be: it was not the sort of thing that was apt to come up in conversation. It was not as if I could not afford to eat well, days when my body could abide it. Still, I was grateful to C for having fed me

The rain passed and the sky grew light again, playing tricks with my sense of the passage of time: was it morning, had we stayed up talking? That would explain how the world could seem refreshed though I had no sensation of having slept and woken to a new day. But no: it was the same day. The sun, were it visible, would be near the horizon. When we had eaten he filled the basin with water from the tank that lived under the counter, scrubbing and rinsing the pan, bowls, utensils, using ash from a dish on the rim of the tub, drying everything with the disintegrating t-shirt, batting away my protests that I should be the one to do the washing up. When he had finished he wiped his hands on his skirt and took a small vial from the ledge above the counter, tapping it twice into the palm of one hand and rubbing the contents into the back of his neck before resealing the vial and offering it to me. It turned out to be Melaleuca oil, and I was glad to follow his example. He poured out the last of the tea, extinguished the brazier, and changed back into his shirt while I got a layer from my knapsack. Then we headed out to squat at the edge of the scarp, pouring what was left of the beer into our teas and squinting into the late-afternoon shimmer. The luminous phenomenon had shifted to a celadon green that fit the post-storm mood.

T regarded the nymph, who had moved on from scrubbing oca and sat now in the same posture, spine erect as only that of the young could be, sorting Atriplex aerials into those that could be eaten and those that would be composted and folded back into the sandy soil of the garden. They wore an expression of quiet engagement, eyes clear and darting, the sclera free of the yellowing and venous defects T saw in their own, on the rare occasion they caught sight of their face in a mirror. With their shaved head and adept’s posture they looked wise beyond their years, an expression doubly apt in the case of this one. You wanted to ask them questions: about failed relationships past, how you ended up in your present circumstances, what the future held, why men were obliged to be such raging dickheads. They seemed unaffected by the heat, save perhaps even less inclined to eat than usual, and this, more than anything else, filled T with wonder and envy. The nymph must’ve sensed their gaze, for they set down the Atriplex inflorescences they’d been examining and turned to meet it, squinting in the glare that filled the air even here, under the sloped shed roof of the kitchen, smiling. Perhaps that calm, clear expression was innate — they must breed them to be agreeable, though distrust had its virtues too. The saltacid spider descended once more into T’s inner field of view. It occurred to them they needed to sleep.

In the light of the doorway Taslan retrieved a t-shirt from the nail where it lived, pulled it on, rehearsing the steps that lay between them and sleep. They administered drops of hyaluronic acid from the squeeze bottle that stood on the workbench they’d appropriated for a dresser, frowning at the jar of WS-9 salve: you never knew when you’d be able to replenish your supply, or if, and the heat could go on for months. But certain things — from the cluster of smaller jars, like what lip gloss once came in — they thought of girlfriends they’d had, applying lip gloss — they selected one at the back, again pausing to savor the soft click it made as the lid disengaged from the mouth. Just the lightest dab, with the third finger, on the radial pulse of either wrist—

—don’t like — cold cake, the long-dead woman was saying, stressing the cold cake in a way that gave you to wonder if, at the time this had been recorded, cold cake had been a genre of dessert all its own, the sort of thing that formed the pretext of a wave of features, in newsletters and whatever else before evaporating as quickly as it had emerged — Taslan was doubtful, but what did they know of that time. Now, as they lay down, mindful of the tears in the hammock they had not got around to patching, he focused on the woman’s voice, explaining how she had purchased the cake at a supermarket — this Taslan could not picture, though they understood the basic principle — heated it up, how in their fantasies — you heard the squeaking of the HDPE clamshell tray as she exhibited the cake in its retail packaging — this was a serving for one but really — this is a serving for two.

A man and a woman, enforcer and protector. He is beaming, broad face, bulked-up trunk packed into a heavy canvas chore coat of the same type as our own man wears, though cleaner, not so shiny at the stress points. It is zipped up to the neck. A watch cap perches high on his forehead, a spray of sandy hair visible beneath the hem. She is smiling too, less demonstrative, black shell that seems to absorb all incident light, simultaneously indicating and concealing the contours of her trunk and arms. No hat, hair in a loose chignon. Young, but again, these days it’s impossible to say. He speaks first.

Sorry to disturb you folks on this lovely morning.

Without being prompted the older man steps aside, gesturing for the pair to come in. This they do, nodding their appreciation, stamping their shoes and asking if they should remove them before entering.

That’s not—

In an essay of 1977 the ecologist Daniel Janzen described a population of genetically uniform dandelions as a single dispersed evolutionary individual. The dandelion, he writes, “is a very large tree with no investment in trunk, major branches, or perennial roots” — the individual dandelion stems are but ramets, contingently detached branches, of a single living thing.

“Such a generalization,” Janzen continues,

is often countered by the observation that the individual dandelions cannot contribute to each other’s welfare. In fact, the individual parts of more conventional EI [evolutionary individual] plants are connected at all levels, along a gradient from where the fortunes and losses of one part are heavily capitalized on and catered to by other parts, to where the physiological connection is virtually nonexistent. Even at this end, group phenomena still occur, such as pollinator attraction, allelopathy, interspecific interference, etc., by the disconnected but closely spaced members of a conventional clone.

Imagine, Janzen proposes, that a mutant strain emerges with spines that repel the local goats. “As its crown grows from occupying one resource bit to covering most of the resource bits, it is competing with several other diffuse crowns of EI dandelions, not with thousands of interbreeding individuals”. Of course we cannot exclude the possibility that the spininess trait will spread from one evolutionary individual to another by outcrossing. But by and large it is by outcompeting the other clones as a unit that the spiny clone — and thus the spininess trait — will flourish.

Tasman Poplar, you mean. He nodded.

We’ve never actually met.

That’s what makes it interesting you know their name. He glanced at the donabe, touched his finger to the part of the surface of the hob you touched to turn it off, frowned. This was a mistake. Convenient, but it’ll be the first thing to fail, and then it’s just another piece of space junk. Muller’s ratchet. He shrugged, lifting the lid of the donabe to check the contents, the returned his attention to me. This needs ten minutes to sit and think. Refilling our cups from the testubin and taking one in either hand he shifted o the irori, gesturing for me to join him. We squatted on opposing sides of the brazier. Between us, opposite where the Copiapoa had been when I arrived, stood a bowl with a loose sheaf of switchgrass laid over it. He propped the switchgrass atop the coals and lit it with the firesteel and striker that lay in the bowl. Between the bath and the steam from the kettle and the donabe the space felt comfortable to me, but I knew he was not one to waste effort, let alone fuel, and the prospect of gazing into the lit coals of a fire caused the hairs along my spine to stand up in pleasurable anticipation. Outside, the storm showed no signs of passing. The room had a dusk-like quality. It occurred to me perhaps he did not use lighting when he was here. I come here when I need a break from the glare. Perhaps he was simply at ease in the dark. All those years waiting, patiently, in darkened spaces, for others to disclose themselves. His eyes stayed with his hands, but he talked as he worked.

