Infinite Variety to the Swarming Hordes

So it starts at 7am 
A very large glass of water 

Dark outside
The familiar sound of the Life on Earth

First it’s "The Infinite Variety"
Facts
Figures 

Four million different types of plants and animals, 
Fifty different types of howler monkeys

Creationism versus evolution
A young David in his safari suit and binoculars
On a boat 
Headed for the Galapagos Islands

The natural selection of the un-measureable variety
In tree, in soil, in sea and rock

Fossils are the uneaten

Fill yourself with formaldehyde
Climb in your capsule
Become your own fossil

Tibetan sky ritual with no memory

To the Grand Canyon to stare at rocks
Exposed slowly by the river
20 feet per million years
Millions of years
A record in time

Life condensed into a year

1^st January – cloudy
No evolutionary certainty here

Atmosphere, gasses, water, heat, volcanoes, radiation, meteors etc.
Somehow amino acids, carbon compounds linking together
Somehow DNA structures
Somehow a split and an attraction
Somehow a copy
Some mistakes
Somethings we don’t know

So that's how it starts

I think its already summer

Some beautiful thing suffers the loss of half itself and repairs itself by attracting new pieces to make itself whole again

Not entirely whole, different

A self improvement story, something else decided what was an improvement. The “thing” only wanted to be whole again.

Then bacteria
A change in diet
From hot rock
To cool air
Liberating oxygen

Is it growing dark again?

From bacteria to ameoba
An organism from different types of bacteria
Under a single membrane
Cooperating

In September

Uncertain again, hesitantly
From splitting cells to sex
Shuffling genes
To create half selves
Attracted to other half selves

An explosion

Hairs
Now we move around
Waft food to my mouth

Bigger and bigger
Then joining a colony

Autumn sees the beautiful pin-head sized volvox
Her daughter colonies
Ejected

Sponges
Single cells living together loosely
Disassociate, re-organise
Take your place

The venus flower basket
Silica skeleton made by sponge cells
No mouth
No gut
No muscle
No nerves
A beautiful dead end

The cone jelly, the medusa
Start life as plants
Growing on a branch
Falling like seeds

Alternating sex and non-sex
A great variety
Metamorphosis

Jellyfish fossils
Portuguese man of war
A colony starts with one

Late December

Man a colony of cells
Mankind a colony of men

The reef
The first life to be spotted from space

A humbling hour
My back aches.

Building bodies

Perfection
Creatures that become so well adapted to their environment that they never change.
Is this the aim of life?
It seems very boring.

Fossilised experiments in the design of life
Nautilus, so successful
Ammenites.
They left their shells and all died
Out

Mozaic eye
Trilobites solved the problem of spherical aberration 400 million years ago.
Now dead.

Other unsuccessful males crowd around

The shell, the restriction.
Molting
Pre-adapted to life on land
Waiting for the plants (algae lingering on wave washed boulders)
The plants waiting for insects
Insects waiting for plants
Crustaceans out of water

First forests

Volcano envy.
Not like they used to be.
Mountain killers
Scatter the planet

Budding or sexing

Transitory creatures
Plants and animals
Live on land but use water for their sex cycle

Frog swimming.
Return to water
Water to exchange fluids
Again water

As the algae stood on rock
So the millipedes ate the algae

Me, descended from fish
Followed the predator
The sea scorpion who tasted the millipede
Who tasted the algae
Who lingered on the rock

We follow the food

The problem of sex is the problem of manipulation

The problem of manipulation is the problem of recognition
Lustful or hungry?

And so a million dances, a trillion songs

Courtship. I hold your hands so you cannot strike a blow.

Manoeuvring, signalling, caressing, stroking until safe
Until the dangerous and intimate encounter

He blows up a Welsh hill
To find the uneaten, the not fully rotted
The traces

The moss that grew to a tree
Spores in search of water
Always back to water to make life

The plants get wet to make love

A seed is an egg not made in water
It falls to the floor to grow again.

Up in the redwood, the biggest organism
An crustacean transfoms his shell to make a wing
To learn to fly to catch food
A spider learns to spin to catch the insect
A beetle builds a sheel to protect its wing and flies no more

A million dances, a trillion songs

Then colour finally comes to earth
Plants burst into flower to compete for insects

What does nectar taste like?

How does a flower look to an insect?

The beautiful flower courts the insect with precise instructions like an airfield

The dull flower courts the wind

Swarming hordes

Superimposed on a shot of locusts swarming
He holds one in his safari suit.
Is he pretending to be in the midst of the swarming horde?

