on destratification
“One of the things that amazes me is that the Himalayas – which people think of as the paradigm of the stable – are still moving up one millimeter a year because India is still clashing with Central Asia. They’re a ripple in the surface of the Earth. We cannot conceive of a clash that would last millions of years – our time frame is too limited. Imagine an observer with a time-scale so large that he could see this clash. He wouldn’t even see us. Species to him would seem like vast amounts of bio-mass in constant change. He would see evolution. Everything that matters to evolution happens across millennia. That observer would see species mutating and flowing. He would probably worship flows – unlike us, who, because of our very, very tiny time-scale of observation, tend to worship rocks.
We are completely seduced by what is stratified. We surround ourselves with permanent buildings, we speak about a rock-solid relationship, we strive for the solid. But it’s becoming clear that everything that’s structured is just historically produced constructions that became hardened and sedimented. All the action is in stuff that flows. I think we’re gonna find out that at a certain limit point of destratification, destratified geological stuff, destratified organic stuff, and destratified mental stuff seem to coexist together. It’s another world. It’s a limit point that you perceive when you’re tripping. It’s happening all the time and we’re not aware of it.”
Interview with Manuel De Landa by Erik Davis