We went back out. The rain was picking up, the temperature falling. He seemed not to notice, or rather not to mind. He stood looking out at the water, absentmindedly retying the tapes at the waist of his skirt. The impression one got from this point along the coast was different from that you got up by the hut, though it was no more than a hundred meters along the edge of the extrusion. From here there was no sense of enclosure, of a channel, of protection — just the lead-colored sea, a right building in the swell out where the surface suddenly got darker and you knew that’s where the shelf must drop away. I could picture him, out there alone in the lineup, biding his time, waiting for a clean set. Surfing had never come up in our conversation, and I had no cause to think he was a surfer. But if anyone could pick it up later in life, it would be he. The danger of it, the real risk of drowning, or getting slammed against the wall or dragged across the reef or caught under the suck, standing there naked knowing what was coming, would appeal to him — not because he had a death wish, or more than any of us, but as a test of equanimity. And there was the cold, that would appeal to him too. Part of me wanted to ask. But we were getting soaked, and at length he seemed to take notice of the fact that I was shivering. I made the universal sign for Let’s go in and have a cup of tea. He nodded, slowly, gravely, and I wondered, vaguely, if I had disappointed him.

Breaking register: Giving this another try. I’ll do my best to keep it unobtrusive and possibly irregular. If by chance you know of anyone who might enjoy this kind of strangeness, I’d be grateful if you’d pass it along. 🙇

when she woke up — most often literally, woke up in the still dark hours when the bromeliads in the garden transpired, some nights she swore she could hear them, woke up, the trace of whatever dream erased save for that feeling you get, you know, when you’ve been menaced and you feel your whole body flooding with cortisol in the space of half a second, feel the calcium channels lighting up in series, up your spine, down your arms and legs, your bowels release — woke up to the fact that nature was indifferent but she was fucked, she would lose hours, stuffing the edge of the comforter in her mouth so that none of the people helping her, who came and went unpredictably at all times of day and night, or the unsuspecting neighbors beyond the palings that marked the border of the garden, would hear her screaming. Blackout screaming, screaming that ablated time, ablated thought, like the surgeon, if they were a surgeon, who came to see to the ferric crystals in her olfactory bulb said about the nature of their task, ablation, the creation of a lesion, there’s a risk you’ll wind up with anosmia, though we’ve had good results, she’d waved these concerns aside, what choice did she have? Wish we could do this with confocal lasers or acoustic or TMS, regarding the retractor in their hand with a dismal expression as if just now becoming aware of the violence of their profession, but with this kind of thing it’s not enough to destroy the tissue structure, you need to get the crystals out, otherwise there’s a risk, even if it’s embedded in scar tissue and no longer functional — they shrugged and she waved aside their concerns a second time, reclining in the chair they’d dragged out from some never-used shed for the purpose of the procedure, when, she joked to herself, apart from the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes of a train or a flight, had she last sat in a chair, let alone one with a back let alone one that reclined, it was kind of interesting, to find oneself in the recumbent position, supported by a polycarbonate, what to call it? scaffold? armature?

Count back from twenty.

This will be the last edition of Breakage Plane for a while as I make an effort to restrict the number of things I must attend to in the week. If you’ve been reading, you have my humble thanks. j

Still, it is good to be out. Now that the snow has stopped there is a glare in the deadeye white of the sky, and he squints, observing the vapor of his breath, standing at the foot of the rise where the birch stand huddled defensively against intruders such as he, supporting his sacrum with the heels of his hands. As always he begins by explaining what he has in mind and why, trying for a matter-of-fact tone, before apologizing, lowering his head and then lowering himself to his knees, the damp of the leaf litter a reassurance through the knees of his trousers, subvocalizing, waiting for the acknowledgment that never comes in the form of speech but simply in a cadence in his thoughts, a moment’s quiet when he senses that it is ok. Talking to myself, he says aloud and sets to, unshouldering his knapsack, freeing the kindling sling from the bungee lattice that runs down its dorsal aspect, shouldering that, pausing to switch sides so as to maintain a modicum of symmetry in the erosion of hips, shoulders, and intervertebral joints, scanning the ground for windfall, anything that might reduce his need to cut into a living tree. When he has filled the sling and emptied it into the knapsack he makes a second circuit, confirming that he has missed nothing. Then he makes a new loop among the mature birch, unarmed at first, looking for the scars made by his own coppicing, vaguely attentive to signs that some other party has been harvesting this stand. At length he selects an individual, younger than he, with a couple low branches that he can reach without shimmying, and returns with the bow saw. He does not need much, they can mix it with whatever litter is to be had within easy walking distance of the house, grasses even. Back at his knapsack he squats with one knee up and the other back, sawing the birch limbs into tractable lengths, propping them over the toes of his boot, then loads the sawed limbs into the knapsack, giving the thing a couple flicks, holding it by the rim, to settle its contents, fastening it with a couple too-long lengths poking out, rolling up the sling, fixing it to the bungee lattice, shouldering the knapsack and heading down without a backward glance.

Imagine that once he has seen the two of them settled in the sauna and offered the client’s accompanying party a tea and the possibility of sitting by the fire to wait, nodding in a show of resignation to conceal his relief when she declines, saying she’ll return at the end of the two hours, he sets off to harvest birch, having noticed, when he went out to start the fire earlier, that they are running a bit low. There is a stand of it a bit back in the brake, about fifteen minutes’ walk, across the road and up the hill that continues across the field there. The place has stood empty since before he came to stay here, though he has a dim recollection of having been inside, once, decades ago, something mechanical, boiler maybe, back when people were still making an effort to have that kind of thing repaired. How he came to know of this stand of birch eludes him, though he knows that in his first year or two here he was more given to rambles, to exploring the neighborhood just to see what might be there, what might be of use. Difficult to imagine having the energy for that now. Moving uphill, every step feels a bit plodding, despite the coffee earlier. He knows that this must be anemia, does not know what he might do about that, though she may, she might have something she can boil, or perhaps it is simply the fatigue of the nervous system that comes, now, even though the winter is so much milder than it used to be — the abiding tension between the shoulder blades, the continual effort, even when you are unaware of it, to make yourself more compact, expose less surface area to heat loss — but it is early in the season yet, too early for that, and he must hope that this is simply some transient micronutrient insufficiency that can be corrected by drinking a decoction of roots.

