The Milky Way
There will be a head-on collision between the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. in approximately 4 billion years. The fact that I can even speculate on that is an amazing thing, science has given us eye extensions so powerful that we can see into the future and so wonderful that we can also see billions of years into the past. This awareness has also made us think again about our relative position in the universe. In the grand scheme of things we are totally insignificant, we will be so far gone when this event happens, that nothing will remain of us. Except, there is the fact that nothing is ever really destroyed. Events happen, light travels and so do other energy forms, a life form 4 billion light years away from Earth may be receiving signals from Earth at the same time that the Milky Way galaxy is crashing into the planets and suns of the Andromeda galaxy. Past, present and future spiral around each other, echoing the spiral arms of galaxies and local blue shift spaces compress as Andromeda advances towards us, whilst the wider universe takes a red shift away from us. Locally we experience life as a compact excitement, whilst the universe expands; the spaces between things growing and growing until at some point everything is so far away from everything else that all that will be read is the blank emptiness of the abyss.
In front of me is another blank emptiness, this time it is white, the white of a blank sheet of paper, it has no marks on it but the longer I stare at it the more I see that its surface is active with potential. Tiny differences in light reveal a textured surface to this paper, a grain runs through it, a memory of its making. The fusing together of its fibres as it dried has left a textured surface and as you look at it very closely you can see echoes of its making. This awareness leaves an idea of an interwoven interior to this thin sheet. A paper's world of structure now arises and as it does it interferes with my first impression of its flatness and a white expanse. I look again, and an optical whiteness begins to billow like a sail in the wind, the convex sphere of seeing asserts itself and spaces begin to open out into this white field. There are as yet no marks or hard edges to focus on. I become more aware of my breathing, a rhythm begins to assert itself, one that flows backwards and forwards, out from myself into smoothly bending white spaces, these movements echoes of my chest, as it too rises and falls in response to the invisible processes of respiration. I seem to breath my seeing.
Gas exchange in humans
The air drawn into my chest is 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, plus a little carbon dioxide, neon, hydrogen and other trace gases. As I breath a chemical reaction takes place and I breathe out the same 78 percent nitrogen, but now without so much oxygen, and with more carbon dioxide.
When a plant is carrying out photosynthesis carbon dioxide needs to move from the air into the leaf. It does this by diffusing through small pores called stomata. At the same time oxygen moves out of the leaf through these stomata pores. This movement of gases in opposite directions is called gas exchange. Plants can only photosynthesise when they have access to light, however, cells respire all the time. During the daytime therefore plants both respire and photosynthesise.The rate of photosynthesis tends to be higher than the rate of respiration therefore there is a net diffusion of carbon dioxide into the plant. During the nighttime, plants only respire. This means that there is a net movement of oxygen into the plant and net diffusion of carbon dioxide out of the plant during the night time. I did some drawings that I was going to animate to show how this works, more invisible actions to make visible.
Gas exchange in plants
Plants are not as active as animals, which means that plants can maintain a
full rate of respiration and live successfully with much lower oxygen
concentrations. This is of particular significance to roots and stems. Roots
obtain their oxygen from the air spaces between soil particles, but this
tends to be in short supply owing to respiratory activity of not only the
roots in question, but also those of other plants, as well as the respiratory activity
of soil animals and microorganisms. Nothing exists in isolation, which is something I want to hold on to as I try to work out what I'm doing. These drawings which are taken from visual information within scientific texts, informing my ideas, as much as drawings made under the umbrella of what is usually called art. My experiences are deepened by this access to knowledge, and allow me to think about the deep interconnectedness of everything.
It is photosynthesis that is central to the presence of the paper I draw on, it was once perhaps an esparto grass, or a tree, cotton, flax, straw or jute, but now an aqueous deposit of vegetable fibre in sheet form. It is the cellulose that allows these deposits of vegetable fibre to stick together. Cellulose does not dissolve in water, which means the fibres float without breaking down. A similar situation is happening within our own digestive systems. Cellulose cannot be broken down by our stomach enzymes, but the plant fibres aid digestion as roughage. So in one way we could think of plant made paper as a sort of roughage and that it aids both mental and physical digestion.
Both myself and the paper I am working on are the result of photosynthesis capturing the sun's energy. The white radiance of the paper a mini moon that reflects light energy outwards just as the actual moon does. Both the Milky Way and this paper obey common laws of energy exchange, I am both like everything else and yet different to everything else, connected to everything as star stuff and belonging inextricably to the matter energy dance.
There are though other forms of invisible energy exchange going on all around me and these have been 'pictured' in commonly used visual languages. For instance, even as a boy, I would take for granted the fact that a speech balloon could tell me something about the nature of someone's inner emotional state. In the speech balloons below you can make a guess as to what is being communicated, and even if you are not quite sure, hopefully at least you will be able to tell that they are representing different types of emotional communication.
It is not just in the shapes of the speech balloons themselves, visual marks made within speech balloons can also be used to communicate emotion.
(I took these balloon shapes from Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics', an essential read if you want to get your head around these issues)
Everything matters: A slightly more rounded edge and we feel a little tipsy.
The images I have used in this post are all drawings. I had to draw the visual exchange of gasses diagram by referring to an online science article and the balloons were drawn after looking at a page of Scott McCloud's ruminations on the languages of a graphic novel. I needed to re-draw them because the originals had things in them that I wanted to take out or change because they interfered with what I wanted to communicate. The bigger issue though is that others had been there before me in communicating things that were almost exactly the same but most importantly, just slightly different. The images in effect become hybrids, my own needs grafted on to the original purposes. This is going on all the time, I mimic what others say, but put what they say into my own words, I am constantly using bits of other people's communications wrapped up with my own. If it was all my own no one would understand it, it would be that paradoxical private language. Things are repeated over and over again if they work, but what if they don't repeat properly or if there is a slight difference? In differences languages evolve; but are these languages like photosynthesis, systems that are also energy converters? I am beginning to think that they might be. Leaves not only convert light energy into chemical energy, they store it. So they are like batteries. Thoughts are made of chemical and electrical exchanges, thoughts can be released by exposure to images that build up ideas in the mind. This exchange is taking place somewhere. It is physical as well as psychic. Just as matter and energy can be interchanged, the physical nature of paper is at times totally enmeshed into the sign systems evolved by humans, the resulting entanglement being objects that we call drawings.
Look both ways
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