Intriguing Natural Ensembles
That day saw record winter storms in other parts. We were lucky as accumulation was low and the power went out just long enough to revert to a slightly more primitive mode of existence. Travel became hazardous and everything not strictly required put on-hold.
We did have to feed the chickens though which required driving some miles to the farm through the lowest daytime visibility I have ever experienced. I go there almost every day and at one point lived on the property. That is to say I know it, about as much as a person of can know a place. It is a question though, what one ultimately knows about a place. It does not mean, for instance, that we know all its possibilities, as this work demonstrates. One lives as an amateur statistician but with no ability to validate the models necessarily applied as filters to the world. The emergence of a new possibility mixes the vanishing phenomenon with timelessness. Timelessness emerges because the new observation verifies a potential state of being that retroactively always was. It does not arise in one’s longstanding relationship to the thing as it is a familiar place but to the thing as it is not known. Here we see a relationship between timelessness and the uncanny.
In a different age I studied Biophysics, particularly structures that are said to self-assemble without precise manipulation from the observer. It might be the case that this effort provides the student with a more detailed model of how certain types of natural phenomena develop - the nucleation and growth of ice crystals on the plant’s stalk, etc. If this is true it in no way deflates the perception of the natural ensemble. Indeed, in this case, the narrator was reduced to uncontrollable laughter.