We eat death

Ecosystem on a tree near a temple in Himeji

Went to a temple in one of the hills around Himej. Every time I visit a temple I get more into the plants around the place than the buildings. At the moment I have a thing for mosses and ferns - the early plants, before flowers.


They also have some good cacti - the most recent addition to the plant kingdom [I've read] - at the Himeji Botanical Garden, as the town is twinned with Phoenix, Arizona, and on my last trip I bought two very mature Lophophora williamsii, each as big as a fist. Taking them through customs was as much excitement as I can bear, although cleaned of soil they're probably legal, as the same plants can be bought in Taiwanese markets at three or four times the price.

Above is a picture of moss growing on a tree stump and around a stone that was cut for the temple. These plants are relentless. They bear a lot of weight and bounce back and just keep growing. I took some from the gardens at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Nara, and with any luck I'll get it through customs and it'll take in Taiwan. I play for team DNA.


Replace the suit and tie with jeans and an aloha, and the hair with a shaved head, in true Mishima style, and you have me eating salami and drinking beer in Japan as much as possible. I eat death.

Repetition and meditating on simple numbers

Photo of a coneflower by Tim Stone [website down] and a short article on the math it expresses

I've taken up swimming in an attempt to halt the cascading failures in my body after 6.5 months of partying too much.

Three weeks of changes - a lot less drinking and back on low carb / primal exercise - and I can already feel things starting to turn around and churn beneath the surface. Stochastic systems and emergence mean a certain amount of surrender is required when it comes to doing the right things for your body. If you can quiet yourself for long enough and listen to what your body is saying, then the answer will often be clear. And, like Haruki Murakami writes in another post: Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

There are a lot of pools in this part of town, and the one two streets over is probably the worst, so after 7pm there's usually only one or two people there. I do 60 x 25m, and to not lose count / keep my head relatively quiet I focus only on the numbers, manipulating them in various ways. This is kind of dull for one and two, but picks up with three and beyond.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. My conscious thoughts are very simple, and I'm barely numerate, so these are basic exercises, but they please me and they get the job done. I don't lose count or think too much, and the swimming is done in a trance.

Anyway, this link leads to a list maintained by Erich Friedman that explains what's special about a lot of numbers, which is similar to this list of the properties of the first 5,000 integers. Lots of things to thing about when you're counting to 100.

Transmission of the agape

meso-american mushroom stones

Nothing sacred ever really dies out.

Richard Evans Schultes in a two part lecture on hallucinogenic plants here [audio not great, because it's old, but I don't know how old]

Schultes was one of the founding fathers of the discipline, along with R. Gordon Wasson and Dr. Hoffmann.

The planetary Other

plant technology

Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin.

Terence McKenna, Plan / plant / planet

Old, wise

pablo ameringo

Reading parts of Reveries and taking Rousseau's feeling for plants at face value, getting that they're the old, wise ones. It's probably not what he meant, but why not think it for a while?

Instruments of our passions

Thelonius Monk / me typing, from Pinamar

Botany is a study for an idle and solitary person: a point and a magnifying glass are all the apparatus he needs to observe plants. He walks about, wanders freely from one object to another, examines each flower with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he begins to grasp the laws of their structure, he enjoys, in observing them, a painless pleasure as intense as if it had cost him much pain. In this idle occupation there is a charm we feel only in the complete calm of passions, but which then alone suffices to make life happy and sweet. But as soon as we mingle a motive of interest or vanity with it, either in order to obtain distinction or to write books, as soon as we learn only in order to instruct, as soon as we look for flowers only in order to become an author or professor, all this sweet charm vanishes. We no longer see in plants anything but the instruments of our passions. We no longer find any pleasure in their study. We no longer want to know, but to show that we know. And in the woods, we are only on the world's stage, preoccupied with making ourselves admired. Or else, restricting ourselves to armchair and garden botany at the most, instead of observing vegetation in nature, we concern ourselves only with systems and methods - an eternal matter of dispute...

