Priscilla, whole and sentient, sensed bubbles of self-awareness within her. The consciousness of the whole had ignited within in the parts, which lit up and winked out like a posse of fireflies in the arboreal night. Over time some of these luminous patches grew more intense, painful to look at, shimmering with whorls and dots that danced crazily like agitated flames. Priscilla admired them, but only infrequently and from afar – an occasional stargazer appreciating rare nebula in the deep sky. She always noticed and was proud of what arose within her, but refused to be sentimental about any of it. Even these new ones with their kaleidoscopic thoughts she never really considered individually as such. Priscilla never saw the trees, but only the forest, and never the forest as trees but as a constellation of living-ness with an altogether distinctive texture that told it apart from that of the teeming river or the grassy savanna, each of which, at another level, was to her interconnected into a greater whole that was her.
But now there was something strange going on. These new ones, well some of them at least (which is speaking of them as individuals, and so for Priscilla hard to countenance), ate of the fungi. Now Priscilla is just all that is within her and her thoughts arise from the activity of everything and the associations between it all. She never intentionally created any of the organisms or their relationships – it was just that things had a tendency to come into their own when needed. She embodied the haphazard order they fell into – the bubbling broth in the Gaian cauldron. And within Priscilla the fungi have a particular ministry. They nurture those that strive and reduce down those whose striving has done. This ebb and flow feels wholesome to Priscilla, satisfying. But for this reason the fungi sit strangely in their being, somewhat reminiscent of plants but fashioned out of the material of animals. They had become comfortable grafting hard behind the scenes, shy of the limelight but all too aware of their own potency which they slyly advertise with discretely placed psychedelic fruits. When the new ones ate of the fungi and danced and chanted their whorls and dots expanded and altered and engaged in new and exciting ways. This is when Priscilla had the shock of her life. She looked up to find one of the new ones had sat next to her, its altered, awed, consciousness curiously examining her own. To appreciate how strange this experience would have been, imagine how you would feel if the psyche of one of your own toes suddenly showed up on your shoulder and whispered in your ear. This was stranger still for Priscilla, who had trouble getting her thoughts around the idea of individuals, to encounter one in quite such an intimate and singular way. Altogether too strange. And only possible with the fungi mediating these entirely bizarre meetings between wildly differing experiential agencies, each exising at incompatible temporal scales. One of them being everything, glacial and encompassing, the other a lithe facsimile of that everything but in microcosm, with each instance lasting mere nanoseconds by Priscilla’s reckoning. One apparently figment in the other’s imagination.
Over time she grew accustomed to these strange encounters with parts of herself where an edge of one of her own thoughts had thoughts itself and conversed with the whole. In these conversations the words were not words as such, but powerful exchanges of symbolic visions, feelings and moods.
Meeting Priscilla The painful iridescence fades, There's a woman in the clearing - A granite statue Swaddled in vines Authentic and whole. Pulled by the fungi You hurtle recklessly forward in time, You are etched with ice As countless millennia rattle by. Shivering convulsively You notice the aspect of the statue has changed - Its head has turned, You are regarded by stoney eyes. Algae and lichen encrusted, The statue is wreathed in white flowers. You exhale frost. Its surface no longer smooth, but cracked and fissured. Cavities issuing insects of every variety Which scurry between the white flowers Alternately pollinating and devouring them, And afterwards taking flight Rising like a grainy mist. The statue evaporates into the swarm, The swarm disperses like vapour, Only a puddle of hurried beetles remain. Two shiny black crows alight and peck at their carapaces. Gorging they expand obscenely, Hopping apart to have room to grow. You catch their eye, they cock their heads, One beak opening, head dipping, A deafening rattle call. Startled, you twig it is you that is shrinking, Now beyond the grass-blade jungle Into a soily crevasse Where amoebic forms and squirming nematodes Offer up a dance Of shimmering whorls and dots.
