[D-G] Lucy, welcome to the age of Lite!

[Mark Crosby]

--- Lucy LeGentilSinge
<lucy100millionyearsold at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> btw Mark, it is isn't it?, interesting to note that
> some ethologists recently felt a contraversially
> prompted need to distinguish the vegetals in the
> vegetals world from those animals in the animals
> world : any animal distinguishes itself from any
> vegetal in reason of these tree aspects, that it
> moves, that it perceives and finally that it
> "feels".

Dear Lucy, it is isn't it? You remind me of _The
Secret Life of Plants_ by Peter Thompkins and
Christopher Bird sprouting this nice outline online
http://www.pureinsight.org/pi/articles/2003/3/3/1496.html
recalling how "Cleve Backster was an American expert
on lie detecttors. In 1966, using a lie detector, he
accidentally discovered that plants have high-level
emotional activies that were similar to those of human
beings". It also claims that "plants have close ties
with their owners"! Oh, I have forgotten so many
plants I once sniffed at and hope they did not wilt as
resentful slaves when I would not continues to 'own'
them!

Oh, and number 21 from Google shows an Aug.2003
article at smh.com, "Bacteria fooled by a secret life
of plants", by Deborah Smith that sez: "Bacteria like
to hunt in packs, and are in constant communication
with each other so they can work out when they have
amassed enough troops to launch an attack. But if it's
a plant they're plotting against, the microbes face a
very cunning foe. Australian researchers have
discovered that plants can eavesdrop on the battle
talk of bacteria under the soil and mimic their
communication signals in apparent attempts to thwart
their offensives". Now that's more scientific, what?

That pureinsight.org article says it is summarized
from several articles in Chinese at zhengjian.org and
could be a cult of orchid growers for all I know. The
Web lays links also to Eleanor White's
http://www.raven1.net/seclife.htm review with
commentary "to provide infromation that a mind control
victim or supporter can make an intelligent decision".
I wonder how these lie-detected plants would listen to
the voices of schizophrenia? There was a 1979 movie of
_The Secret Life of Plants_ with music from Stevie
Wonder (I did not see ;)

Hey! adding schizophrenia to this Google gives a
superluminal rhizome direct to Miranda Morris's "How
(not) to Become Plant: A Deleuzeoguattarian Analysis
of Human / Plant Assemblages" in _The Laughing Medusa_
at http://www.gwu.ed/~medusa/plant.html . Morris notes
that "It is no wonder Deleuze and Guattari spend
little time on becomings-vegetable in their essay:
there are so few examples of real human / plant
assemblages that are not Oedipalized and reduced to
simple imitation"; eg, "very filial relationships
being set up from the beginning with the cultural
representation of the Cabbage Patch Kids" (not to
mention the Jolly Green Giant and his Sprout ;)

Morris puts her finger right on the phallus of
Thompson and Bird's humanization of plants when they
say that plants "are endowed with personality and the
attributes of the soul". Morris notes that they use
the work of Marcel Vogel for "exploring the
possibility of ESP communication between plants and
humans" and the 16th-c German mystic Jakob Boehme "who
claimed he could commune with a plant and feel its
life force for himself". But Vogel thought that the
interaction is "not that of an intelligence in plant
form, but that the plant becomes an extension of
oneself".

In the last part of her essay, Amanda Morris explores
Michael Pollan's 2001 book _The Botany of Desire_ and
its theme that "through their fruits, their beauty,
their intoxicating effects, etc, [plants] have
throughout history been manipulating humans to do
their evolutionary work for them". This grows
alongside the "pornocentric" interaction with nature
by such nomadic gardeners as Johnny Appleseed.
Unfortunately, Morris sez, "Pollan winds up
consistently humanizing the apples instead of ever
really apple-izing Chapman.. (And then, after all,
there is the forest of many vegetizing drugs ;)

Wanting to flea from the forest into the cosmos, for
doG's sake! But these Dark Matters mentioned seem
still to hold us in place - forever?

Here's something from this list Re: Gravitation, 19
June 2002:

> --- avuydanbqrth gdhmndg
> <hasardous_CUNT at dashnet.zzn.com> wrote:
> > hola everyone
> > what Deleuze works can tell us about gravitation?
> > Is it due to chemical reactions? I dont 
> > understand its cause in the frame of a spinozist 
> > ontology. can someone help me to understand 
> > gravitation a bit more please. thanks you.

"-Oh. I feel better, said Freer very softly. -I am
glad to know the docking orifice which has swallowed
my ship is the inside outside of the outside of the
inside. That my ship is scrubbing Predecessor cunts...
-We have been accorded the privilege of penetrating
atmosphere. Beside has become below. Out is in. There
then is here now" (John Clute, _Appleseed_).

   More after the fold, as the bloggers say..

> My brain is in progressive evolution I
> want to say, and it was good to get out of the
> forest I tell you for it is still growing in
> retrospection of this evolution and within it's
> introspectivity like a mirror, so as my interest in
> my mirrored past in the forest has recently lead me
> just a few hours ago to consider my past again in
> the forest, so to say it's not that bad to have a
> brain to feel capable and thus understand oneself,
> to analyse ourselves as we analyse it analysing it,
> etc.

Maybe check out my favorite astronomer, Amara Graps:
http://www.amara.com (who did her PhD on Jovian dust
streams !) I am just reading Amara's recent review,
"Of Transhumanists: Following the trail of the
alchemists", mashing together Idries Shaw's 1964 _The
Sufis_ and William R Newman's 2004 _Promethean
Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature_,
which you can find here
http://www.lucifer.com/pipermail/extropy-chat/2005-February/013649.html
Amara notes: "Newman's text is only concerned with the
definition of alchemy that denotes a physical
transmutation of one material into another. I think
that transhumanists should be concerned with the
psychological transmutation, as well".

My best to all and sundry in Zagreb, Mark