"The only difference between memory and imagination is that we choose to ascribe to truth to one and not the other." -Tom Blue Wolf
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies–all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. This hour of Radiolab, we ask how this happens.
We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, and even our very own brains with fire-flyologists, ant experts, neurologists, a mathematician, and an economist.
…round and around, the indefatigable beacon of a lone lighthouse circumscribes its reach into the undulating darkness of its existence
round and around, sublimating in minuscule disparate droplets the diaphanous salty echoes of its refracted expressions
round and around, this institutional orbital insistence on resigned altruism carving speckled approximations upon the fabled horizon beyond
round and around, a voidness, long and latitudinal, recurrently ubiquitous, the voidness
round and around,
a piscean glimpse piercing the plane from below endeavoring for air
a vanishing dappled reflection of the loyal if distant nocturnal companion above
a distant flickering glance floating slowly across stirring false hopes in its retreating wake
round and around,
still
yet
round and around, the imprecise exactitude of this existential incapacity to escape the
round and around, round and around, round and around
when, another round and around encompasses
the light within brilliance of its own
the tacit exhortations within the acceptance of its undertaking
round and around, daybreak…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
