Sitting with Lucretius in the garden
There are moments when the jungle before me implodes under the weight of its own complexity.
Every stone is a mountain writ small, and the invisible air conceals a maelstrom of atoms and vacuums.
The appearance of stability dissolves: reality rearranges itself into a catalogue of magnitudes.
The substance of “being” comprises yardsticks and archetypes and foundations, and all a series of nested matryoshka dolls.
Details are dense with the possibility of perspective.
The world I am born into each day regains its original novelty; it is a posited proposition, as selective as any other.
This precise moment is a precipitous peak – unbalance tips me over, down deep into exotic dimensions.
A garden with (a lawn, chairs and a table, a rusty shovel in the shade, and next to it) a vine growing (grasping at the brick wall, hidden roots, a lone flower among) leaves with (glas green and pandurate blades, rough to touch except for the soft brush of) trichomes protruding from (protective epidermis, hidden vasculature sharing sweet juice, and mesophyll tissue made of) assimilation matrices founded on (receiving sunlight, interchanging simple and complex molecules via) chloroplast empires.
Falling deep and deeper, ever stranger territory; eventually amino acids, and nuclei, strange quarks and improbability, and lilliput become brobdingnag.
Children of Helios
The greatest part of life as we know it – our anthropocentric bubbles around which we base and define our life, all the way down to microbes that coat its every surface – all of it is a derivation of the light emitted by the sun and absorbed by this planet. Biology is like the whirlpools that form atop an unplugged drain; both are a strange construction, seemingly purposeful, but really a (beautiful) superficial shape of entropy; we are a mode of energy dissipation. All food webs are built up from a foundation of photosynthesizing life, like the olden-day economies built upon gold bullion – without mined ore, money could have no value and marketplaces no existence.
This dependence is even more marked when we vainly focus upon the creatures of life (viz. the multicellular life forms), whose induction into possibility itself depends on the oxygen produced by photosynthesis. Every few seconds I inhale a new breath, an action that is virtually synonymous with life, and which is the unconscious basis of all that I do.
The photosynthesizing organisms I know best and with whom I feel the greatest kinship are plants. Plants are built of cells that (some of them) contain and use chlorophyll to absorb sunlight. Or, from the other side, chlorophyll constructs cells and plants as extensions for reaching sunlight. The verdant greenery I see so often is merely the cloak that represents this incredible and complex passageway between the sun and life. Every blade of grass and leaf is a demonstration of this understated, subtle magnificence.
In those moments when I become aware of the fractal nature of reality, I see a leaf as a tremendous industrial district, mining the environment for molecules and photons, to be processed through sublime electronics and atomic fabricators, powering infinitesimal pumps and manufacturing monads of fuel.
Photosynthesis on one foot
Photosynthesis is a process in which light energy is captured and stored by an organism, and the stored energy is used to drive energy-requiring cellular processes. MMoP, p1
This photogenic process occurs in throughout the tree of life, but I follow the tread of my interest – botany. Plants specialize to acquire light depending on their environment, which wavelengths or colours are most bountiful, and provide the most energy.
Plant cells are encapsulated in a membrane, and contain organelles – “microcells”, surrounded by their own membranes – wherein the molecular apparatuses of photosynthesis are stored an employed. These organelles are the chloroplasts.
The enterprise of photosynthesis, taking place within a chloroplast, can be described as four steps.
Molecular complexes called antennas are hit by photons, absorb the energetic shock, and transmit the potential in the manner of a funnel, moving down towards a reaction centre.
What the reaction centre receives is an energetic electron, desperate to react. This volatile subatomic particle provokes a chain reaction between molecules that can handle the electron whilst avoiding its reactivity, until finally, a (relatively) more stable bond is achieved.
The molecule carrying the (still energetic) electron is, as a result, a strong reductant eager to donate its charge. This propensity drives another sequence of reactions, whose power drives molecular pumps and recharges molecular fuels.
All that’s left for the process is the vital synthesis and export of stable products; primarily the sugars that form the staple of the plant’s transportable energy and life processes.
