Patrick Farmer
+447769732635
dr.patrickfarmer@protonmail.com
In one way and another our world views shape who we make with worlds. We can’t take in someone beyond our paradigm, unless we shift, unless we flip, spin, bewilder. There are those who straddle world views of course, disenchanted, real, objective, soulless matter, a forging of ‘the’ self, autonomous, separate from world, individuality, and responsibility… reconciled with enchantment, archetypal perception, ensoulment, nesting within and recomposing outlines inside. Consciousness, is world’s insides, as Owen Barfield said.
Personification of body, let alone cochlea, let alone stereocilia, has many luminous and prismatic histories, and they are right here with us. I think a lot about, I work with, Taoist cosmology, helping me hear who body is saying, or at least reminding me to listen, reminding me that listening is possible beyond perceived dimensionality, as all parts are speaking, all parts are human and alive, including pathologies in a non-pathologising ethos, and this is part of chimeric nature, loosely held as shadow and ego who have (and themselves are) myriad permutations, iterations, irritations, impressions seen in diffractions of voices of water within water, sinew within sinew as connective tissue. It’s all right here.
Outlines feel their outlines trembling and overlapping as they find a sense of commonality and community, this is not so much about who stereocilia ‘are’, more about listening to many voices as superposition, as poppy, as electron field, living cosmos.
I spent a long time (and I constantly forget) learning a vernacular, a language of proteins and voltage, a mechanistic language. I’m not trying to deny their validity, but neither am I enthroning them as reality principle. There are myriad lives within lives in every coherent water molecule, and this is part of an alchemical outline of selves. Magical thinking as addition. We don’t need to give up our knowledge (remarkable as they can be, we do many things well, and many things poorly), just hold that mind is mattered as matter is minded, they are fundamental perspectives, none of which have privilege, they are not tangential to each other, nor accidental.
Stereocilia are marbled surfaces, stereocilia are moons reflected in a bowl of water and ink, coagulates of cloud papers in endolymph.