Aquarian Trinity

Human settlement has always been defined by its relationship of proximity & integration to the water. The ocean moves inland, waters carried, breaking to land against the coastal settlements, floating over the continent to enrich and create as they move inland, forming forests. Land itself only stops water after a certain point of intensity, barrier mountains preventing water from reaching deeper inland to create countless deserts, the great plains and steppes arid as they are from water’s exhaustion over intense distances.

These three differentiate themselves in kind by this presence of water in them. Foliage becomes increasingly intensive of its water-usage on the coast, with swamps and deltas forming environments where all creatures live partially oceanic, water in such an excess that they grow from recessed water, the spilled over dam, the river overflown to a delta. The forest works via water-trapping, water in a balanced quantity to create, as plants and animals integrate water in their beings, thus creating enormous trap-structures, trees and megafauna and foliage abounding. The steppe/desert is in slight contrast, a desperation, each creature designed to obsess over the seeking of water, to hunt down and hoard water, existing to it as a single end.

No one understands the coast better than the promiscuous to have emerged from it. The writer and cataloguer of tales, journeying through the entrapped waters of a detail float with growths of mangrove-homes and strange peoples who provide infinite rabbit holes of curiosities, scribbling down the mariner’s stories as they filter into the bar of a thousand languages overlooking the expanse of the blue Earth. The merchant creates the wunderkammer resulting, stories, curiosities, small facts and details in such a kaleidoscope array that their schizophrenic massing becomes an art of its own.

The End in Metal Gear Solid 3 begins and ends the battle fully integrated, at first so part of the forest animals crawl about him, then finally decaying to autumn leaves to melt into the ground, his micro-bomb setting off a flurry of these leaves to the sky escorted by his birds. Arborescence ends this way with decay, returning into integration as chemical materia to be reuptaken. Yet its living-being is one of a library. The forest is obsessed with hierarchies of information in the same fashion as the traditional school of learning. The tree organizes itself is a ruthlessly logical fashion, building a glorious structure into the heavens on the backs of its formal order. The wizard constructs his tower in the forest and knows this, memorizing every last demon of Solomon, every last letter of countless ancient alphabets, as he walks the forest, remembering the leaves as the descendants, the trees as the source, the forest as a collage of Truths.

The empty land of the desert or steppe creates a monotheistic relationship in the terms of Negarestani, the flat expanse and the void of heavens, where the human is reduced to nothing, a single point tracing lines across an unmappable infinity, all transformations become topological. Standard geometry can no longer affix anything with solidity, transformations being wholly of intensities in relation only to themselves and their own qualities across the void. Rommel understood this in his tank maneuverings, taking into himself the mindset the steppe or desert creates, simple going around and flanking the British attempting to fight a desert war on arborescent principles. Emptiness creates the conditions of such a mind, a mind of internal qualities of motion and transformation, the mind of the stars, shifting of the dunes, the eternal ride…