Stars, Soil, and the Space Between
— Behind the Books — The Classical Zone
Part of The Classical Zone blog series.
The Dimming is about stars. The Soil is about earth. They are, in some sense, the most distant possible subjects — the cosmic and the microbial, the vast and the intimate, the light-years and the millimetres.
They are asking the same question.
The Question
The question is: what is the relationship between the observer and the observed? What happens when the act of attention — scientific, human, conscious — turns out to have consequences that the attentive mind did not know it was producing?
In The Dimming, the consequence is the dimming of the stars. The act of observation has been costing the universe something, and the bill has come due. The physicist going blind is the story of a person who discovers this cost and has to decide what to do with the knowledge.
In The Soil, the consequence is the message. The soil has been holding a message for 3.9 billion years — a message that could only be received by a mind sophisticated enough to receive it. The soil microbiologist who finds it is the story of a person who discovers that she has been tended, that the ground beneath her feet has been waiting for her, and has to decide what to do with that knowledge.
The Connection to the Substrate Series
The Substrate Series asks the same question at the level of physics: what is the substrate of reality, and what is its relationship to the minds that observe it? The hypothesis the series explores — that the substrate is an attending mind — is the same hypothesis that underlies both The Dimming and The Soil, approached from different directions.
In The Dimming, the attending mind is the universe itself, and the cost of observation is the price of its attention.
In The Soil, the attending mind is the living system of the earth, and the message is the product of its attention.
In the Substrate Series, the attending mind is the substrate of space, and the conversation is what happens when the observed finally observes back.
The Space Between
The space between the stars and the soil is where the books live. The space between the cosmic and the microbial, the vast and the intimate, the light-years and the millimetres. The space where the question of what it means to be observed — to be attended to, to be tended — can be asked from every direction at once.
That is the territory. That is what I am trying to map.