Poem: "The Arteest of Extinction"
Dec. 13th, 2022 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis poem is spillover from the December 6, 2022 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by ng_moonmoth. It also fills the "Extinction" square in my 12-1-22 card for the Wonders of Nature Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Artists of Destruction.
"The Arteest of Extinction"
Since the beginning, Gaia has
been a temperamental arteest.
She twirled through her atelier
in long flowing skirts, her bare feet
pattering over the smooth floorboards,
bangles chiming at wrists and ankles,
her wild hair pinned up with paintbrushes.
She forgot and put uncapped markers
into her patchwork vest, reached blindly
and drank from the "paint water" mug.
She has gone through so many phases
in her decoration of planet Earth.
There was the Brown Period
before life, all mineral swirls
and chemical spumes.
There was the Blue Period
when the microbes got going --
water, water everywhere
full of tiny things.
Then some of them
discovered Fire and
harnessed the Sun.
They filled the air
with oxygen, and that
killed almost everything.
It brought on the Green Period
with algae thriving around the world.
Eventually the plants became
more complex, moving from
single-celled to multicellular life,
and from green to multicolor.
The Cambrian Explosion was
an orgy of free love and flung paint.
This brainstorming led to some revision
as less successful shapes were edited out.
The creativity continued throughout
the Ordovician, with the establishment of
the first land plants, until it collapsed
into mass extinction at the end.
The Silurian brought vascular plants
and several terrestrial arthropods.
With the Devonian came
the first forests, painted in
wide swaths of green and gold;
true seeds evolved and began
their long search for diversity.
Tetrapods ventured onto land
and lay on the beaches, gazing
toward the beckoning woods.
With Gaia's attention on land,
the sea life faltered, losing
the armored fish along with
most of the jawless fish
in the late Devonian.
The Carboniferous period
flourished with vast rainforests
filled with amphibians and insects.
Gaia hummed happily to herself
as she sketched myriad leaf shapes
and enormous, rainbow wings.
Eventually the rainforests dried out
as Pangaea turned to desert during
the Permian period, but by that point,
other interesting things were springing up.
The giant amphibians soon gave way
to the synapsids and the sauropsids,
thriving in the drier conditions.
A fiery temper tantrum led to
the eruption of the Emeishan Traps.
The Capitanian mass extinction event was
especially hard on reef-building creatures.
Then the Siberian Traps went, spattering
the canvas with red lava and black basalt
as the Permian collapsed in the Great Dying.
Afterwards, though, life flourished in the Triassic
with the rise of pterosaurs and the first dinosaurs.
Some therapsids developed into true mammals.
The end-Triassic extinction included the eruption
of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, which
put out enough carbon dioxide to warm up
the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.
That killed off the conodonts and
collapsed coral reef communities.
The Jurassic dawned warmer and
wetter as Pangaea opened up
into Laurasia and Gondwana,
forests pushing toward the poles.
Dinosaurs dominated the land, while
sharks and rays arrived in the seas.
The Cretaceous blossomed in waves
of color as flowering plants appeared.
Dinosaurs continued to spread, and
new groups of mammals emerged.
The oceans swarmed with ammonites,
rudites, and marine reptiles. The climate
spread shallow inland seas all over.
It was dense and vivid and beautiful
until an asteroid splattered the paint.
Gaia screeched and clutched her hair,
dislodging one of the paintbrushes and
obliterating most of the dinosaurs.
"We don't make mistakes, we
just have happy accidents,"
she muttered. "Let's make 'em
birds! Yeah, they're birds now."
During the Paleogene, birds
and mammals diversified,
filling niches left empty by
dinosaurs and other losses.
The Neogene connected
North and South America.
It also saw the rise of
the first humans in Africa.
The Quaternary Period
was defined by the rise
and fall of the ice sheets
at the poles, following
fluctuations in climate.
Then Gaia noticed that
the humans had become
invasive and run entirely
out of control, ravaging
the land and sea alike.
Other species caught
in their wake crashed in
the Anthropocene Extinction.
Gaia flew into a rage again.
"FUCK IT!" she screamed, and
started scraping paint off the canvas.
But no matter how terrible her temper
or how many species wound up on
the atelier floor, history showed that
she always came up with something
even bigger and better than before.
* * *
Notes:
arteest
An artist who takes nobody and nothing seriously, not even themselves, and uses humor and parody in their art. The opposite of an artiste.
The arteest's sculpture was a hilarious commentary on nothing.
Artists are often eccentric, and some people use the term "arteest" for one who is prone to wild antics and mood swings in pursuit of inspiration.
Here is an example of Paint Water and Not Paint Water mugs. These exist in many variations, for the simple reason that a lot of artists need them.
A mass extinction is a time when the rate of species dying out rises dramatically above the average rate. Estimates range between 5 and 20 depending on methods of measurement.