Think you’ve mentioned that once or twice, smiling from where she squats at door, scrubbing the threshold with dilute oil-soap. The diminished falling tone series of “Factory 141” is well-suited to task at hand, not to say the mournful cast of the day, every snowfall containing a rehearsal for the end of snow, and by the time they arrive at the lo-fi carrier tones and reverberative cadences of “Calm Imagination” and the contrapuntal chimes of “Warm Rondo” they are enveloped in the mood of calm abiding clients expect of them. Or at least of her, his role is mechanical, the splitter of wood, lighter of fires, bearer of water, the one who remains in the realm of the dispositional so that others may cross over into the realm of the immanent. They have never discussed it in these terms, and he understands that it would pain her to have it put in words, the artifice, the theater of it, that to talk about it would constitute a further erosion of her sense of craft, but he takes a certain pleasure in playing a part, just as he did in an earlier life, and this is more or less what he is thinking about as they sit quietly at the table, inhaling the acrid scent of juniper smoke and watching the snow fall through the window that abuts the fireplace, the events of the morning all but forgotten notwithstanding the lenticulated card lying facedown on the table between them and the book with its spine fractionally out of alignment with that of its neighbors visible, from where he sits, on the shelf opposite, when the knock at the door tells them the client has arrived.

The thump of the cab door is muted in the post-snow air, and then they hear the crunch of boots on the gravel out front, two pairs, to judge from the doubled meter, growing closer as they come around to the kitchen. A knock at the door that causes something to coil and uncoil in her gut.

A man and a woman, enforcer and protector. He is beaming, broad face, bulked-up trunk packed into a heavy canvas chore coat of the same type as our own man wears, though cleaner, not so shiny at the stress points. It is zipped up to the neck. A watch cap perches high on his forehead, a spray of sandy hair visible beneath the hem. She is smiling too, less demonstrative, black shell that seems to absorb all incident light, simultaneously indicating and concealing the contours of her trunk and arms. No hat, hair in a loose chignon. Young, but again, these days it’s impossible to say. He speaks first.

Sorry to disturb you folks on this lovely morning.

Without being prompted the older man steps aside, gesturing for the pair to come in. This they do, nodding their appreciation, stamping their shoes and asking if they should remove them before entering.

Imagine now a third figure, younger than these two, perhaps sixteen, fifteen, though again, it is difficult to say. Underfed, perhaps, though it is difficult to say what underfed means today — in another time you might say her appearance was the product of a innate high metabolism combined with a tendency to distraction, to getting caught up in things, neglecting to eat. She looks well cared for, skin clear, eyes bright, hair shiny, the scent of one who has spent one night sleeping rough, not hundreds. Old enough, they’ve judged, to be offered coffee. She — we’ll say she — has the mien of one accustomed to being watched: she sits at the table with her gaze directed at the bowls before her, the smaller with coffee, the larger with a wedge of bannock and a shred of pickled pumpkin, hands in her lap save when she takes a sip of coffee or swabs the bannock in the pumpkin, using the narrow end to divide the fermented flesh in two, carefully dragging the bannock against the wall of the bowl so as to scoop up the halved slice of pumpkin nearer her and deliver it to her mouth, maneuvering the packet past her lips without touching, biting down, returning the truncated bannock to its bowl and her hand to her lap before discreetly wiping the crumbs from her fingers. Watching from where he stands leaning against the counter, elbows propped at the edge of the prep space between sink and hob, he is reminded of films he saw as a child: spaceships docking, the dramatized visualizations of missile guidance systems acquiring a target.

Imagine the following scene: Morning, winter, an old farmhouse kitchen, or what passes, these days, for old. Snow has fallen in the night — not much, just a finger joint, if that, and that half gone, but enough to give hope: a world with snow is a world not yet forsaken. The sky is the color of an enameled tub that has seen decades of scouring, the color of a fish’s eye, white but empty of luminosity. The operative predicate is suffused: the kitchen is suffused with a soft light, suffused with the hush that is distinctive to the morning after a snow, even a bare dusting, even now when there are so few vehicles on the road and so few animals in the wood, when the wood is more brake than wood so that there are few trees, and little tracheophytic vegetation of any kind, to move in the wind. The world has gone quiet — even so, there is something specific, and sacred, to the quality of the quiet that comes with snow.

Two figures, a woman and a man, she sitting, he standing at the counter, like most people these days younger than they look. He moves with the delicate care of one newly come to an accommodation with chronic pain, though in fact the pain in his sacrum has been with him eight years. A quilted blanket hangs in the doorway to keep the warmth of the fire from escaping. He speaks first.

Found her hiding in the shed.

Picture a bobbin resting in your hand. Your task is to wind a skein of thread around the bobbin. If you wind the thread along the shortest path about the bobbin, tracing a conic section orthogonal to the bobbin’s major axis, you will shortly find yourself confounded by an accretion of layers of thread one atop the other. What you want to do, what you will naturally tend to do, is to wind the thread along the longest possible path along the surface of the bobbin by wrapping it in a helix, each turn of the skein tracing a conic section that diverges from orthogonal to the bobbin’s major axis by an angle given by the arccos of the triangle formed by the diameter of the bobbin and that of the thread.

Now imagine a vast, warmly lit space, like a zendo but orders of magnitude more capacious, the walls receding from view in all directions. Picture a lattice, like the one we marked out in the first though experiment a week ago save that this one is marked out in gaff tape on the floor. Place a volunteer at one tape mark. Imagine that the space is characterized by periodic boundary conditions, so that if you set off along one of the principal axes at length you will encounter your volunteer again. The same thing will happen if you set off on a diagonal—it will simply take longer, like winding a skein of thread around a toroidal bobbin.

In fact, we can imagine an infinite lattice with periodic boundary conditions, so that whatever path you took, if you continued in a fixed direction, at length you would return to your volunteer—but here at length means in the limit, as the time you spent walking, t, or better yet the number of paces you’d taken, n, approached infinity. You can check that this converges.

This is the kind of thing I do at night to fall asleep.

Ambisonic decodes from Bogong. With much gratitude to Madelynne Cornish and Philip Samartzis. These run 32’, so make yourself a tea and find a dark, quiet place to lie on the floor for a while.

Spectral flux

Spectral flatness

Spectral centroid

Here is another entry from my journal, not one that I have caused to be superimposed on your own notebook, just something I found in an old notebook, late one night, going through what little I have in the way of worldly possessions:

Yesterday evening around 9, sitting at the table after eating, hands resting on stacked ankles, regarding them, the unaccustomed veinedness of the backs of the hands — an impression they were not part of me. Mild but clear, and unbidden: these were alien features of the world. It is not that I experienced revulsion for them or a desire to have them removed or destroyed … just a neutral dissociation. Looking at them now, I can summon it again, even as they move under my command.

