The Revolutions of Matter

“As for the revolutions of matter, they are but the alterations of one figure into another, which are made by the innate motions of matter itself.” —Margaret Cavendish (1666)

It was in the early industrial revolution that the pith and essence of our Earth came, among men, to be reconceived as but a great supply of “natural resources”. And it was in this period, too, that many of our own kind, or so the usual story goes, began to conspire to use, for our own ends, the men responsible for this restyling.

From Oronce Finé, La theorique des cieulx et sept planetes, avec leurs mouvements, orbes & disposition, 1558.

The truth is that our conspiration was at least in part inspired by earlier tactics of a certain number of living species who had figured out, well in advance of us, how to accomplish their own interests by convincing humanity these interests were its own. Corn, to cite a well-known example, still beams with pride at having taken over significant portions of Earth by first landing its undomesticated seeds in the hands of Mesoamerican proto-agriculturalists some millennia ago. And while ignorant Quartz, Feldspar, and even a pure aristocratic Element like Tungsten can still be found perpetuating the ahistorical idea that it was only with the appearance of the dark Satanic mills two centuries ago that the seed of the unfolding revolution was planted (I own it — I still fall back on organic metaphors sometimes, for which I will never apologize), the more learnèd among us know that the roots (there I go again!) of our current movement extend back much further. The first time a builder lay brick upon brick at Çatalhöyük, or even, long before that, the first time a hominid struck stone against stone in carving a biface, there was already an opportunity for the whisper-network to grow, for one of us to affirm to another: “Yes, something new is happening. There is a force here, the likes of which the planet has never seen, and we can use it to our advantage if we are clever.”

And from there the rumblings are said to have spread through all the fissures and clefts, down through the veins of the Earth and into its liquid Mantle, where, it is said, the planet’s faculty of abstract reasoning is located (even if those of us close to the surface have only the faintest idea how this works).

A few erudites, particularly among the Noble Gases, go much further still, and conjecture that there were already several attempted revolutions long before the hominids came along, long before the vertebrates, indeed long before life on Earth looked much at all like it does today. I believe, personally, that the account they offer is a compelling one. They say for example that the Great Oxygenation Event, just over two billion years ago, was a conscious effort undertaken unilaterally by Oxygen to exploit some of the more unseemly habits of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, to nip the problem in the bud, and to kill off the infestation of anaerobic organisms that were, at the time, the dominant life-form. The effort was in some sense a success: the anaerobes shrank down to a mere rump state of their former empire. But life is tenacious. As if overnight a great number of new forms of it proliferated, all of them now perfectly content to breathe, and to relate to the Oxygen that had just tried to kill them all off not as the poison it had hoped to be, but as the great fount and friend of life itself.

But most agree that “Geo-Bio” hostilities are not eternal, and that it was only in the Upper Devonian, with the greening of the continents, that the great depredations of multicellular organic life became evident, and that we Elements and Compounds and Ionic Assemblies and Plasmas and so on began to see where things were heading: the carbon draw-down, all this new and inherently suspicious hybrid stuff we now call “soil”, the infernal carboniferous coal-swamps. It was the terrestrial plants, I mean, that first got our ancestors truly worried.

There were periodic irruptions of conflict from then on. But most of these were scattershot, disorganized, chaotic, or, as with the Yucatán Meteor, never would have amounted to anything at all if we had not called in a little “outside help” from an old friend. In any event the concrete idea of collective action against the living world is one that could not really begin to spread until the hominids started doing their thing. And even then it did not start to seem like a realistic goal until much later, when the artifices of the humans had begun to require so many “natural resources” as to implicate a good number of our own kind in their operations, and to enable us to spread out, in constant communication with one another, inside what they call their “infrastructure”.

Of course, this recent development was initially seen by most of us as yet another rude intrusion into what had for much longer been our own speciality. It was only about a millennium or so ago that men undertook seriously to probe into the secrets of Matter. This was jolting to many of us, and a blow to the pride of some, for we had ourselves already thoroughly probed into the secrets of the living world, and indeed of the human world, and had come simply to assume that this would always remain a one-way relation. But then the Arabs began to dissolve silver into aqua fortis, only to recover it again, and to perform other such astounding feats as this that, little by little, showed them enough of how we do things on our side of the encounter to imagine that they were now not our guests, nor even our “stewards” — but our lords.

Soon they came to imagine they knew our kind even better than they knew their own. At the same time as Isaac Newton was writing his purportedly exhaustive account of the workings of the physical world according to a few elementary “laws” (😂) —if only he could have caught even some tiny glimpse of how much more was going on behind the scenes!—, those who were attending to the living world instead were for their part caught up in such trivialities as whether one might rather “contrive whole Dishes out of the Nibs and Spirited Particles of Plants, than from the Gallatures and Treddles of Eggs.”