From the Seventh Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 98

Other posts in this series:

I resigned the post I then held
Reveries of a solitary wa*ker

Bugs lead to plant teachers

Aoshima Chiho - click the picture to enlarge, the name to know more

Haven't given up / disappeared, just busy at work and then relaxing away from the machine when things are done. To keep my hand in here's something from Scientific American:

Natural toxins in plants can fight human diseases. Research shows that when looking for promising plants, a telltale clue is the presence of brightly colored insects.

In the insect world, bright reds, oranges and yellows can be a warning: “Eat me at your own risk, pal.” Because colorful bugs can be toxic, they often get their chemical protection from nibbling poisonous plants. But these poisons can have a flip side for us—some fight cancer or tropical parasites that cause diseases like malaria.

The idea that colorful bugs can tip us off to disease-fighting plants isn’t new. But researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute just backed it up with science, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. They chose ten plant species that kill parasites and cancer in lab tests, and ten species that look similar but do nothing. Then they headed into the Panamanian jungle to survey hundreds of these plants for beetles and caterpillars. Turns out, they found colorful bugs on almost all the toxic plants but less than half of the harmless plants. And black, brown and gray bugs didn’t have a preference—they ate indiscriminately. So modern-day shamans scouring the jungle for cancer-fighting drugs might just cut down on search time by keeping an eye out for brightly colored bugs.

Full podcast on this and related links can be found here.

Waiting to be unraveled

Zen line from p165 of The Botany of Desire: the infinite is in the finite of each instant.

Now this is Zeno's paradoxes and the infinities that are nested between integers, curled up in the most ordinary of moments and things, waiting to be unraveled. The only problem being that there's no time for us to explore it - we can only get so far before turning back or dying.

The book was OK, and well-written and all, but kind of empty, with few stand out lines or ideas. Or maybe I'd already reached the same conclusions, and wanted to be taken further.

At least one mistake that came out glaring, when Pollan claims that peyote is 'the flower of a desert cactus' [p169], rather than the cactus itself, which contains the active ingredient in question. When I read it struck all the more because yesterday, for the first time in two years, one of my peyote flowered, as shown above.

I may dry and smoke the flowers and see what happens, but expect little more than a cough.

Feed me to plants when I die

Dran via Who killed Bambi?

Sitting by my tiny garden this afternoon, in only a sarong and sweating heavily, proofreading, looking at the plants and trying to work out what's going on under the soil, the network of roots and how they interact, the chemical messages sent out among them, the accumulation of dumb facts that leads to the sudden emergence of something approaching intelligence, which is all I'm working with at this end. There's the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, which does what you'd expect, but whatever their findings it wouldn't affect my admiration one way or the other. Plants don't do what we do, but we don't do what they do. Two different means to the same end, and they're doing well.

Which leads me to this link:

Researchers Resurrect Extinct Judean Date Palm Tree from 2,000-Year-Old Seed

I don't believe the following for a moment, but I like to flirt with ideas:

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

Terence McKenna

Trivial, unconscious

The cafe scene from If... [some nudity]

...evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events...

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p xv

A box from Amazon the other day to ease the apprehension about the next eight weeks full of classes and proofreading ahead of my 'last day', August 8th. Among the things inside were the Criterion disks for If... and The Botany of Desire, subtitled a plant's eye view of the world. The line above jumped out at the start. Pollan's writing about his attraction to one kind of potato, and making the link to bees and flowers, but I thought straight away about the trivial, unconscious reasons to be attracted to someone, and about the trivial ways of getting pregnant and entering the future flow of evolution. One (un)lucky orgasm and that's a whole new roll of the genetic die cast.

I think I'm lucky that I've never become a father, and that Yuki also doesn't want kids. I think I'd be a terrible father, and I'd resent the time and energy a child would take from me. My students disagree, adding that a mixed-race baby would be very cute, but I don't want to take the risk of my deepest feelings on the topic being proved right.

