My Goodreads Review of the Overstory

The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

STILL

Truth. Tree. Understory. Learners. Blink and done. There is no path to any future. We are already there. The End. Amen.

It's not fair. We elected Hillary and got Donald Trump. Now we know that he was an agent of the trees, the only one capable to loose the new coronavirus, to crash the stock market, to provide shock therapy to a system that is working all too well. That show how far up this birds' eye view ascends. How far out. The Overstory. How could an author loose such control?

I was too slow to cue the usage of understory. The unconscious. Things you can't connect to, while making the best laid plans. There are ways to connect but we have nearly killed them all, even as our virally connected handhelds rob us of our actual consciousness. You know, don't you, that the machinery of Google is not meant to help you find things? No such power would be wasted on anything less than to concentrate money.

And yet that machinery can't help but spread more powerful seeds. Between and among the strange attractors of the occult value to predict your individual behaviors in ways that can be monetized (such an ugly word), there creep other words and images begging to keep the planet alive, and not to choke it with ever better instrumentation. That instrumentation tells us what is happening, but nowise what to do about it.

Do nothing, and the trees will do the rest. Do nothing and you will be reclaimed soon enough by earth.

And yet we did find that there are bosons which are the messenger particles for forces. We do know how to map our genome, and how to fool people into thinking they can know their personal story that way. To catalog against future misbehaviors.

We have yet to find our emotive centers, they are so displaced by the falsifying enthusiasms of chasing money to survive. Of watching ever more adrenaline clearing films.

Mind is out there in the forests and beyond. Only seeming to stand still for us. Those patterns will outlive even our local written tongues. There is no conception we can reveal which can equal the whole earth. We know only how to apply forces and logic.

Love is simultaneous. A goad to narrative. There is no force to it. There are no messenger particles. There are signs.

Those most ancient I Ching hexagrams, perhaps. The Tarot Stack. The Tree of life.

Which reader would you trust to tell your fortune? Why must we leave the psychopaths in charge? They will only tell you what you want to hear. They have an agenda.

The earth has none.

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