The room I have called home the last eight years and change is a converted closet on the north side of the main building, behind the kitchen, away from the front office and the zendo proper and all the ancillary spaces you associate with a center such as this — the abbot’s office, etc. When the laundry is running, I hear the purring of the drum through the wall, and since we often run the laundry in the evening — we have the kind of machine that features a washer and dryer sharing a drum, so we can start it in the evening without fear the clothes will be sitting in the drum damp overnight — I have grown to associate the sound of the washer and dryer with security, with the gratitude I feel at the end of the day when I crawl into my futon, the relief to be here and not one of the places I was before. The room has no windows and gets no natural light, nor is it ventilated the way you’d like a room where someone is sleeping to be, and the floor is finished in industrial carpeting that does little to protect the feet from the cold of the cement subfloor in winter and that bears the indentations of the chrome-wire shelving units that occupied this space until it became mine. The walls are scuffed but it is difficult to paint in here, because of the ventilation. Apart from the futon and the brass hooks where I hang my clothes — a splurge at the hardware store about a year after I moved in — the only thing in the way of furniture is a polyethylene tote, the kind that’s transparent but tinted, with an opaque lid with hinged clasps that snap down over the rim of the body. Mostly it holds things I use every day: the caddy in which I transport toothbrush, razor, and soap to the lavatory and shower down the hall, a rotation of paperbacks from the used-bookstore in town, a spare sweater, a bead-blasted pocket tool, gift from a guest a few years back, plus a handful of tokens from my earlier life. Apart from the pocket tool and the winter boots that live in the rack by the entrance by the kitchen there is nothing to my name worth stealing.

Soon someone puts on Takecha’s Deep Soundscapes and you feel yourself descending into a state of edgelessness, as if concentration were a periodically bounded thing, both the meditation experience and the old novice with the twitching pulse in the superficial temporal artery forgotten.

But later, back at your hut, you find the following in your notebook:

Gut better. Up early, strong sit. The sense of the face being erased has returned — partly guided, a bit spontaneous. Not with the feeling of brightness I experienced previously — this time it is more like it’s being washed out with ink. Ego dissolution, lacking the euphoric edge of the last time — closer to simply happening, neutral affect.

You turn the notebook over, running your thumb along the spine and edge. The hand of this entry is not yours, nor is the diction. Could you have written this in a state of dissociation, late in the evening? The other entries appear to be as you recall. You set the notebook aside and make a cup of tea, then stand at the counter watching the crows jostle for position in the false cypress beyond the window above the sink.

By chance I am on kitchen duty that morning too, so we are introduced at last, one of the other long-term residents — let’s call them Iro — placing a hand on your shoulder, interrupting your reverie, so that you jump and they apologize, saying they wanted to introduce us — gesturing with a tilt of the head at where I stand, I nodding as our gazes meet — as it occurred to them perhaps we had not yet met. On this morning kitchen duty for me has meant cleaning out the floor drain behind the dishwashing station with the powerwasher. It is something I try to get to every few months. In a restaurant they’d be lucky to get to it once a year, and they’d be doing far more volume than this kitchen ever sees, not to mention that the clientele, say, of one of the places in town with a forty-five-minute wait for a two-up on a warm spring evening is less constrained by injunctions against waste of the sort that represent an abiding precept of life at the retreat center. Truth be told, I see very little platescraping action on dishwashing duty, and most of it goes straight into the compost. But taking care with one’s living space is another of our precepts, and in any case I need to give myself some kind of activity that makes our introduction a little awkward, so let’s imagine that on this morning kitchen duty for me has meant cleaning out the floor drain with the powerwasher — perhaps I noticed a backwash the other day — and when you turn, following Iro’s gaze, you see my forehead is smudged and there’s some kind of dark stain spreading across the white smock I’ve tied on over my kitchen duty henley and skirt. I nod again, wiping my hands on the apron, then, holding them up and regarding them with a dubious gaze, I offer you an elbow instead. The kitchen is where I feel most alive, apart from when I’m outside tending my experimental plots in the garden, so my alpha is relatively high, maybe sixty percent? maybe as high as eighty, and between that and the bright 4000K lighting of the kitchen reflecting off the white tile and stainless steel you don’t notice I’m a little see-through.

I am there, maybe thirty, forty percent opacity, but you could not be expected to notice me, you’ve got enough on your hands just following the protocol for entering the zendo, taking your seat, how you place your hands, your gaze, not to say all the new information, the altar, scent of aloeswood, and when the clapper sounds for the end of the hour and you look up you see just a handful of others in the space — I left ten minutes ago to shovel the drive and throw heated gravel on the walks, and if you notice me at all this morning it is when you head out, back up to your hut to get in another hour’s work before it is time for breakfast: a gaunt, lone figure, bundled up just as you are bundled up in a long puffy jacket of recycled nylon with recycled polyester fill, a watch cap on my shaved head, beat-up canvas trousers, the main differences between us that I am wearing proper winter boots and I am a bit taller and, for all that I have suffered in life, my carriage is more erect than yours. By that time, eight am say, I up to fifty percent opacity — never thought I’d say it but the cold weather suits me — but outdoors, as I’ve said, I am less salient, especially at this hour, in this season, with snow on the ground, when the light is polarized and salmon-colored through the trunks of the C. obtusa whose maturity marks the center’s patient determination over as many decades as you yourself have been alive, though not so many as I. It is no fault of yours if you take no notice of me, or took notice of someone, shoveling snow or tossing gravel from a bucket, but neglected the low-alpha holographic character of the individual in question, not to say the way the snow seems to reappear, every minute or so, just where I have been shoveling it.

I was there at the long table, across from you and down at the far end, ducking in when everyone had started, nodding when my neighbor gestured at the pickles, bowing my head in thanks when they passed them over, assembling my bowl in silence, appearing to take no notice of the conversation around me or at least having nothing to contribute. At this hour I was more present, say seventy percent opacity — I tend to be more vital in the evenings — and of course I was wearing the clothes I favor for kitchen duty, a waffleknit henley over a disintegrating t-shirt, a canvas skirt that has seen better days. My upper body is well developed and I keep my head shaved, and between the close-fitting henley and that hunted look on my face you would think I’d stand out, but again, it is the ambient quality of my movements that allows me to fade into the background. Once I have provisioned my bowl I enter a loop—I have long since stopped keeping track, but let’s say a minute, ninety seconds, never longer than a hundred ten — the food I consume in that time reappearing in the bowl when the cycle resets, and this continues until the meal begins to wind down, at which point I rise, my bowl empty, nodding at my neighbors and whoever is sitting opposite me, returning to the kitchen to take up my station at the dishwashing sink, where I enter a new loop, food debris reappearing on the dishes when the sequence restarts, continuing in my efforts until my colleagues are nearly done wiping down the counters and table, returning the condiments to the walk-in, sweeping the area around the table and returning the chairs to the floor, having set them, sitting surface down, on the table to facilitate sweeping. When I have been at the dishes a plausible span of time I leave off and set them to dry. I dry my hands, toss the dishtowel in the laundry bin, dry them again on my skirt, and return to my room, nodding goodnight at the others who’ve been on kitchen, all of us going our separate ways. In my room I undress, returning the skirt and henley to the hooks where they live, and lie down in the dark, grateful for the heavy comforter.