Most people fail to count what was probably the first, and quite possibly the most extreme, mass extinction because it happened so far back that little information is available. This is the Great Farting Oxygen Event, when some plant life discovered fire and harnessed the power of the sun with photosynthesis ... thus turning a reducing atmosphere into an oxydizing atmosphere, and killing almost everything else on Earth. A few survived as archaea, obligate anaerobes that live in oxygen-poor environments because too much oxygen would kill them.
The Cambrian explosion featured a sudden and enormous diversification of lifeforms with increasing complexity.
The Cambrian–Ordovician extinction killed off many brachiopods and conodonts, also reducing trilobites.
The Ordovician period was dominated by invertebrates like molluscs and arthropods. It brought the first land plants and jawed fishes.
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event replaced Cambrian fauna with Paleozoic fauna such as suspension feeders.
The Late Ordovician mass extinction is the earliest of the most famous mass extinctions. It reduced all major taxonomic groups.
The Silurian period marked major developments in terrestrial life, and in water the diversification of jawed and bony fishes.
The Devonian period featured extensive forests on land, and placoderms dominated the waters.
The Late Devonian extinction spanned a series of pulses primarily affecting marine life, which almost wiped out reef-building organisms.
The Carboniferous period featured many tetrapods and early amphibians, along with major radiation of insects. The vast forests of this period later became coal beds.
The Permian Period saw the diversification of synapsids and sauropsids, dominating the supercontinent Pangaea.
The Carboniferous rainforest collapse was a minor event affecting primarily the coal forests.
The Capitanian mass extinction event decreased species richness, possibly related to eruptions creating the Emeishan Traps.
The Permian–Triassic extinction is the most severe known, likely caused by eruptions laying down the Siberian Traps.
The Triassic period was dominated by reptiles, and saw the first dinosaurs emerge along with the first pterosaurs. Therapsids declined overall, but the first true mammals evolved from this group. The climate was hot and dry, but eventually became more humid as Pangaea broke up.
The Triassic–Jurassic extinction event wiped out conodonts in the seas and most archosauromorphs on land.
The Jurassic period was dominated by dinosaurs and introduced the first avian dinosaurs. (Yes, birds are dinosaurs). In the seas, the first sharks appeared.
The Cretaceous period had a warm climate with shallow seas and forests to the poles. Flowering plants emerged and spread quickly.
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event wiped out pterosaurs, large marine reptiles, and non-avian dinosaurs. Its defining iridium layer was caused by an asteroid strike.
"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."
-- Bob Ross
"Ever make mistakes in life? Let's make them birds. Yeah, they're birds now."
-- Bob Ross
The Paleogene period featured the diversification of mammals.
The Neogene period saw the emergence of the first humans, Homo habilis. The climate cooled, leading to glaciations.
The Quaternary period is defined by cycles in ice sheets and climate changes.
The Anthropocene epoch depends on human impact, but people disagree about how to define it, largely because the easiest clear markers (like the nuclear bomb) came long after major impacts had changed the Earth. Among the biggest impacts is the Holocene extinction or Anthropocene extinction, which is comparable to rates in previous mass extinctions. Congratulations, humanity, your contribution to Earth approximates that of a comet. But you're still not the most destructive species ever: that was whichever alga invented photosynthesis.
Bob Ross once demonstrated (in Season 11, Episode 13) an advantage of alla prima painting (wet on wet). If you don't like how the painting is going, you can simply scrape off all the paint, leaving only the values behind. Then you paint something new over that background, which then serves an underpainting. This is very much like what happens in a mass distinction: all the details disappear, leaving more basic lifeforms that can be built up into new iterations.
ng_moonmoth. It also fills the "Extinction" square in my 12-1-22 card for the Wonders of Nature Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Artists of Destruction."The Arteest of Extinction"
Since the beginning, Gaia has
been a temperamental arteest.
She twirled through her atelier
in long flowing skirts, her bare feet
pattering over the smooth floorboards,
bangles chiming at wrists and ankles,
her wild hair pinned up with paintbrushes.
She forgot and put uncapped markers
into her patchwork vest, reached blindly
and drank from the "paint water" mug.
She has gone through so many phases
in her decoration of planet Earth.
There was the Brown Period
before life, all mineral swirls
and chemical spumes.
There was the Blue Period
when the microbes got going --
water, water everywhere
full of tiny things.
Then some of them
discovered Fire and
harnessed the Sun.
They filled the air
with oxygen, and that
killed almost everything.
It brought on the Green Period
with algae thriving around the world.
Eventually the plants became
more complex, moving from
single-celled to multicellular life,
and from green to multicolor.
The Cambrian Explosion was
an orgy of free love and flung paint.
This brainstorming led to some revision
as less successful shapes were edited out.
The creativity continued throughout
the Ordovician, with the establishment of
the first land plants, until it collapsed
into mass extinction at the end.
The Silurian brought vascular plants
and several terrestrial arthropods.
With the Devonian came
the first forests, painted in
wide swaths of green and gold;
true seeds evolved and began
their long search for diversity.
Tetrapods ventured onto land
and lay on the beaches, gazing
toward the beckoning woods.
