ever since the first human-made objects, inanimate tf has always been with us. all human beings1 possess an unknown (but objectively finite) amount of mechanical energy that we will exert over the course of our lifetimes. regardless of whether or not you believe in any kind of a soul, it's objectively the case that in any act of productive labor2 carried out by a person, the resulting object is direct result of some amount of that mechanical force being transferred into its materials to give them shape. and remember, when the chemical energy in your cells becomes the hem on a skirt, or the back of a chair, it is being neither created nor destroyed. Only transformed from animate to inanimate.

for a whittled bird carved over the course of one quiet evening, the amount of life force crystallized in this process is than a drop in the bucket of a person's total lifespan. but we didn't seize our bully pulpit in earth's ecosystem on the backs of mementos.

consider the sistine chapel ceiling, painstakingly hand-painted by michelangelo over four restless years of his life. or a railway that is quite literally the life's labor of so many who met their unjust deaths while being forced to work on it? what do you hear when you listen to the the hum of those rail lines beneath you, or the electricity being carried overhead from an underground coal mine? in either case, the other end of the line is another life, shaping itself into something which we would not call alive.

how many lifespans worth of human labor might be captured in the shapes of a space elevator? remember that all the tiniest parts of those machines are tiny fragments of someone's life force too. if such a colossal gathering were to take place, could we really say that such an object was truly bereft of life, even some version of it as yet unfamiliar to us?

but sometimes it's just nice to imagine being a bench too.


  1. therian pals too! nests, dams, draconic hoards are all products of this same mechanical life force.

  2. something i find interesting to think about is that this same wellspring of mechanical energy is also constantly shaping and reshaping the air we collectively breath


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