Periodically you pause, pulling back a bit to inspect your work, setting down the pencil, taking up the eraser, editing your grid of hashmarks, erasing, making a new mark just to the left of the old, or below it, aiming not for machinic uniformity but for a quality of facture that evokes the care you wish you brought to all things. When you are satisfied, when the sheet of paper is covered in a grid of marks that extends uniformly from edge to edge in either dimension, the erasures lending the thing a pathos, like a face softened by age, set down your pencil and eraser and again take the sheet in your hands. This time fashion a tube in the other dimension — if you’ve had the sheet in a portrait orientation, so that your initial series of marks ran down the longer dimension and when you joined the edges it was the shorter edges you were joining, now you will be joining the longer edges. Or perhaps your sheet is square — in any case, whichever dimension you manipulated in the earlier exercises, this time start with the other. When you have satisfied yourself, by tracing a path from mark to mark with your eyes or the index finger of your free hand, that you have induced periodicity in this dimension, unroll the sheet of paper and try it in the other. Note how it changes things to have a grid of marks rather than a series.

Now take up your carpenter’s pencil and make a series of marks down the length of the paper, from the top edge to the bottom, hashmarks, two quick strokes, evenly spaced. The intrinsic dimensionality of this series of points is one, that of a line. Now imagine that you’ve rolled the sheet of paper so that its edge forms a spiral and inserted it edge-on in a basin filled with sand. The sand fills the space at the center of the rolled sheet and between its layers, supporting it in rolled form. The series of marks on the paper still has an intrinsic dimensionality of one, but now this fact has been obscured by its suspension in the sand. Marks that were at opposite ends of the sheet when it was flat appear, under the curved topology induced by it suspension, to be neighbors, so that the series as a whole has an apparent dimensionality of two. Now imagine that the paper has dematerialized, leaving just the pencil marks embedded in the sand.

Now put in a pin in this version of the experiment and retrace your steps to the point where you took up the sheet of paper and formed it into a spiral. This time, instead of forming a spiral, simply join the opposing edges of the sheet of paper to one another so that it forms a tube — just hold them in place with your thumb and forefinger — so that if you were to trace a path along the series of marks you’d find yourself back where you started. It will help to join the edges in such a fashion that the marks are on the outside, but if the sheet of paper is long enough and the light good you should be able to complete the exercise even if the marks are on the inner face of the tube. If the sleeves of your hanten are getting in the way you may have to remove it and fold it over the back of a chair, but you’ll find the hut pleasantly warm and your range of motion greatly enhanced.

Four ways of listening to Qinfen Laneway, Pudong, May 2018.

Spectral flux

Spectral flatness

Spectral centroid

I never knew where it was. When they came, three of them, never saw them again, they gave me a stick-on, said, Put this on the inside of your wrist, I said, What’s it for? Protection, they say. Yours or mine? Both. So I put it on and we’re getting underway, they give me a prompt, or a script, they say: You’re just getting a ride. Just an ordinary day, just going wherever you’d ordinarily go. No armored whatever, just an ordinary car save that there’s full-plate where the windshield would be so no one can see one of them is driving, but even that’s not so uncommon. I put the sticker on and they’re tense and I don’t want to distract them or annoy them but I’m thinking: This is not doing anything, it’s not having any effect. But I don’t say anything, we’re driving, driving, chatting, they’re asking me about work, it’s clear they’ve been trained how to do this, how to make small talk, put you at ease, without learning anything that could put them at risk later, or you. It’s pretty remarkable, actually, all this stuff you never think about, you know, you imagine someone learning how to have a conversation and make it feel casual, get you to lower your guard, and meanwhile they’re scraping you, they have an agenda and you never realize or not until later, but what about the opposite? How to have a conversation and make it feel natural but without learning anything about the other person.

Trip takes a while, couple hours, maybe four? Six? They’re passing around, like, energy bars, but good ones, handing out bottles of tea, like it’s a road trip, nothing that requires a lot of planning, just stuff you might pick up at the Z-Mart on your way out to the mountains. They ask me if I need to stop, to stretch, relieve my bladder, whatever, and I say no, and it’s the truth, I don’t feel the need for any of that. Finally they say, We’re here, you can take the thing off, and I say, Wait, what? It had been just getting light when we left and now the sun is going down, the sky’s all pink, we get out and I hear dogs barking, a fucking rooster, and I have no idea where we are and no memory of the route, no memory of any of the country we passed through to get there.

One jar of Skippy was half-used, the surface furred with gray, the mycelium tracing the scarps left by fork tines in the colloid beneath. Z craned his neck to see over M’s shoulder. “Anisotropic,” he murmured. “Like it’s going somewhere.” She rolled her eyes, replaced the lid, and slid that jar to the far end of the counter. The next was intact, its mylar seal bearing injunctions similar to those of the JIF.

“What was it used for?”

“Everything,” Z said. “You put it on toast, on bananas, on apples, you mixed it in with noodles, you blended it with nut milk, it was used as an emergency supplement for starving kids. Spoon it straight from the jar if you were hungry.”

“You didn’t put it on noodles, that was sesame paste.”

Four ways of listening to the Isle of Eigg.

Spectral flux

Spectral flatness

Spectral centroid

The birds fell all night, though no one could bring themselves to look. You knew it by the sandbag sounds of their bodies hitting the ground. Inside, they put on scent diffusers and filled the building with the smell of sandalwood and, when that got old, peppermint oil and finally, to bring everyone down after a jittery evening, lavender. In the morning, when the pff … pff had stopped, a pair of groundskeepers in full hazmat tog came up from the technical facility on the other side of the island and cleaned it all up with flamethrowers, not bothering to collect any specimens to send to pathology. Everyone was advised to spend the day indoors. It was another gorgeous day, cloudless, with just a touch of moisture in the air presaging the turn of the season still some ways off. To keep everyone distracted Micah organized a speed Go tournament, nine by nine, “Forget about territory, go for capture, play to lose.” This proved such a success that there was talk of making it a regular feature of the weekly round. Micah smiled, nodding and clapping the guests on the shoulder, though of course he knew this was fantasy and had his own ideas about where he would be come this day next week that had nothing to do with hosting Go tournaments for a band of lost children.