The fact that plants grew seeking the sun
Is why insects grew wings

Climb up, float down
Flyup, float down

Social signals
An obstacle course for insects
Only if you can read the signals
Can you get the reward

Class sticks to class

I need exercise
Flagging
Coffee not matte

Caterpillars are eating machines

No sex, just eat until its time
To turn into a butterfly

People eat experiences
Waiting to settle and transform
With their vulnerable soft bodies

Poisonous, moving strangely, camouflaged, rebellious, unappealing
Avoiding the transformation
Until the time comes
The time does come

But again the shell surrounds
The only way out is to
Come together
A super organisms
Taking as much oxygen as it likes

Each member incomplete
Lick the queen
Exchange fluids
Find out the why

When are your genes not my genes?

Somewhere a smell and I know it is time to stop gardening and take out the rubbish
I don’t ask about the smell
It doesn’t do to ask

And have we killed a single species?

End

Conquest of the Water

I’m tired
Of the Life on Earth
Disk two

Hello sea squirt.
Ancestor with muscle and tail
Lanclet, Lamprey, Hagfish
No jaw, no backbone
Fish in swimming, but in swimming not fish

Slacks and jumper now
It grows cold

The lancelet stiffens with cartilage to be
A shark
A ray

The boney ones swam up river to find lakes
Shallow pools
Gulping for air
The sense of the lateral line

Not changed since

Perfect fish
Sleepy fish

On the reef to stand out
The crowds grow colourful

I need you to know
Who I am

I dress like this because
I need you to know
Who I am

Some take to the air, several hundred meters
Some retire to the bottom
Abandoning even floating
Dreaming not of flying
But flattening

The two oceans
Sunlit
Deep
Thermocline betwenen

The old fish swims like an S
And the pictures from the deep are 1970s still
A mark of time
Technology

He stands in the murky river
Holding a pole with a Heath Robinson hat
Looking for electric fish
Who navigate the mud
They read electric currents like maps
Can we?

The eel discharges 400 volts
To the red glow of another contraption

From the river to a volcanic spring
Fish at 43 degrees
Fish at freezing point
Anti-freeze for blood

How well adapted is the king of fish
Salmon
Navigation, senses, strength
Teeth for battle now the feeding is over

And you step in the water without boots
And get your jeans wet

So many eggs
So sad to see
So many dead

A walking catfish leads the march
To frogs
To reptiles
To mammals
To me
An invasion of the land
Now there is food there
Easier to catch than the slippery fish

You squinting in the sun on a beach in the Comoro Islands
Waiting to grow extra lids?

Or forgotten your sunglasses


To the desert
To find fish living and breathing in air
Dug up from a dry pond
Like something that climbed from water
Because it wanted to be a frog
A salamander

With permeable skin to breathe
To dry out out
To return to water

Peter pan
Water monster
Axolotyl
Always juvenile

And once you had feet to walk and jump on the land
You quickly lost them to swim again in sand

Goliath toad
Bigger than your head
Almost got away

Flying frogs like flying fish
Fish out of water
So vulnerable
Soft bodies
Defended in infinite ways

Camouflage
Rearing up
Bright colours
Shinning
Even as they dry out
No use in darkness

The first to sing

With the only accompaniment
The beating insect wings
You try to quiet

A rain song in a varnished skin

And sticky out sticky tongues

Prelude to the rain

Below a frenetic orgy of frogs in the rain
At the end of the reproductive season
Indiscriminate tangle

Above in plant trapped ponds
A safer bet

Or a foam filled cocoon

Beautiful eyes and tails
Inside soft illuminated shells
Hearts and eyes

And the finger of god descends to show us scale

Eggs absorbed into your back
Eggs swallowed hole
Only to vomit whole frogs sometime later

The frog who covers itself in a bag
Waiting for the water
Five years underground

They become a precious sponge drink
And having drunk one for us
You find it a pond for water

3pm, 8 hours straight, jesus H, half way

Victory on the dry land

But the frogs covet the limiting hard shell their ancestors left behind

Now water tight scaly skin
Reptiles

You, muddy, emerge next to the giant turtles drinking in muddy pools
Thirsty creatures
No returning to water
Creating their own ponds in hard shelled eggs


A marine Iguana in cold blood
Blood boiling
Not sweating
No need to eat for heat

In breeding fettle you say
The tiny eggs are your internal pond

From these to dinosaurs
King lizards

The richest deposit of bones in the world

Walking fermenters
Living on the fibrous plants
Controlling temperature
With skin panels

So heavy they left footprints in rock

And why did they leave?
Not a comet
No a planet killer
But a slow cooling
Leaving only the water dinosaurs
To cradle their chirping eggs in their giant teeth
To delicately fondle the baby crocodile in a blanket of teeth

And the lizards lost their feet and started to burrow
Then emerged once more to swim the surface

A snake orgy, Southern Canada

Waiting for scales to become feathers.

Its 4pm. End of disk Two