The first ever extraterrestrial cemetery is set to launch next month, reports Wired: “On Dec. 6, the desert silence near Upham, New Mexico, will be shattered by the roar of a SpaceLoft XL rocket hurtling skyward from Spaceport America. The payload: individual capsules containing the ashes of 179 people, part of the Legacy Flight program, among them the late actor James (Scotty) Doohan and Gemini program astronaut Gordon Cooper.”
So will this new Kuiper Belt of micro-earths solve the high ecological cost of earthbound cemeteries? Not entirely, because there's a catch: “You're not actually 'buried' in space; you don't embark on an endless orbit of the Earth. The duration of the flight all depends on the apogee of the orbit, and can range from two to several hundred years, depending on the service the customer requests.”
Still, I do like the idea of gravesite visits reprogrammed, for instance, as a typical American suburban backyard barbecue. While the burgers and hotdogs are grilling, family and friends will consult NASA's Satellite Tracking service to determine the path of a spacebound crypt.
There will be a hubbub about vectors and declinations, some frantic ballyhoo about latitude and longitude. And there will also be a row about whether to use the metric system or English units, but then it's finally time. The lights are switched off, someone opens up a Bud Light, and everyone takes turns peering through the telescope as their dearly departed passes them by overhead.
Or maybe everyone will drive up to derelict observatories up in the mountains, made obsolete by more powerful telescopes or urban light pollution. A pilgrimage to necro-planetariums, through picturesque winding roads and autumnal colored forests.
When their orbit finally decays completely, they will then simply fall back to earth in a blazing, primordial meteor shower towards a cratered necropolis, their final impact coordinates having been picked, reserved and paid for centuries ago.
Actually, I had no idea that this was possible, but I just passed the gate and walked down, and nobody really took notice. The first 3 levels down, everything is still quite messy, but the rest of the 119 below zero floors, are perfectly intact.
I took the speed elevator to go all the way to the bottom floor -121 to enjoy the view. I was a clear day and you could really see far away. all the way down, All of negative -Manhattan, the subways, the negative of the statue of Liberty, the roots of central park, really very nice.
I had a negative-coffee at the cafeteria and the white servant that worked at the counter, really thought I was telling here a joke when I said that all the positive had been blown away 2 years earlier.
“Months after Bruno the Bear was knocked off in Bavaria,” reports Spiegel Online, “Germany finds itself faced with another freak animal dilemma. An albino deer has appeared in the eastern German state of Saxony. Hunters smell blood, and basically everyone else wants to protect the animal.”
So will this as yet unnamed “snow-white deer with pink eyes skin” become another hysterically inconsequential megaspectacular media event to rival Paris Hilton and Natalee Holloway? Will Deutsche Welle send reporters to interview conservationists and celebrities pleading for the hunters to leave it alone? “As a rarity and natural phenomenon, it should be allowed to live,” these environmentalists will probably say.
As a matter of fair and balanced journalism, will they also interview the hunters, who will no doubt argue that the “white deer is a mutation. It does not belong in the wild. It should be shot.”
In any case, I'd like to resurrect an old proposal for a new cable channel, sort of a cross between The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, providing round-the-clock, real-time reports and analysis of news events at the intersection of human and animal cultures.
And all of these stories will be treated like major weather events, “structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.”
For the 50th anniversary of the International House of Japan in Roppongi in 2002, Takeshi Ishiguro “created a machine which pops out smoke rings automatically from a box which is placed in the large garden - every 5 minutes. The smoke shapes into a perfect circle first and gets transformed immediately depending on the wind etc. When there is no wind, it goes straight up to the sky keeping its shape until it finally disappears.”
You can watch the smoke rings in action on the artist's website.
And for more about the machine and Ishiguro's other works, you can read his interview with PingMag.
Meanwhile, what Takeshi Ishiguro should do next is construct more of these machines and place them all over Rome. Then on a cloudless and windless day, they will huff and puff away the complete text of Ovid's Metamorphoses — the epic poem translated into vapourous morse code.
At Piazza del Popolo, for instance, you will be able decipher the passage wherein Zeus turns himself into a cloud so that he could seduce the maiden Io without his eternally vengeful consort Hera detecting their tryst.
Elsewhere, at the more tranquil Giardino del Quirinale, you can read about how the Centaurs came into being from a curious coupling between King Ixion and Nephele, a cloud nymph who Zeus had created in the shape of Hera.
Everywhere churches, gardens and palazzos are wondrously oozing with smoke. The Eternal City seemingly dematerializing into air.
You wake up one morning in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. You try to remember, but their names have escaped you completely. The previous night's drunken revelry has fried up a bunch of short-term memory cells.
Sensing that a rare opportunity for some topographical experiment has just presented itself, you decide not to ask anyone where you are. Instead, you go out for a walk to find out for yourself, studying the native flora, indigenous architecture, and vernacular street patterns.
It's urban forensics! Or CSI: Landscape Architecture.
But unfortunately, there's this thick fog blanketing the entire city. It's hampering your terrestrial sleuthing. It's hard to see anything at all, let alone the street signs. There's a clearing now and then, but it's zero visibility most of the time.