The typhoon made landfall the next day, in the still hours of the morning while most of the guests and staff lay sleeping in their rooms at the main building or in the cottages that had multiplied across this end of the island as guests demanded greater autonomy. Initially this provoked unease among the staff, but ultimately, the director decided, the guests had a point, autonomy was essential to healing, and when they had attained the self-awareness to demand it, it was incumbent upon the facility to respond with empathy. Soon the hills falling away from the main building were honeycombed with small bothies in a range of modern designs, many with exteriors of latticed wood that made them look like lanterns in the evenings, healing bodies visible in flashes as they moved within, making tea and fetching beers for visitors, jumping up to reenact the corporeal style of some individual not present whose comments at a committee meeting a day or two before had been the object of teasing, not all of it goodnatured. Now the rain lashed the huts and shacks as it lashed the main facility. People awoke to find their futons soaked with spray from rain coming in the windows, rushing to drag their sleeping mats away from the wall and close the windows, sopping up the spray as best they could, disoriented, not quite awake.

It was when I was explaining the flow-through culture system we used for Elysia spp., the catalytic filters, how the slugs were said to be solar-powered because it seemed, though the evidence was inconsistent, they could subsist, for a time, on energy generated by photosynthesis in the plastids they had extracted from the algae they ate, that I saw his eyes light up and knew we would be funded. He bent to inspect the individuals of E. viridis making their leisurely way around the tank nearest at hand, nodding in thanks as I passed him a loupe, nodding again as I directed his attention to the green flecks that marked the presence of chloroplasts in the tubule cells of the digestive epithelium, distributed, in this species, over the whole of the body, from the tips of the rhinophores to the edges of the parapodia. It’s more prominent, I said, directing his gaze to neighboring tanks, in E. marginata and , the last, in the fed state, taking on a vibrant green hue. My partner, standing a respectful distance back, explained what made it so remarkable that plastids should survive in the cells of the new host, in some species for weeks, much less that they should continue to function. Endosymbiosis, they said, is not like swapping a battery, the chloroplast genome has long since lost many of the genes essential to its own upkeep, including some of those implicated in photosynthesis itself. These are encoded in the nucleus of the endosymbiotic host, their expression mediated by signals from the plastid. In fact, signaling between plastid and host is bidirectional, the maintenance of plastid structure and its acclimation to changing photoenvironment a product of ongoing coordination between the two. Selection, I added, operates on the plastid–host ensemble. The older man raised his head, handing me the loupe, regarding me with that unnerving neutral gaze. I became aware, as I’d long since stopped being, of the drone of the filter pump.

She went in and got a bottle of chicha de oca from the fridge, with the stamped-on cap you could just twist off, went in the back room and made up the futon, limbs heavy though it was not yet that hot in the evenings, lay down atop the comforter, had not yet swapped it out for the throw that made more sense in the warm weather, lay there watching the color drain from the parcel of sky visible through the window on the north-facing side of the room. Directly overhead the cats were starting up, or a cat: sounded as if one of them was scrapping with an owl tonight. Still a couple left, you heard them from time to time. Sure to end in tears, or whatever cats did. She propped herself up on one elbow, twisting at the spine, slowing scanning the area past the head of the futon with the opposing hand, looking for where she’d set her beer. Still a bunch of stuff to bring in, and the place could use sweeping, and all this should be done before she had something to eat, which should also happen this evening, though nothing jumped out at her as something she had a desire to eat, just a vague awareness that her blood sugar had dropped in a way that could not be remedied simply by moving around or taking in more caffeine. A flapping, as of the owl, departing, having inflicted grievous injury on the cat that lay, lamenting its fate, on the far side of the boards whose edges she could just make out in the light coming from the security spots the neighbor had posted on the fence that marked the boundary between their lots. Protein was never her forte. A blocky rendering of an unopened packet of maize tortillas materialized on her inner screen, eight-bit, emojic: was this something she had in the house? Carb on carb. Maybe she had some kind of salsa verde or aduki sprouts. Miso. A scrambled plegg.

I wish I had the wit to describe the negotiations that follow. It is the end of an unseasonably mild week in whatever edge-city dormitory situation I’ve been reduced to, the air remarkably clear, no sting on the mucosa of the eyes and nasal passages, and though it seems likely there will be at least one more episode of difficult weather before the good season, the season that is neither the time of 10,000-year floods nor of heat that verges on the physiologically intolerable, though it seems too soon to exhale, everyone has exhaled — you see it in people’s faces, even when they are not smiling, though in fact just about everyone is smiling, you see it in their postures, in how they move, a general letting down of the guard, and though we are a long way, geographically and conceptually, from the hōjō at the edge of the sea, my partner waking to the vacuum-insulated Ti-6Al-4V flask of coffee I have left on her pillow, nestled alongside her like a partner, while I am down at the edge of the water, working my way up to a modest submergence — that feels a long ways off now, but I am hopeful, and exhausted, able, now that the season has turned, to admit exhaustion. So I wish I had the wit to describe the negotiations that follow, but ultimately it would just be another relapse into making things up.

Your benefactor is smaller than you’d imagine, wiry, still in the disturbing way people with this kind of background often are. They favor a restricted palette: in the mornings, drinking tea, working out, a black cotton t-shirt and black hemp drawstring pants save that when you get up close you see they’re not exactly drawstring, they’re momohiki, with an upper block you kind of have to assemble for yourself every time you put them on, and having once tried them on you’re amazed, watching the casual way they ties the tapes, without even thinking about it. For later in the day, working hours, or socializing, relaxing, they favor black linen, a shirt with a stand collar and a hidden placket and a straight hem, cut to fit their surprisingly narrow build, and below that a skirt with a cleverly hidden structured upper block that you only become aware of when they slip their hands into the pockets along the seams, hooking the thumbs out over the tops as if they were wearing trousers. At one point they lent you their flat for a couple nights so you got to see their wardrobe, a garment rack on wheels with clothes hanging from hangers, two identical skirts, two identical shirts, a pair of momohiki, a couple t-shirts, a spare pair of boxer shorts. They seem to own no socks, nor much in the way of ornament. They keep their hair cropped close, shaving the scalp every three or four days with the same safety razor they use for the face.

Your benefactor drinks tea and takes care with it.

