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--- parn:dilzio [2013-04-23 12:56] – [Interview featuring three patabotanists] nik
+++ parn:dilzio [2013-04-23 13:52] – nik
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 --tritar
+====The fallacy of misplaced intangibility====
+Wed Oct 03, 2012 3:35 pm
+It is not the place here to present a rigorous critique of the prevailing viewpoints we have frequently encountered while engaged in our researches in this dimension. But there are certain apparent biases in humans that are so baffling we cannot let them pass without at least some further if desultory remarks.
+In short, it seems that the fallacy of misplaced intangibility is at the root of a good deal of misunderstanding between humans, plants, and us. Theorists and philosophers here have come up with the notion of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to describe what they variously call fetishism, animism, homeopathic magic, or even by extension such practices as cargo cults.
+This position is articulated in a most outspoken way by the author of an otherwise remarkable tome of some antiquity on this world, whose position statement on magic can be found in full here http://www.bartleby.com/196/5.html, and which may be summed up in his emphatic declaration that "magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art."
+The fallacy is, however, not one of misplaced concreteness, but its opposite, and it is exactly this that makes it so difficult for plants to understand humans or communicate with them - and of course for the representatives of our own patabotanical guild as well.
+I was going to say more but it will just turn into a rant from here on, so enough said.
+--armormin
+----
+Wed Oct 03, 2012 3:40 pm
+sincerely said, i really found your remarkable books by accident when surfing internet yesterday. i had forever want tell, you really do raise so many of good point. exactly! success, it would goes wished to you in your future career of what kind i wait to see with big anticipate. keep on that cruising way! i respect hear anything you tell for very long time.
+--doorknob199
+====Cargo cult interior design challenge I - biotech equipment====
+Tue Oct 02, 2012 4:46 pm
+Trismegisto has returned with a whole van-load of peculiar apparatuses acquired from a recent auction held by a biotech company after it went bankrupt. He's added these to his growing hoard of scientific instruments - many of them found mouldering away in the basement of a local university. (His research assistant had to be bribed, because he claimed that in order to take these apparatuses he would need to orchestrate a midnight raid on the university, effectively breaking and entering. Apparently it seems we can't simply ask the university directly to lend us equipment that they don't even use.) We can only find space for these often enormous and clumsy machines in the labyrinth of disused rooms connecting to the Snoepwinkel through the one window opening onto the loft of plant meditation. This is also a cause for some concern, as these rooms are leaky and dilapidated, their walls and floors often close to collapse. Clearly Trismegisto is becoming impatient to advance his work in the most direct (and sometimes unsubtle) manner, inspired by a previous frenetic burst of research into the archaic technologies of this world (some of his notes on this can be found here).
+He has set up an entire rig of interlinked machines and is constantly making forays deeper into the abandoned rooms of the building where our lab is, assembling and disassembling devices, cords, tubes and pipes. Sometimes he can even be seen furtively crawling out of a manhole across the street; no doubt he's discovered underground catacombs in which he has expanded operations. However, nothing seems to be working properly. He is often heard muttering that the machines are "apparatuses of metamagical torture," and that the software they run on has been "coded by drunken mountain apes with delusions of grandeur." Again and again, he expresses the profoundest scepticism that the original purpose of these devices was to interface with biological organisms in some way.
+This extreme disillusion has fed tensions between Trismegisto and his research assistants. Not a day passes without heated arguments; these arguments often lead to fits of screaming and the assistant being quite literally ejected from the Snoepwinkel in tears of frustration. And yet today one such argument took a dramatically different turn. The assistant was trying to explain for the hundredth time that just because a machine looks somewhat like one that can be found in our dimension doesn't mean that it works the same way, and ended up screaming that Trismegisto was "nothing but a downright cargo cultist!" The rest of us thought this would be the cue for his instant ejection, but instead Trismegisto's face lit up and suddenly he asked if the assistant wouldn't like to elaborate on his idea over a drink. Flabbergasted and confused, the assistant nevertheless reluctantly agreed.
+--eleq
+====Harvest Fest preserves====
+Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:46 pm
+The patakitchen was transformed into a distillation laboratory for unusual essences, the last taste of summer in this autumnal hemisphere preserved in oil. I worked all day gently distilling and brewing four interesting essences which were then taken and shared at the Harvest Festival with the help of some dedicated and assiduous assistants (who also helped carefully label and explain each preserve to fascinated passers-by).
+These were the four recipes:
+  * Beetroot for its earthy taste
+  * Green coriander (rather than the dried seeds - an experiment)
+  * Pepper with ginger
+  * Plums with ginger (plums with garlic would have been interesting, but Armoracio was sceptical…)
+{{120922-170817.jpg}}
+--andemica
+====Saracenia====
+Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:13 pm
+Someone wrote a meticulous but incomplete name tag on one of the species we are investigating. There are some details I need to confirm, as I believe they could be inaccurate. For example, does anyone know which "endangered habitat" is referred to in the label of this specimen of Arschia beluaiz? This plant actually seems to have started a process of aggressive mutation while held in captivity, though it is quite incorrect to report it as being "97% Zamzia."
+{{>https://secure.flickr.com/photos/foam/8032303621/}}
+--cerhy
+----
+====Watering plant spheres====
+Fri Sep 28, 2012 10:17 am
+  * 04/09 - All but 1 side string
+  * 06/09 - All string plants
+  * 13/09 - All string plants
+  * 20&21/09 - All strings
+  * 27/09 All strings sprayed and injected…
+--mango
+====Of making strawberry jam====
+Wed Sep 26, 2012 3:11 pm
+So many jams to prepare in so little time and now my assistant has asked me to write it down but I don’t have much to say. As the autumn days shorten I find myself more and more in the fields and forests at twilight, hurrying to gather fruits and herbs and the last of summer’s bounty. My kitchen is overflowing with jars and liquorice, pots, pans, alembics, bottles, children’s toys, it’s such a mess but what can you do, life is bubbling up like hops.