I think everything I do is built on trivial, unconscious foundations, rationalized after the event with the aid of confirmation bias. At the same time I fall for the idea that nothing else could ever have happened, that....well, from Burnt Norton, Eliot's recording of which [here] has been sitting on my MP3 player and getting a regular work out:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Which for me means there were never any choices, because only one path was taken, and the future is already written. Why not? I don't know what happens next, nothing actually changes.

Related: All posts labeled 'plants'

Plant sex and consequences

My garden is small, maybe just 3m x 4m, one half of the gated yard in front of the house. We moved in a year ago and it was just dirt and creeping vines, two tall trees [5 or 6m each]. I cleaned it up, churned rotting vegetation into the ground, and began to move in some new plants. The flowers mostly died but the other things flourished, a great variety of green things, tall and short, and there's snails, butterflies, geckos. I worked hard on it for 4 months or so and then just let it be, my job just to trim things that grow too far out of bounds, pull the more aggressive weeds. I let things happen and watch it like a slow sport. Plants rock - they use sunlight to turn dirt and water into the living matter that lies at the base of every food chain.

I'm a big fan. So this story in the NY Times caught my eye, Plants Shown to Show Preferences for Their Relatives.

... scientists have found evidence that the sea rocket is able to do something that no other plant has ever been shown to do. ... [It] can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment. [...]

The finding is a surprise, even a bit of a shock, in part because most animals have not even been shown to have the ability to recognize relatives, despite the huge advantages in doing so.

“I’m just amazed at what we’ve found,” said Susan A. Dudley, an evolutionary plant ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who carried out the study with a graduate student, Amanda L. File.

“Plants,” Dr. Dudley said, “have a secret social life.” [...]

The studies are part of an emerging picture of life among plants, one in which these organisms, long viewed as so much immobile, passive greenery, can be seen to sense all sorts of things about the plants around them and use that information to interact with them. [...]

Some plants, for example, have been shown to sense potentially competing neighboring plants by subtle changes in light. That is because plants absorb and reflect particular wavelengths of sunlight, creating signature shifts that other plants can detect.

Scientists also find plants exhibiting ways to gather information on other plants from chemicals released into the soil and air. A parasitic weed, dodder, has been found to be particularly keen at sensing such chemicals. [...]

The problem, for many scientists, is that as obvious as the behaviors sometimes are, they can seem just too complex and animal-like for a plant. “Maybe if we understood more mechanistically how it’s happening,” Dr. Karban added, “we’d feel more comfortable about accepting the results that we’re finding.” [...full article at the link above]

So that's cool, as I'm about other ways of being, and it also links slightly into this thing on Bee Porn that I came across a while ago. I saved the page in Google Reader and didn't read it, assuming that it was going to be about floral mimicry gulling bees into copulation, which it was, although the main point is the movie that it links to, which depicts a graphic scene of inter-kingdom love. And also this quote from an abstract, which suggests why the slightly exotic attracts us.

The theory of mimicry predicts that selection favors signal refinement in mimics to optimally match the signals released by their specific model species. We provide here chemical and behavioral evidence that a sexually deceptive orchid benefits from its mimetic imperfection to its co-occurring and specific bee model by triggering a stronger response in male bees, which react more intensively to the similar, but novel, scent stimulus provided by the orchid. [Details at the Bee Porn link]

Note: While it may seem dumb that bees are aroused by the obvious fakery of orchids and such, don't forget that some men have been driven to a state of pseudo-copulation by ink on paper arranged in such a way that the two-dimensional image, a few inches high, resembles the naked form of an adult female.

Related posts:
What's so wonderful about flowers

Being moss

Had you not lost all your sheep...

Finished that talk on Totalitarian Consumerism from the post before last, and it didn't develop in any meaningful fashion. The man has a whole page of credentials and honors and speaks well, but there's little point to it beyond aren't commercials dumbing, aren't multinationals too much of a good thing, and shouldn't we do something to resist things. He confesses to driving an Audi in a guilty tone, and I although I lack the car-savvy to grasp the consequences of this, I'm sure his home is full of tasteful knick-knacks. In short, he seems like an odd person to be calling for a return to a level of existence beyond which basic needs are not met - although that call itself takes some guts or gall when speaking to a public audience in what was once behind the Berlin Wall.