I could tell you more about the Tatami Guesthouse: How yesterday morning the thermometer display that sits on the ledge at the reception window read 14 C — indoors — and everyone goes around in their shiny polyamide puffy jackets, avoiding eye contact as we brush past one another heading to or coming from the trough-like communal washbasin at the end of the hallway by the fridge. How the water at the communal washbasin, when you run it through the heater, is faintly unctuous on the fingertips and smells of branched hydrocarbons, suggesting kerosene from the heating mechanism is getting into the water — you try to avoid using that tap to brush your teeth or fill your kettle. The injection-molded house shoes I’ve claimed as my own from the loose supply at the main entrance, a bit loose so that I clomp around like a stag. The cold I’ve been nursing the past few days, lying in bed until 9, wondering abstractly if it’s one of the new respiratory things, feeding the heater first thing when I get up, never without a sense of having failed at something though the something remains formless: hardiness, indifference, inurement, an openness to the turn of the season. It is never so cold outside as in, and by the time the heater shuts off, at the end of three hours, and writing time is drawing to a close, I am inclined to open the window save when the rain is lashing down, as has been the case the past three days. (I would welcome the cool freshness of the rain, but experience has shown it would spray all over the bed and floor and the desk where I keep the personal effects displaced from the closet I have made into a desk.) I justify my expenditures on nukazuke from the bar on the corner and other small luxuries with the need to maintain a supply of ¥100 coins to feed the heater, not to say the shower cabins on the ground floor.

After a few days the dredging crews disappear, and the forest takes on a quiet more somber than that they have known in the past. The stream recedes into the background: one morning, in fact, they awake to find its course has shifted so that it no longer runs directly beneath the platform that supports their home. It is Know’s turn to make tea, and as it happens this is the first morning it occurs to them the house would be more comfortable with a bit of heating — they had the foresight, after the koi turned up dead, to get the stove out of storage, clean it and oil it, test it to ensure its proper operation, lay in a supply of white gas and a stock of lucifers to last through the winter. So it takes just a couple extra minutes for Know to maneuver the thing into the center of the room and get it going, opening the valve all the way, waiting for the blue of the ring, turning it down to a faint impression like a wet tumbler might leave on a counter. It is only when they register the reassuring hiss of the stove that it occurs to them some other broad-spectrum sound has been missing from the morning, and glancing out the window they see forest floor where the day before had been the stream. Wrapping themselves in a blanket and stepping out on the platform they see the waffle pattern of the reinforcement caissons on the far bank off a bit through the trees. Later in the day the two of them walk over for a look. It seems the same as it was the day before: the occasional sumi-colored carp, the broad flat bed of smoothed stones between the cement embankments, its burbling mildly changed since the reconstruction, like the huskiness that comes into a body’s voice after an operation that disturbs the larynx. They stand there for some time, neither feeling the urge either to survey the new course of the stream in one direction or another or to cross over to the far bank and see what abides there — surely just the continuation of the forest. Returning through a light rain, they find their feet covered in leeches, and they sit bowlegged under the eave at the entrance to their hut pulling these off, taking their time, occasionally glancing up as if expecting to see something hovering in the air. In fact, the monsoon brought a number of new forms of life: dragonflies, walking sticks, salamanders. These now appear to be gone, and that, more than anything else they have observed this day, seems to signal the onset of the wet.

Then the dream began to recur in variation. At first it was animals: a short-finned pilot whale, a horned ghost crab, its antennal eyes scanning me like prey, its clawspan as broad as my own. A week when every night saw a different kind of corvid, eyeing me with apprehension or disdain. Cephalopods, ctenophores, these last soothing in their intricate symmetry. Over time, heterokonts began to make an appearance, then plants, at first bryophytes and lycopods, at length trees: a Montezuma cypress, a cluster of scrubby junipers, a deodar, a red pine, a stand of spotted gum. One night a kitchen knife appeared, a santokubōchō, the three-pointed all-purpose knife favored by every chef or would-be chef, myself included. The santokubōchō did not move — even the trees had moved, shivering or swaying as if in a breeze. It simply lay there, though there was no indication of any surface beneath it, no shadow, say, no directional quality, in fact, to the light it appeared to be bathed in. So perhaps you’d do better to imagine it floating rather than lying. Either way, it was outwardly inert — and yet it had a presence, it felt like a familiar. In the dream I reached out to grasp its handle, the stippled grain of cherry, smoothed and molded as if by long association with a hand, perhaps my own — though it was clear the image of the knife was way too big for me to grasp if it had emerged from the wall, as long from its tip to the base of its handle as the crab had been wide.

It is difficult to draw comparisons between the Earth system of the Ordovician and that of our own day, because the distribution of terrestrial mass at the surface of the oceans was dramatically different than the distribution of continental land masses as we know it, with implications for ocean circulatory phenomena; the exchange of gases between the lithosphere, atmosphere, and ocean; the surface albedo (solar reflectance) of the Earth; and so on. Still, it is interesting to ask what could have caused the CO₂ drawdown we observe in the climatological record of the late Ordovician. One hypothesis is that a key role was played by the earliest terrestrial plants.

These were avascular plants, similar to the bryophytes—mosses, hornworts, and liverworts—that feature in the understory of damp biomes today, along with lichens, a class of holobionts composed of algal or cyanobacterial colonies scaffolded on fungi. Lacking the endogenous vascular structure of tracheophytes, bryophytes and lichens depend on some mineral or ligneous substrate to provide both a physical scaffold and a growth medium. But in the Ordovician, there were no ligneous vascular plants, nor was there much of a humus. Terrestrial surfaces consisted of bare rock, notably basalts, newly erupted from the Earth’s magma. The minerals in this rock—phosphorus, magnesium, iron, calcium, potassium—provided the nutrition for the growth of bryophytes and lichens. Plant life depends on plants’ evolved strategies for accelerating the weathering of silicate mineral substrates, in the process drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the ground. Experimental and simulation studies suggest enhanced weathering by avascular plants might have been sufficient to tip the Earth’s climate into a glacial cycle. Recently, enhanced weathering has been suggested as a strategy by which humans might intervene in the carbon cycle to slow climate change.