+We’re all thinking about the winter to come and the many feasts round the hearth and home and at bonfire festivals. Wines and oils, juices of berries from distant lands, and there’s so many ways that the essences and the substances can be preserved - they’ve got to last for the long winter of course, but it’s much more. When I make strawberry jam some of the essence of the beautiful strawberry princess herself is distilled in the jar. Strawberries in the winter.
+--andemica
+====Greenhouse contemplation====
+Wed Sep 26, 2012 3:09 pm
+(Worm Moon, 492829 PRT, 4th Octal)
+The gardens were deserted in the twilight. I walked along the paths towards the greenhouse as if invisible, my lantern casting the palest of green halos through the trees, my footsteps echoing with the imprints of those forgotten sounds that have always seemed peculiar to this world alone. (Trismegisto believes that these sounds are doorways.) As the night descends, the cool furnace of the greenhouse is palpable from a distance, radiating the substances captured during the heat of the day in a continuous gentle wind, seemingly impalpable to the natives of this world. This emanation renders the glass walls viscous and easy for me to pass through. I stepped into the scintillating luminosity that is not light, and took up my customary seat in the grotto, listening without sound to the movements of a slow metabolism that is the synthesis of light and earth. Thus I pass many a night on this world.
+--caslab
+====I don't understand humans====
+Wed Sep 26, 2012 3:07 pm
+A general rule of thumb is that human beings dislike being mistaken for vegetables. I made this mistake quite often during the carnival when introducing people for the first time. A gentleman who struck me as the spitting image of a carrot objected vehemently when introduced as such to a young lady who resembled nothing so much as a wilted lettuce.
+--mango
+====Arrival of the trees====
+Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:56 pm
+(Beaver Moon, Week of Merry Rollercoaster Rides cira Motionless Daisy Hula-Hop Paraphernalia Exploraton)
+Somehow during the night our laboratory was transformed into a jungle. The light changed; the walls dissolved; or rather, we can now walk right through them and into other locations. Maybe the plants seeped down through the skylights while we slept; perhaps the machine elves were at work. Our room is now filled with a mesmerising susurrus, and we carry out our research like somnambulists. Celsa Rizofor has discovered a new soma - I am tasting it now, and it is really good.
+When the assistants water the plants, the room floods. Many of our notes are washed out onto the streets and into the canals that surround the abandoned candy store, to be discovered who knows where. To escape the deluge we move upstairs and sleep on ancient grass that was fossilised in plastic - it still retains its green pigment after all the passing of the eons.
+---druko
+====Shopping arcades; sleep experiments====
+Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:14 pm
+Castuus made a rare appearance in the Snoepwinkel yesterday and was much more talkative than usual (in fact he never really talks at all). Evidently something was troubling him, for it’s usually impossible to find him anywhere else than in the greenhouses; the city and even our secluded enclave is so noisy and busy for him, and all he wants in any case is to dream green dreams away from everything. What had impelled this sudden and impulsive drift into the world?
+I overheard him in conversation with one of the research assistants - she’s the only one who’s ever been able to exchange more than a few words with him - but today he was positively animated. It turns out that, while sitting in the deepest recesses of the greenhouse, he began to hear a mysterious singing. Some ferns, normally so silent, had begun a plaintive melody. Somehow this roused him from his meditations, though their singing was softer than the splash of falling dewdrops, and a strange restlessness took hold of him. And so he left the greenhouse, and made his way into the city.
+Looking around him, he began to feel a jarring, restless melancholy about the people he saw everywhere. He felt they seemed to be so fearful of stepping out of the busy world of shopping arcades, cars, self-importance, and bustle. He approached a group of young ladies who appeared to be deeply absorbed in a mystical trance, buying makeup, clothes and shoes. Believing them to be kindred spirits, he suggested they come away with him to the greenhouse to listen to the singing of the ferns - surely a meditation they would deeply appreciate, since they evidently had mystical leanings. But instead they seemed shocked, and looked at him as if he were crazy. Castuus was taken aback and somewhat hurt.
+Then he thought he should try to understand their point of view. He tried to absorb himself in spiritual contemplation of fashion shops and perfume advertisements. He quickly became intoxicated, though somewhat queasy. People were indeed onto something here - it was a state that had a certain distant similarity to the contemplation of singing ferns - but instead of a sense of lightness and clarity he found himself becoming increasingly vague, heavy, dispirited, exhausted - as if he were seeing the world through a bag of cotton balls. Somehow he stumbled through the shopping arcade and came to a shop selling pillows of grain. He bought one pillow full of spelt and another of buckwheat and staggered, exhausted and dispirited, into the Snoepwinkel just before closing time.
+He went to sleep on the mezzanine with both pillows upon the fossilised plastic grass. The queasy restlessness of the day disturbed his sleep, and as he twisted and turned he moved his head from one pillow to the other. Then he noticed that his dreams changed depending on the grain. A different quality of Viriditas seemed to fill his sleep depending on the different seeds under his head. Late that night he asked Hazel, Ivy and Frazer to try an experiment, sleeping on the different pillows to see what their reaction was, inscribing the results on the wall next to his makeshift bed. All of them experienced a similar phenomenon - distinct dream states depending on the pillow. He convinced us that he needed to stay on and sleep all day to discover other ways to reach people in their dreams (when they are closer to their vegetal minds). We reluctantly agreed to this, though we left him and went on a field trip over several days using Zizim.
+--alchumilla