Rappacini, Philip K. Dick, Origami, and the Zen of the unnatural natural

- 2 minutes read - 309 words

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz? It’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by Frank Herbert where Herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, I’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is a story of his called rappacini’s daughter (one of the first best gothic stories ever written) where he writes abotu a man who puts a poison in the lips of his daughter (who is of course, beautiful) and if she kisses someone she’ll kill the kissee.

In any case, there’s a story around that, but see she’s manufactured but natural.

In the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Deckard encounters a wild animal ( in this future vision, the animals are all gone: goats, horses, dogs, etc. Those that remain are venerated under the hyper Christianity of that world called “Mercerism”. The wild animal he encounters is a grasshoper, he turns it over and looks at the bottom and realizes that it is in fact a simulation, a machine grasshopper. This has some meaning relative to the previous experiences he went through.

Origami, origami is amazing. It’s like Zen gardens, the goal is to mirror the natural ways and assemblages of natural foliage, but to do it in a way with patterns that show human intervention was involved, the natural unnatural as it were.