to understand the full extent of the constraints of the abyss

about to relocate to oxford, ms: recalibrate/re-evaluate/re-imagine the work. it's all by inches at this point. lots of learning by mistakes; lots of mistakes

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in any case, i want to find a way to write more regularly in general, and in this space in particular. i have no idea who currently reads this space, or who would. regardless, the bottom line of the narrative seems to be: i went from the horrors of an environment so structured as to be dehumanizing to the madness of an environment so unstructured as to be paralyzing, and now i'm trying to locate center.

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in other news, one thing that i have been doing a lot of recently is reading - and if you're around me long enough it's hard not to notice that i can't read without highlighter in hand. i have an obsession with marking up texts that i read (magazines and newspapers included), especially with the basic act of noting passages that i would like to remember. this habit seems neither uncommon nor unreasonable, but my persistence in doing it borders on the obsessive. that being said, i've been trying to find a way to do something with all these phrases and paragraphs that stand out across my diverse readings - and i think this space is a reasonable one to experiment with. blogs seem to be a genre centered on commentary and reference - a leviathan concordance to culture & politics, supremely dynamic and inconsistent. here's to the bizarre sandbox that we've built for ourselves:

from "where wonders await us," by tim flannery. in the new york review of books, volume liv, no. 20:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. It's a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish - seemingly all fangs and gape - with a "fishing rod" affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this discription pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea - until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.