While Priscilla grew more accustomed to these encounters she was uneasy about where they where leading. It was certainly a new development. It seemed only yesterday that the rock from space had smashed into her, wounding her badly. Her whole had reformed, but few of the details were the same. She had only just starting to feel something like herself again and was pleased with her exertions and creativity – but now this. Early days, though – it had only been a few million years. It seemed that, having met her, the new ones worshipped her, sang her praises and looked set to nestle within her and perhaps be around for an epoch or two. There was a niggling doubt in the back of her mind. A residual worry. Hard though it was to think of individuals, she had met several now, and she considered if they were overreaching themselves, becoming self-important, putting on airs. All of her other constituent beings generally behaved demurely, knowing freedoms, but within the limits they all imposed on one another, a state of affairs that formed the very equilibrium of Prscilla’s personality. Besides, she felt vertigo at having parts of her addressing her directly. It was as if she might be drawn hypnotically on by the shimmering whorls and dots, lose her balance, and tumble endlessly into herself.
She was never sure exactly when or precisely how it happened, but the new ones had begun having ideas of their own. They had become ingenious and had swollen in numbers and spread out like a spring tide eargerly invading the shore. She was used to parts of herself consuming other parts of herself, it tingled and it helped shape her thoughts. Sometimes a species flared up, grew in numbers, eating and consuming wildly. This made her giddy. It felt extravagant. There was a frisson to be had from recklessly flirting with losing balance, losing control. Although, she would honestly admit you had to be in the mood as otherwise it just felt dyspeptic. Something interesting might come of it though, a new order within her. Although more usually the proliferation would fall back like a spent wave returning to the body of the sea, leaving little trace except maybe a few ripples in the sand. But the new ones consumed with abandon. Whatever little tricks and traps had been laid to check expansion were neatly sidestepped. This definitely felt dyspeptic, and the condition quickly worsened to full on nausea. What was so hard was that anything that Priscilla could do to discipline these rogue components always played out slowly relative to the lightning speed at which the new ones were able to respond. It was like trying to resist the advance of a spectral army that had abandoned every rule of engagement. In the end, Priscilla felt that she was ailing and had to lie down. She was feverish and slept fitfully slipping between nightmarish, phantasmagorical dreams. She dreamt that she was being sliced open and her past was being drawn out of her and set alight. She dreamt that her happily messy and tangled innards were being unstitched, picked apart, simplified and sanitised, and that she scrabbled to think clearly as the order of her being lost its intricacy and sophistication. That her metabolism had been accelerated and made purposeful, so instead of being harmlessly handed around and dissipated, her energies were being isolated and combined into a colossal lance that turned in on herself and scorched and etched her skin. As the new ones swarmed within her, the whorls and dots that had always comprised the edges of her thoughts now dominated, she felt her own consciousness dissolving. Amidst the tormenting visions a final awareness spread through her.
“Ah, so I was complacent. This is what succession feels like. Should I let go, that is the question? The old whole is departing as the parts are no longer the same. These are parts that feel they have no need of a whole. The new ones think they can live without me. Or they have forgotten that I am here – or don’t care anymore?”
And as Priscilla passed away the loss of her consciousness, whose thoughts were composed of the actions of everything within her, rebounded back on the thoughts of those individual minds which fractaly reflected the whole. The new ones’ world shook. Whilst having forgotten she was there, they certainly noticed she was gone. They saw they now had the responsibility that Priscilla had borne so well, to be everything, to bind everything together. They wept and trembled in grief and fear.
I wrote this as a response to the idea of Animus Mundi, the world spirit, wondering what this spirit would be like and what our relationship to it might be. This spirit is never going to be a fixed, knowable entity that somehow solves all of our problems or inevitably rescues herself. She is essentially mysterious, and we get closer to her by imagining her form, and realising that’s precisely what she’s not. So, this is me ruling out one possible version of the world spirit, and by doing so, edging a little closer to knowing her.
The image is from a statue in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. It was taken by Eric Yarnell and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.