Later on, you begin to notice that there's a pattern to the way the vaporous voids and non-voids pass you by. It's some sort of an encrypted message. You know this, because you were once in the Boy Scouts of America and had learnt from their field manuals how to interpret morse code and Native American smoke signals. You even earned a merit badge for it.
And so you go into the nearest park. You find a bench, sit, and get comfortable. Then you begin decoding.
After 13 hours of manic translating, fingers blistering, bloodied, whole hands cramping, you read what you've got written down:
its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon
Lo! You're in Dublin!
Today is Bloomsday!
And there are 13,000 Takeshi Ishiguro machines installed throughout the city belching out James Joyce's Ulysses. Unabridged.
These ones come straight out of the catalogs of ÆGIS ASIA, a fine purveyor of biodecontamination and microbial protection products and services. Order 75 for your coffee table or for your migrant gardens.
Is it possible to order a garden from Martha Stewart Omnipedia, and via 2-day priority mail, it arrives fully formed, plopped onto your front yard by the mailman?
Or better yet, what if your garden remains airborne, forever nomadic?
So you order from TrueValue.com, and before the end of the business day, it begins its perpetual migration. From Chicago then Beijing and Vladivostok, and then on to Dubai and all the major European cities before waiting out a 104-hour delay back in Chicago and continuing on its suborbital journey. From one aerotropolis to another aerotropolis, they are tended to by the US Postal Service, a legion of 24-hour phone order operators, cargo pilots, air marshalls, baggage handlers, and customs officers. But I wonder, are USDA airport inspectors competent gardeners?
On a clear day, you can see their complex Baroque compositions crisscrossing against a deterrestrialized groundplane. A hortus conclusus twice removed from the earth.
But you can still tend to it from your earthbound living room. Simply pick up one of the many home and garden catalogs littering your mailbox, or tune in to QVC and the Home Shopping Network, and order the necessary fertilizer, clippers, and that prize-winning new hybrid. It's only a phone call or a mouse click away. Tele-gardening.
And with this potentially lucrative market, Airbus just might save itself from dissolution.
When you need to take a look, simply hack into airport CCTV cameras; X-ray machines; TSA's chemical, biological and nuclear detection network; and air traffic control radars. Or track their migration through Google Earth.
Could these be the tracings of Paradise or the ominous tracks of a botanical invasion out to finish the native vegetation of England once and for all?
A few months ago, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art mounted a spectacular exhibition on Persian manuscript painting. Fortunately, digital facsimiles of the miniatures and folios are still available online.
Here are some of my favorites, starting with this twice-walled Edenic garden floating amidst an orange vegetal sea.
And here are some weirdly kinetic fortification walls.
The swirling vortex of extruded geology. The stage for a battle scene or a weaponized terrestrial tsunami?
One wonders if 16th century Persian painters understood the physics of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, since they undoubtedly display a mastery of the multi-temporal and the multi-spatial in this miniature.
And one wonders, too, if they also understood the peculiarities of tectonics, as the following two miniatures obviously portray the billion-year process of mountain making.
This, of the ascension of Prophet Mohammad, is beyond compare.
This is absolutely beautiful!
And this!
And this!
One detail I quite like is the animal leaping off the landscape. Perhaps the landscape continues on in the next page, but I like to think that it is trying to escape off the miniature and off the page and even off the book altogether into the white voidscape of our digital webpage, into the safe precincts of Pruned.
In any case, all these miniatures are mind-bogglingly gorgeous!
Although this last folio depicts an ascetic man in self-exile inside an arboreal cave, it nevertheless reminds me of one of the more erotic poems by Foroogh Farrokhzaad, Iran's greatest 20th century poet. Below in full is a translation by David Martin of the poem.
in my small night, what mounting
regret!
wind has a rendezvous with the trees'
leaves
in my small night, there is terror
of desolation
listen! do you hear
the wind of darkness howling?
I watch breathless
-ly and wondrously this alien happiness
I am addicted to my own hopelessness
listen! listen well!
can you hear the darkness
howling? -- the dark hell
-wind scything
its way towards us?
in the night now, there is something
passing
the moon is red restless and uneasy
and on this roof -- which fears
any moment
-- it may cave in --
clouds like crowds of mourners
await to break in rain
ruin
a moment
and then after that, nothing.
behind this window, night shivers
and the earth stands still
behind this window an unknown
something fears for me and you
O you who are green from head to toe!
put your hands
-- like a burning
memory into my loving hands --
lover's hands!
entrust your lips -- your lips
like a warm sense of being! --
entrust! -- your lips to the caresses of my
-- loving lips -- lover's lips!
the wind will carry us with it
the wind will carry us with it
This is PAMELA, or the reconfigurable robotic Pedestrian Accessibility and Movement Environment Laboratory. If you volunteer to be a human guinea pig, you will be subjected to a sort of urban nightmare: headache-inducing lighting; steep inclines to raise heart rates and test the patience of wheelchair users; wet surfaces, gaps and bumps to trip and bruise you; and other people.
But such experiments may result in safer streets and more user-friendly public spaces.