His prescriptions were not clear, but he didn't suggest running any workarounds on the primate systems just below the surface of us all. And in truth it's so easy to resist on a personal level, by just not buying their stuff. Also...the ability to turn away from the world and it's judgments on success and failure needs to be cultivated, you need to understand your head and learn that nearly all the good things are created inside. Stoicism should be acquired, because even if you have the ability to remain ultra-virtuous you can be sure others will come along and f*** things up before long.

I keep returning to the survivorship bias. The visible success are a small outcrop of all the necessary failures. In many fields, the average level of achievement is very, very low. Think of actors in L.A., the vast majority of whom are waiting tables, so the cliche runs, waiting for their big break. Their level of achievement is zero to date and mostly likely zero in the future. In this I can comfort myself with being statistically bang on target.

In most endeavors outside of the well-run profession the majority of people will fail. That's why it's important to find some work you enjoy or that pays well enough and you can live with.

And yet there's always a secret success, the germ of which is a kind of madness, a refusal to live purely externally and be judged on appearances. Reality is out there, but directly inaccessible to us all, so the construction we perceive is wholly subjective. In short, cultivate your garden.

Pangloss used now and then to say to Candide: "There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

The end of Candide

Related posts tagged 'happiness'.

Body chemistry

John C. Lilly

I'm big on body chemistry. I used to get in bad moods easily, and they could mostly be traced to eating too much bread. Since I moved onto a low carb diet I've had zero mood swings, but yesterday I ate a loaf for lunch and by 4pm I was feeling bad. It was a good test of the system.

I still drink too much coffee, it's my one true addiction. I used to run it in cycles, upping my consumption until I got the shakes and then cutting it out for a week or so, moving back to tea. Lately that system's been abandoned, but I cut down by moving from a pot to twin Vietnamese drippers, a fast and slow one, and let my obsession with details run wild with new combinations of beans. Around the corner is a coffee wholesaler, and when I die I'll be riddled with caffeine.

My coffee use echoes that of John C. Lilly and ketamine, although in truth I show more moderation. He'd stay up for three weeks injecting more as the last dose wore off, and even shot up while conducting classes (albeit at Esalen).

Lilly with the Janus equipment, getting ready to communicate with dolphins

It's my birthday soon, and I got some books as gifts. One of them was The Scientist by John C. Lilly, the other was On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee, and I'll be surprised and rather disappointed if the latter doesn't turn out to be more of a trip. I read about what I'm eating, drinking, and it's another way to become closer to things.

The many different ways of seeing an apple: culinary, nutritional, botanical, economic, chemical, aesthetic, metaphorical, and so on. The idea being to extrapolate as much meaning as possible from what's already present, to see things much more as they really are. But it'd be hard to do this without giving in to madness for a while, and then no way to talk about such things without boring the hell out of others and giving the game away.

The only [formerly] legitimate guy with comparable psychedelic experience to Lilly was probably Timothy Leary. Shuglin and others are names to conjure with in the first rank of the community, but Lilly and Leary are the two who are best known for taking too much, too often.

I read the two recent biographies of Leary, caricatured as the pro and the con versions of his story. In neither does he come out very well, more like a Hugh Hefner wannabe who hooked up with drugs rather than porn, but for much the same ends. If you look at them, they're like brothers, always the same big smile on their faces, and probably with good reason, but their aims and ends are not what it was supposed to be.

But then here I am, setting limits like a puritan. Still, a smile can be faked. It was Marshall McLuhan who told Leary to smile beatifically at cameras in order to sell his message more convincingly. But I don't like his smile, it annoys me like a commercial. It's the smile that I do when I have to.

That said, I came across Leary's 1964 Cooper Union address the other day and it holds up very well. Part of the background is that he's just come back from Mexico after an early experiment in psychedelic communal living. He's already way gone into the 60s lifestyle, but the rest of the world doesn't know a thing about what's looming. He can still be welcomed as a public speaker to a group of students. In this talk he's lucid, charming and doesn't oversell the stuff, while also kicking off the whole scene. A rewarding hour from another time and place.


