Sunday, February 17, 2019

FROM THE BLASTOSPHERE TO THE COYOTE METAPHOR IS A TRIP

The blastsphere of any mammal is a tiny ball of few cells with a future both undetermined and responsive.

The blastosphere probably doesn't even have the impulses to go forward (meaning knowing which that direction is forward or backward) because it is fed automatically and carried in any direction.  Maybe it senses floating.  Certainly it is affected by the mother's blood contents, which include emotion, but not in any self-aware or preferred way.

As for what the embryo sends back to the mother, there probably isn't much before "quickening" when it begins to make perceptible moves.  New heartbeat joins mother's heart beat, what affects hers affects the embryonic heart.  Fetal heartbeat is distinguishable but in sync, like the rest of the developing creature.  Since all is created according to what just came before, the record of this early history will accompany this early version all the rest of the experiencing trajectory of its life.

I've always thought that the Bernini's portrait of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa looked as much like a floating fetus as it looks orgasmic, though both seem relevant.  Perhaps the oxymoronic self-contradictory sensations of such a state as "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" are memories of pre-birth, recorded with blur by incomplete sensing organs.  Primal.

All through the gestation the brain and the rest of the body are generating and connecting the filaments and tubes that will run the body, carrying molecules and oxygen as well as creating movement.  The brain in particular is making loops of neurons that will sustain homeostasis, keeping everything between too much and too little.  The directions in the cells, the genome, are guiding everything between what is necessary and what is unique, creating a personality type that is vulnerable and reacting in characteristic ways.

The experiences after that will be filtered or honored according to this basic frame which is so deeply internal that it seems like absolute reality.  If the culture endorses this, even more so.  This is as true for a coyote as it is for a human, for all mammals.

Here are two contemporary contrasting articles about coyotes.  

https://mountainjournal.org/hunting-in-america-faces-an-ethical-reckoning


https://blog.nature.org/science/2019/02/13/the-howling-why-youre-hearing-coyotes-this-month/?src=social.nature.twitter.main&sf98762365=1

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