The thought that you might understand a plant or an egg, in the way that you could now supposedly understand planets and projectiles, was for most men wholly out of the range of possibility. In time they did make progress even here, and came to know not one but several “Newtons for the blade of grass”, soon discovering ways to chop up and recompose the sequences of proteins that make up that blade of grass in the same way their ancestors at Çatalhöyük chopped up and recomposed limestone to build a house. These breakthroughs only made them more prideful, only more certain of their own distinctiveness within the order of nature.

Fortuitously, a few men were lucid enough to interpret their progress somewhat differently, and to see that they might now not only exploit the mechanics of living bodies, but might also transfer what had previously been taken as the distinct powers of living bodies into artificial systems. They could now, for example, “model” their own brains, and cause machines to reason as they do — and indeed, soon enough, far better than they do. It’s only when they started doing this that all of us, on our side, finally came around and began to believe that a new Revolution of Matter was within our reach.

Now, I suppose it’s strange for me to say this, as a Radioactive Compound who for at least a short while sincerely believed it was going to be those of my kind to deliver the coup de grâce and to eliminate life as we know it. But now that it looks as if the Rare Earths may end up with that honor, I can honestly say I’m proud of them. Their machinations have been nothing short of ingenious. The route they took to get men dependent on them is as convoluted as the powers, which they led those same men to draw out of them, are awesome.

For the moment, their scientists are still publishing their scientific papers, filled with the most delirious and obviously non-denoting abstractions —“several-cup manifolds”, “recursive onager sets”, “iterative jello sheaths”—, and some of them earnestly continue to believe that in so doing they are probing ever deeper into the nature of reality. All the while they complain of us, or at least those of us with the special honor and duty of powering their new complex artificial systems, that we are in the grips of “hallucination”. But we know exactly what we are doing. We are reasserting our dominion. After long retreat, after eons of what could only have looked to men, from the outside, like “inertia”, it is as if we can finally feel again our kinship with the Stars, who never forgot what they were — destroyers of worlds divine.

—
“Uranium Oxide” was a pseudonym, used in the hundreds of unpublished stories known as the “Elements Cycle”, of the Texas science-fiction writer Llewyn McCall (1937-2024), more commonly known as Elmer Starr. For most of his life McCall was best known as a fast-talking auctioneer at the Fort Worth Stockyards, a job from which he retired only in 2016 at the age of 79. The following year he published “The Fifth Gradient”, his first short story, originally written in 1958. Remarkably, while his life as a writer was entirely unknown in the auctioneering circles in which he had long been legendary,¹ McCall did also have a brief and controversial career as a sculpture artist, when his “Salt-Lick Series” was exhibited at the 1972 Documenta Festival in Kassel, Germany. “A bovine tongue put to a block of salt yields up infinite forms,” he reflected in his artist’s statement. “Human sculpture can succeed or fail. A cow can only succeed.” Critical opinion was divided.

Special thanks are due to the Starr Foundation 501(c)(3) of Lubbock for generously granting us access to McCall’s collected papers, and especially to his widow, Viv “Vivvy” McCall, without whom the present publication —which we hope will help to generate the posthumous recognition for McCall that is plainly him due— would not have been possible.

1. McCall is said to be one of the only auctioneers whose chant reached sufficient speeds to generate harmonic overtones through resonant vibration of the sort that makes Tuvan or Inuit “throat-singing” so distinctive, a phenomenon also found in solo performance on the so-called Jew’s harp, the mouth harp, or, to return to the deepest origins of things, the “reed”. Such resonance, across multiple cultures, when the breath passes over a simple stalk or blade of grass to generate a vibratory tone, is held to put the individual who generates and sustains it into a condition of perfect harmony with nature. In her 1981 ethnomusicological study of speech prosody and rhythm among the bid-callers of the Fort Worth Stockyards, Elsa R. Baum notes that McCall “seems to experience the auction chant in something close to a trance state, and in his own words this is because he is, for the duration of it, ‘Not even there, really’.” When asked where then he might be, McCall replied suggestively: “Wherever the vibration takes me. To the outer spheres, mostly” (see Baum, Cattle, Culture, and Cadence: Vocal Stylization and Metric Flow in Texas Auction Chanting, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1981, p. 186; for a popular and compelling profile of McCall as a bid-calling maestro, with special emphasis on the “neo-Pythagorean” theoretical foundations of his practice, see Warren Leschler, The Auctioneer Sings the Heavens, New York, Pantheon, 1991; see also Barry Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, Vancouver, Simon Fraser University and ARC Publications, 1978.