A Dripping Dread

“They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and tr

Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

But the Jackson’s chameleon also confronts itself with its horns. Sometimes as it is roving the tree branches, gaping and hissing and swaying and surprising wasps with its projectile-tongue, it will by mistake grab onto its own forehead-horns and then panic, wrestling itself, frantic to escape its own frantic grasp, a one-reptile bedlam in the padd

I’ve gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; the

He couldn’t see any of them, but he knew there was a bustling electric world below his feet. “It was a moment I can still close my eyes and go back to,” he tells me. “It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had, and I’m so sad I’m not there right now.”