Now Lilly is a very different character. While Leary went off and set out to become an international playboy, Lilly shut himself away in an isolation tank and tripped hard, and I feel quite an affinity for the guy, for his need to get further away from people and further into something else. Will be dipping in and out of the autobiography over the next week or so, and posting things as necessary. I doubt there will be as many anecdotes as with Leary. Floating alone, in lukewarm water, in the dark, doesn't really lend itself to narrative. But so what? Life isn't a work of fiction.

What's so wonderful about flowers

I saw Adaptation when it came out and I liked it a lot, but that was before I got into my plant crazy phase, and when I saw it again the other week it meant even more. This time around I also liked Donald more than Charlie, in part because Donald made people happy while Charlie upset them at every opportunity. His intelligence brought little direct joy into the world, bar - and it's a big bar - the screenplays that he wrote. And while his had more resonance, the greatest happiness of the greatest number was obviously going to served by Don's movie. But I'm more interested in my happiness than that of the greatest number.

Some context. Meryl Streep is a NY journalist who sees Chris Cooper as a colorful character for an article on orchids. So far in the movie she's looking down on him as a misguided hick, and then out of nowhere he springs this little speech, which is the only time I've seen the key role of plants in life on earth expressed and illustrated in a movie.

Michael Pollan makes the observation that in agriculture / gardening the relationship between plants and humans is little different from that between plants and bees. Of course, hardcore paleoconservatives think that agriculture was when things started going wrong for us, health wise.

Being moss

I like to quantify things, so I bought a bicycle computer to tell me combinations of time, speed and distance. I rode out into the country, just where the hills begin to rise up to the central mountain range, and ended up in a not so good botanical park, but which had a nice forest inside and paths that I could ride along. The plants I liked best were the mosses. It'd be cool to be a moss, cling to the side of something and be devoted to contemplating sunlight and moisture more deeply. Bacteria, plants, fungi, animals - we're all related and have been evolving for the same amount of time from our common ancestors, just along different paths.

We have consciousness...plants have biochemistry.

Michael Pollan

Have been entertaining the ideas of proto-consciousness and panpsychism - that consciousness pervades all things. I hardly believe it, but it's fun to let the idea run and think of moss being able to feel, if not reason. But then reason is only choices, and moss makes these to grow this way or that, taking actions that are entirely logical, given the available facts. Perhaps reason is an emergent property of cellular automatons [an example below], which is no great statement.


Maybe the ability to be stupid - to act irrationally on knowledge - is a hallmark of higher consciousness.

Mushrooms from dead wood

Above is a picture of some oyster mushrooms growing in my garden. I inoculated the log last summer and then a week ago they started popping out.

The garden is only about 2.5m x 4m, but it has two tall trees - 3m and 5m - and plenty of variety. I worked on it a lot at first and then let it go. The idea is for it be a self-sustaining experiment in permaculture and emergent behavior. Only dead plant material is used for nourishment, I just add water and introduce new species, then let them work it out together. With regard to size and apparent vigor, the yam plants are kings of the patch, but there are various smaller things, a lot smaller, who thrive in the undergrowth, some of which are the fungi I've introduced through spore prints and inoculated wood.

I should make it clear that I don't really know what I'm doing, but I pay attention and let the plants teach me things. The names are not that important, I just need to see what they do, which are fragile and which are unstoppable.

Plants [and fungi, which are different] are highly evolved technology. All the energy we use is at base solar power, and it's plants that are on the front line of using solar energy to convert dirt and water into edible, flammable or wearable material. I'm not up to comprehending animals yet. I still look at our cat and can't quite figure out how it can be so self-contained, to move about with only a piece of fish and handful of biscuits a day as the energy source. Plants seem a lot more tractable, the processes essentially graspable and hence the sense of awe fully owned rather than just default.