∅ kept the card with the fish, kept it where he’d found it, under the edge of the tatami, but tucked a bit further in so that it did not show past the edge. He retrieved it in the evenings, when he got in bed, and studied it, turning it over between thumb and forefinger, watching the design evolve on the one side, noting that it neither seemed to repeat nor to run to fixation, a pure color field, but maintained a pleasing complexity and broken symmetry. Now and then the state parameters seemed to shift—the movements of the pattern elements, the wave fronts and pulsations, sped up or slowed down, the self-symmetric curves got smoother or more fractal-like, the motif switched from tree rings to waves to loops to darting gliders. It was responsive to sound as well as pressure, with beats producing the stone-tossed-in-the-lake effect at what appeared to be random positions across the surface of the card and clicks producing a kind of glitch, random noise all over the image. The topology, he saw, was periodic—you could bring the edges together along either axis and the design would be continuous. ∅ took a professional interest in all this. Whoever had implemented this had known what she, he, they were doing. The other side appeared to have no responsiveness, no animacy. It was simply an ink brush drawing of a fish on a line. He spent a few minutes with it every night before turning off the lights but apart from that did not make much of it.

From work completed and making the rounds:

He rubbed the heel of one hand against his eyes, turning his face to catch the sun. Winter had not been that cold, certainly not what he’d expected, though it had been years since he’d spent a whole winter in these latitudes and he knew there’d been changes, and of course they kept the long-term rehabilitative care facility a touch on the warm side for the benefit of guests whose nervous systems had enough to deal with without the stress of the constant damp chill he still associated with marine climates. Even so, the heat of the sun was a welcome novelty, one of a small number of things that gave him unalloyed pleasure. He could feel himself growing toward it, plantlike, and though he felt conflicted about this, unable to accept that he was in the world, still, again, in spite of whatever dark thing had happened, he made an effort to spend as much time as he could outdoors, just sitting there, feeling the sun grow stronger and himself with it. They’d started encouraging him to go out alone now, to take paths that led beyond where you could see the main building once he’d gone once or twice with Maya or one of the nurses, and the one that led to a clearing overlooking the sea, facing southwest, was his favorite. In the afternoon it caught the light just before the sun’s ambit was clipped by the trees as it slipped down to the north. Soon it would be the equinox, and then you might even start to see it meet the horizon, on clear days. The flat stones at the end of the path, where it met the headlands running down to the water, were charred as with the traces of some ancient firepit, and the warmth they gave off, late in the afternoon, made him think of sitting at a hearth, drying himself after getting caught out in a storm.

From work in progress:

Your breathing slows and the sound of it tails off, until the only sound is the rote of the surf and grass rustling in a breeze. You lie there, imagining dendrochronologies and biota turnover, an accelerated tableau of species exemplars dying en masse, returning to the earth to be succeeded by a panel of new exemplars differing in form from their predecessors, new body coverings, unfamiliar habits of locomotion, trees that somehow resemble cycads and cacti at the same time. You come to and lie in the dark reviewing what you have seen, listening to the surf as the breeze dies down, feeling the residual warmth of the day on your face and smelling the the peppery-sweet astringency of the melalecua oil at the back of the neck, trying to think whether, when you’d first come here, there had been the sound of cicadas, or whether this is something you remember from some other place or from a recording or whether, in fact, you have ever heard cicadas or have been applying the term to some other sound. At length you feel yourself drifting off. You wake some time later, having dreamt you were walking through a bamboo forest at a time of synchronous flowering, wondering when you were last in such a place, if ever, before drifting off again.

From The Meat Question (p 71):

… What should we call the phenomenon that makes it possible for a community to sustain the transmission of a body of innovations over many generations, even to maintain it in dormant form when it cannot be put into practice and then to revive it later, as the Martu [Western Desert of Australia] have done?

From The Human Scaffold (pp 71–72):

Could we imagine a regime of prescribed burning that underwent a similar process of development until the use of fire to manage the environment bcame as labor-intensive as the use of domesticated plants and animals? Or is this precisely what we cannot imagine with fire—precision, planning, mastery? You may have a precise understanding of seral succession, of how the vegetative cover and fauna of burned land will change over time following a burn. But you can never know, when you set the world on fire, exactly how the fire will spread, how far, how fast, in which direction, how hot it will burn. … Fire is alien, disturbing, and it remains so even when we have contained it and turned it to our purposes. … Perhaps this is what makes the ease that Tasmanians and Noongar felt around fire, at the time of European colonization—not to say the similar ease evinced by present-day Indigenous fire managers in the Northern Territory—such a problem for theories of cultural evolution. It is as if Indigenous Australians have recognized affordances in fire, as if fire disclosed an inchoate tool-like potential to them, the way a hammer or a trapeze bar might to those from other backgrounds. To invite fire into your peripersonal space, to corporealize it, suggests not just a different historical trajectory but a different way of imagining the role of the body in making space.

From The Human Scaffold (p 51):

[A]pnea diving presents formidable challenges both physiological and biomechanical. These include pressure: every ten meters of submersion below sea level introduces an additional quantity of pressure comparable to atmospheric pressure, so at twenty meters you experience three times the pressure on the thoracic wall and tympana (eardrums) that you would at the surface. Barotraumas of descent include pulmonary edema, alveolar bleeding, and atalectasis (lung collapse). These have been observed in single-bout dives as shallow as thirty meters, and evidence of pulmonary edema from prolonged surface swimming suggests that the repeated-dive pattern typical of ama and haenyeo would incur a heightened risk of edema even at relatively shallow depths. Ascent carries its own dangers, as the rapid depressurization of the lungs reduces the partial pressure of oxygen, creating a risk of hypoxia and loss of consciousness. Hypoxia of ascent is compounded by alternobaric vertigo, in which asymmetric changes in pressure in the middle ear between the two sides of the head can cause loss of awareness of one’s rotational orientation.

From The Human Scaffold (pp 23–24):

Physiological adaptation to cold in humans remains incompletely understood. It is clearly both developmental (epigenetic) and transgenerational (genetic and epigenetic) in nature. In terms of mechanism, it takes at least two forms. One is the retention of thermogenic brown adipose tissue into adulthood—or, perhaps, the expansion of brown adipose tissue under recurring cold exposure. Brown adipose reserves may provide a 10 to 15 percent boost to the metabolic rate under cold stress. A perhaps more significant component is an elevation of the basal metabolic rate, mediated in part by thyroid function. (The precise mechanisms remain unknown, though there is speculation of a partial decoupling of respiration from oxidative phosphorylation, so that energy is released as heat rather than stored as ATP. This would be consistent with a role for brown adipose tissue, which is distinguished by mitochondria that produce UCP1, a protein that facilitates respiratory decoupling.) Of course, elevated metabolic rate does not come free, especially in environments where sources of food, carbohydrates in particular, are limited. Possible tradeoffs for elevated basal metabolism include lower total fertility among women and slower body growth during development. This last point suggests that morphological traits associated with communities with a long history in cold climates—a more compact, endomorphic build with relatively short limbs—are at least partly developmental in origin. These traits reduce the surface area of the body exposed to cold and wind, so over the course of many generations in a cold environment they may be selected for genetically too.