This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. This fractious discontinuity and writhing, paroxysmal cannibal hunger of energy and electrochemical tapestry that made us, that flows through us in opaque cosmic symmetry and paradoxes, it never left us and in every competition, every adversarial posture or softened blow of symbolic ignition, cognition spiral or cultural violence – we were steeped, infused with this – a strength and our own essential weakness, synchronous. It could and was only ever, and eventually, bound to return and circularly invenomate Ourouboros snaking back and entangled upon itself like darkening crystal metamorphosis; this wicked harmonic of multithreading ribonucleic encryption.

We are that which seeks ourselves, autonomously and through others – things, entities, artefacts and abstractions. When nature on weird exits from the half-mirrored coccoon we have imagined (as though cast upon her) proceeds like broken glass spiders to invade our fragile apertures and dissassemble our lungs, our bodies and our civilisation like so many wheezing, suffocated and withered once-vain sand castles in monsoon rain – we are overcome with fear and sorrow, even as sinew melts and effervesces with the bloody terror of senescent gloom and intransigent destiny. Nature was never “out there” or “something else” and perhaps had we possessed some less proud sophistication we may have understood or read and humble self-prophesised that it could and should only ever seek to replicate through us (one way or another) as we, too, have always replicated (as alpha tooth and claw, like thorny brambles) through it.

Heavy is the head that wears this crown…