Clouds

Melville's lonely old whale has died and gone to a sky-swimming school where he and his swagbellied friends can drift endlessly through the blue together.

Pink Moon

Nick Drake's spare, aching, beautiful final album; his death album. Its moon is pink because his heart's blood is mixed with its whiteness. The white goddess accepts such sacrifices, from time to time.

Mongolia

Once the Mongols ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen; now Mongolia is a backward nation, and 'mongoloid' a term of medical abuse for Down's Syndrome children. Thus does the resentment of the conquered work itself out upon the fallen empire: in a few century's time a Chinese blogger will observe that 'England' is a backward nation, and 'English-looking' a description of genetically deformed children.

Wodwo

Scholars derive the word from the same root as woods, assuming this creature is a wood spirit ('The Woodwose [Anglo-Saxon: wuduwasa] or hairy wildman of the woods is a mythological figure that appears in the artwork of medieval Europe ....') But, fancifully, I enter into the wodwo's state of mind, of exclusion and abjection, and wonder whether the name doesn't incorporate a doubled sorrow: woe-and-woe.

Romanticism

'Born from the oxymoron of agreeable horror, Romanticism was nursed on calamity' [Simon Schama]. This is on the right lines; although it would be closer to the truth to say that 'agreeable horror' (which is a very ancient human idiom) unveiled for the Romantics a new perspective on subjectivity. To put it another way: Romanticism asks what part of us finds horror so agreeable?

Hands

One of the main characters in Greg Bear’s recent novel, City at the End of Time (2008) is a far-future superevolved human ‘Tall One’ or ‘Eidolon’ called Pahtun. Here he is in conversation with some less-evolved individuals:

'He waved a long-fingered hand, and Tiadba noticed that on the tip of his sixth-finger—he had six fingers and an odd thumb, mounted in the center of his palm—there was a pink flower. Patient observation, as Pahtun spoke and waved his hand some more, rewarded her with the realization that this flower was in fact a cluster of six-smaller fingers—perhaps used in delicate tasks’ [Bear, City, 287]

What makes this little image so striking is its peculiarly fractal logic, its extension of our sense of a human being as (to appropriate Lear’s words) a poor forked thing: a unitary, single ‘body’ (which we tend to mistake for ‘us’) branches into two arms, into two legs. Each arm branches at its end into five digits. Bear simply imaginatively extends this logic: it is hard, I submit, to think of the finger branching into six miniature fingers without wondering whether each of these mini-fingers does not also end in even smaller fingers—perhaps . Our hands, howsoever useful they are as manipulators and signifiers, also represent one place where our body frays.

Gravifree

We've been looking in the wrong place for intelligent alien life; that we have achieved consciousness (though of a freakishly rapid and temporary sort) in the crushing basin of a gravity well is a bizarre thing. Most intelligence in the cosmos lives, slow, diffuse, in the enormous intergalactic spaces, as far as possible from the contamination of gravity. Clearly life was meant to exist in these spaces, because they constiute most of the universe.