Disorientation

The microbial world can be a profoundly disorienting and challenging place for humans. Largely, we palpate the edges and surfaces available to us, and we make sweeping, grand assertions. We gesture and point and say: “this means this. Science knows”.⁠
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And science does know, a whole bunch. We are all born scientists. But Science (with a capital S) operates on a different platform from science (with a little s) and so we have to learn, as alive people, how to differentiate between the knowledge born of hard-won persistence and curiosity, and initiative and hunches, versus that born of rote capitalist necessity.⁠
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To have science, you need joy and terror and esotericism, and you need to know what you don’t know. You also need to know that there’s an awful lot that you don’t know, you don’t know. You know? To have Science…..well, paperwork. The microbial world is not….established, or of establishment. It’s dynamic and, in turn, makes the rest of the planet, and the entire universe dynamic, like a glacier slamming into a skyscraper.⁠
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The networks that underlie this mountainous, ancient power are not to be fathomed by human Science. But maybe science can do a better job. Maybe we can take what we know about what we know, and use it to leverage what we don’t know we don’t know (you know?) — into some sort of visible spectrum for us.⁠
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Because the truth of it is, the microbial world is also the human world. The microbial world is every conceivable niche and biome on the planet, but that is not a reversible equation. You gotta stretch out a bit and see if you can touch the other stuff, you gotta dangle by your ankles, off of the stuff you think you know, you know.⁠