Cellular Criticism

By Scott Johnson

A dark clad noble scientest beckons
with falcon claw the chasm leap to make his fearful counterpart,
crouched in calm repose, the dreaming poet in flowing eastern robe.

We love, said scientific, both the same eternal deity. But clash,
we must eternally on literals and prose.

I dont see signs and
numbers lying 'tween our splintered love, replied the lucid
slipping suddenly from 'neath his silent stare. A cold moral
depravity benights our common goal.

Speak on, my cowering
adversary, entertain us with your sinuous words.

It is clear,
cannot you see, our twain desire for this fallen lord. Yet we,
his earthly Avatars enchroach the other with word and sword.
A twisted game of selfdesire shall set us on our better half
and incinerate us in simultaneous selfloathing, the twin
response to Other. But systematically, we consecutively withdraw
then seek the falling words of approval from what but that which
is not our common god. By the schismed ground on which our
road worn weary feet do even rest, this is just an echo of the
wound that burns that universal flesh. Our cowardly worship
nothing but subconscious will made manifest, to mend a microcosmic
vessel already voyaging across eternal troubled seas.

But here!
remarked the man of signs, a sardonic smile even now
playing across his sullen windswept contenance. Once again we
arrive at nothing but the dichotomous failing of these phrases
which I regret your sweet mouth ever to express. The first,
this indentification of self with universal self begins to
titilate between empathy and egoity. Can not we draw the
boundary of our selfturned love and hate from flowing over
to fill the boundless starry skies? What reason to equate
ourselves with the cosmos when it is in the very nature of
the eternal to die? Thus my second argument has made itself
the fitting conclusion to my first.

I laugh aloud,
replied the wordsmith resting adroitly on his nimble
limbs so carelessly arranged. With your fractal grasp,
did it not occur to you this cyclical self-feeding to an ever
unflowering greater whole? Or shall I say, a spiral,
composed of finest finite crystals each a shadow-mirrored
replication of that higher spiral leading even higher to
an ever receding highest goal? The single individual
creature, crystal, human being carries within it a
perpetual pattern extending like a boundless line
toward a fateless future and from out an ever
self-judging past. And so the species, world, and cosmos
each a single member in perpetual evolution yet dwarfed by
a greater mystery still. And our divide is nothing but the
future building of a nanocarbon-tube bridge leading
closer to that lightning-wrought and perilous sky. Or did you
think the clever division of our previously single brethern
just another thoughtless diversion to pass the time until we die?
Perhaps a growing healthy system is in need of cellular criticism
so the replicating units may continuously grow a greater whole.
Stasis is a greater hoax than e're was played by god of old.

Quoth the numerologist, and Judgement is a better task
to turn these leaden units into gold? How can any single
cycle of a never ending spiral hold itself to be the chequer
of a particular future that may or may not have chance ever to unfold?
Stasis, Judgement, both restrictions to a single body's units told
by other of its units with that selfsame taste for gold. Do you
at last betray your yet unwritten oath of old? Inertia must
be ever balanced with carefully constituted random change
lest that constant change may cause the individual units to fly
from off the face of a perpetually self-replicating growing whole.

And what a shame that we have killed that artist of experimental
flavor bold in our quest to trump the other with a selfsame echoed
lie. My gift with words and your machines would yet alight a nimbus
powered by his musical soul and sail into that finely crafted
ever changing starry sky. His balancing effect was felt by
the both of us.

In--deed. But now you see the calm revise
of your unit-based spiral evolution in our clever notator's
chilling and removed demise. It is the genius relationship of
well crafted elements that may yet teach ships how to fly
or create a body that shall last. A metalanguage of
creation erupting from an ever uinterrupted whole, selecting
fleeting moments to display before the eyes of those
with momentary soul. To what final end we grasp, but nothingness
remains to tempt us on to some possible impenterable goal,
the existence of which is most probably a delusion suffered
by any body charged to self-consciously grow.

And yet 'charge'
and 'grow' are heavy words to drape the breast of possibly
nonexestient goal, whose eternal form is but the pattern used
by mystics to describe the systematic change in all chaotic
changing systems that have temporary grace to glow. And any
flaming goal is but a ripple on the oily surface of
an infinitely more abstracted and undifferentiated whole. We should
not crystallize these aeonic flares, but acquiesce in the moment
we have breath to carry on some eternally-forebegotten word
before its signal dissipates into the noise of silence once more.