a lament for the cephalopods

it is probably true to say that every squid dies for love, or some approximation of it. a pity then, that the cephalopod minds do not have the neurons to fully grasp the scope of what they are doing. that is the fundamental game of evolution-to survive and reproduce, but the game of survival is set against the game of reproduction, and sooner or later, a person, eight legged or two, finds themselves displaying color after color, pattern after pattern, brass knuckles and electric guitars, shotguns and poems, until all the ink has run dry and there is nothing left to live for save the chance at a single more mating attempt. i salute you, my eight legged brothers under the skin, for going about it the way you do. there are no half-measures when it truly comes down to it. to live to court another day is just that, another day to die in the act of seeking love or whatever comes closest to it. for us mammals, the fields of play are expanded sideways, and i suppose i will never know if Cretaceous ammonoids looked after their babies the way i hope they did. like the giant octopus, in its darkened boudoir, breathing oxygenated air over its babies till the life drains out of it.......either way, the eggs we incubate grow up to become replicators in their own right, bent of feeding and breeding the selfsame way we did. cephalopod brothers, and sisters

for you, baphomet

i long to touch your crowned head, your thorns. you are not a beast to be reckoned with lightly, yet you are there, Baphomet, and either you have sought me out or somehow i have had led you to myself by scent traces. perhaps it was all the scribbling, and perhaps it is the way i posture. nevertheless, here you are and you represent a genuine conundrum. you have rotated everything precisely forty five degrees, and now i am viewing everything, all of it, from the side. i could not see these facets before, and yet i long to have my old perspective restored. what do all these old plans mean now, after all this, these games i have played over the ages, the scores now turned upside down and inverted, like crosses yes, like the hanging man, or worse still, the hanging man restored to standing. we speak separate languages, and that is why i cannot trick you into sitting down at the table for a game of checkers. this is chess, i see, your game, and i am sitting down to play.

more....

Onward they walked, till at last Blue stood in the vault of the PowerMind. It was brightly lit, and crowded. More than a thousand robots of all shapes and sizes stood, watching her entrance with serious expressions.

A great blue eye appeared in the space above her, and the PowerMind uttered a single word.

“Speak!” it said.
At that particular moment, Blue felt smaller than she had been before. She was tiny before the magnificent PowerMind, and she felt it. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go away, never to come back. Something was very wrong here and she did not have the courage to face it. Still, she stood proudly, trying to summon the words. Finally, from somewhere deep within her, some place her Robot Mother put there through hours of loving attention, something lesson after lesson with Robot Six taught her, a conviction that the truth must be spoken somehow propelled words from her mind.

“Your excellency.” she began. “I have found unequivocal evidence that robot civilization began on planet Vulcan, and that robot life was preceded by at least one earlier form of living thing.”

The blue eye glared down upon her, beaming a harsh and steady malediction.

“In addition, your excellency.” Blue continued, feeling that it was too late to stop now. “Our solar system has been visited by an intelligent species that arose hundreds of million years ago on Vulcan, and is most likely, ancestral to our own.”

The blue light intensified.

“Its....impossible.” it blurted, clumsily. This was a PowerMind taken aback, surprised, even terrified.

“Let me present my findings, starting with the fossils.” continued Blue, and the robot spoke for three hours.