Walking cities
Jun. 8th, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI always liked that image of us.
We are not so much single individuals, as much as enormous cities of millions of animals. Many, like those in our skin, liver, and muscles are locked into position with their neighbors to form a coherent structure, but many, like those that police our bloodstream, or those that build our bones, or those waiting to replace damage, wander about through our internal passageways and highways more or less autonomously.
Our brains are billions of intricately interconnected animals that mindlessly pass electrical and chemical pulses to each other. They constantly shift their connections, growing new feelers and dropping old links, ever remoulding and modifying signal paths.
A walking city of siblings, from the same germ line, carrying the the same genes... but there are outsiders too. The vast, dark oceans of the gut contain a huge population of plants that are required for the city's health. The surface of the city, like the exterior of a planet holds an extensive ecology... or it used to. These days we have demolished most of them, leaving only weeds to spring up in the wake of daily exterminations. Now that we've lost most of the protective creatures our surface is vulnerable to attack. Many of the animals and plants that remain with us are a mystery, like the bizarre creature that lives only in the eyelash hair follicles of every one of us. All those we've driven to oblivion we may never understand. Who knows what marvellous webs of life we supported. Even so, the rainforests of armpit, the deserts of elbow, the swamps of mouth still have their plants and grazing animals and the predators to hunt them.
Life is strange. And of living things, we are one of the strangest.
We are not so much single individuals, as much as enormous cities of millions of animals. Many, like those in our skin, liver, and muscles are locked into position with their neighbors to form a coherent structure, but many, like those that police our bloodstream, or those that build our bones, or those waiting to replace damage, wander about through our internal passageways and highways more or less autonomously.
Our brains are billions of intricately interconnected animals that mindlessly pass electrical and chemical pulses to each other. They constantly shift their connections, growing new feelers and dropping old links, ever remoulding and modifying signal paths.
A walking city of siblings, from the same germ line, carrying the the same genes... but there are outsiders too. The vast, dark oceans of the gut contain a huge population of plants that are required for the city's health. The surface of the city, like the exterior of a planet holds an extensive ecology... or it used to. These days we have demolished most of them, leaving only weeds to spring up in the wake of daily exterminations. Now that we've lost most of the protective creatures our surface is vulnerable to attack. Many of the animals and plants that remain with us are a mystery, like the bizarre creature that lives only in the eyelash hair follicles of every one of us. All those we've driven to oblivion we may never understand. Who knows what marvellous webs of life we supported. Even so, the rainforests of armpit, the deserts of elbow, the swamps of mouth still have their plants and grazing animals and the predators to hunt them.
Life is strange. And of living things, we are one of the strangest.