Reading is an Aspect of Writing: M. M. Waldrop

"[E]very topic of interest had at its heart a system composed of many, many "agents". These agents might be molecules or neurons or species or consumers or even corporations. But whatever their nature, the agents [are] constantly organizing and reorganizing themselves into larger structures through the clash of mutual accomodation and mutual rivalry. Thus, molecules ... form cells, neurons ...form brains, species ...form ecosystems, consumers and corporations ... form economies, and so on. At each level, new emergent structures ... form and engage in new emergent behaviours. Complexity, in other words, [is] ... a science of emergence."

--from Complexity, the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop

schools
flocks
swarms

fire spread
starfish outbreaks
invasions of exotic plants

flows through porous media
flows that create their own channels through a medium

collapsing sand hills
nuclear chain reactions

if then the epidemic dies out naturally
if then the epidemic spreads indefinitely

seed dispersal
animal migration

flake

flake

...roughness...

head twisted to look to the wall feet in water and hand feels fur the loopy kind tacky floors and a musty smell a stack of bills lopsided the long white wire of the camera like the one she’d drawn on her skin this one connects does not repel to think of cutting it and floating there in the water a while longer rather than rushing to the street to see who might be passing slow tick of a new appliance when had she last written this way upright mechanical (but the need to see who might be behind glass)