With Gaia's attention on land,
the sea life faltered, losing
the armored fish along with
most of the jawless fish
in the late Devonian.
The Carboniferous period
flourished with vast rainforests
filled with amphibians and insects.
Gaia hummed happily to herself
as she sketched myriad leaf shapes
and enormous, rainbow wings.
Eventually the rainforests dried out
as Pangaea turned to desert during
the Permian period, but by that point,
other interesting things were springing up.
The giant amphibians soon gave way
to the synapsids and the sauropsids,
thriving in the drier conditions.
A fiery temper tantrum led to
the eruption of the Emeishan Traps.
The Capitanian mass extinction event was
especially hard on reef-building creatures.
Then the Siberian Traps went, spattering
the canvas with red lava and black basalt
as the Permian collapsed in the Great Dying.
Afterwards, though, life flourished in the Triassic
with the rise of pterosaurs and the first dinosaurs.
Some therapsids developed into true mammals.
The end-Triassic extinction included the eruption
of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, which
put out enough carbon dioxide to warm up
the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.
That killed off the conodonts and
collapsed coral reef communities.
The Jurassic dawned warmer and
wetter as Pangaea opened up
into Laurasia and Gondwana,
forests pushing toward the poles.
Dinosaurs dominated the land, while
sharks and rays arrived in the seas.
The Cretaceous blossomed in waves
of color as flowering plants appeared.
Dinosaurs continued to spread, and
new groups of mammals emerged.
The oceans swarmed with ammonites,
rudites, and marine reptiles. The climate
spread shallow inland seas all over.
It was dense and vivid and beautiful
until an asteroid splattered the paint.
Gaia screeched and clutched her hair,
dislodging one of the paintbrushes and
obliterating most of the dinosaurs.
"We don't make mistakes, we
just have happy accidents,"
she muttered. "Let's make 'em
birds! Yeah, they're birds now."
During the Paleogene, birds
and mammals diversified,
filling niches left empty by
dinosaurs and other losses.
The Neogene connected
North and South America.
It also saw the rise of
the first humans in Africa.
The Quaternary Period
was defined by the rise
and fall of the ice sheets
at the poles, following
fluctuations in climate.
Then Gaia noticed that
the humans had become
invasive and run entirely
out of control, ravaging
the land and sea alike.
Other species caught
in their wake crashed in
the Anthropocene Extinction.
Gaia flew into a rage again.
"FUCK IT!" she screamed, and
started scraping paint off the canvas.
But no matter how terrible her temper
or how many species wound up on
the atelier floor, history showed that
she always came up with something
even bigger and better than before.
* * *
Notes:
arteest
An artist who takes nobody and nothing seriously, not even themselves, and uses humor and parody in their art. The opposite of an artiste.
The arteest's sculpture was a hilarious commentary on nothing.
Artists are often eccentric, and some people use the term "arteest" for one who is prone to wild antics and mood swings in pursuit of inspiration.
Here is an example of Paint Water and Not Paint Water mugs. These exist in many variations, for the simple reason that a lot of artists need them.
A mass extinction is a time when the rate of species dying out rises dramatically above the average rate. Estimates range between 5 and 20 depending on methods of measurement.
Most people fail to count what was probably the first, and quite possibly the most extreme, mass extinction because it happened so far back that little information is available. This is the Great Farting Oxygen Event, when some plant life discovered fire and harnessed the power of the sun with photosynthesis ... thus turning a reducing atmosphere into an oxydizing atmosphere, and killing almost everything else on Earth. A few survived as archaea, obligate anaerobes that live in oxygen-poor environments because too much oxygen would kill them.
The Cambrian explosion featured a sudden and enormous diversification of lifeforms with increasing complexity.
The Cambrian–Ordovician extinction killed off many brachiopods and conodonts, also reducing trilobites.
The Ordovician period was dominated by invertebrates like molluscs and arthropods. It brought the first land plants and jawed fishes.
The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event replaced Cambrian fauna with Paleozoic fauna such as suspension feeders.
The Late Ordovician mass extinction is the earliest of the most famous mass extinctions. It reduced all major taxonomic groups.
The Silurian period marked major developments in terrestrial life, and in water the diversification of jawed and bony fishes.
The Devonian period featured extensive forests on land, and placoderms dominated the waters.
The Late Devonian extinction spanned a series of pulses primarily affecting marine life, which almost wiped out reef-building organisms.
The Carboniferous period featured many tetrapods and early amphibians, along with major radiation of insects. The vast forests of this period later became coal beds.
The Permian Period saw the diversification of synapsids and sauropsids, dominating the supercontinent Pangaea.
The Carboniferous rainforest collapse was a minor event affecting primarily the coal forests.
The Capitanian mass extinction event decreased species richness, possibly related to eruptions creating the Emeishan Traps.
The Permian–Triassic extinction is the most severe known, likely caused by eruptions laying down the Siberian Traps.
The Triassic period was dominated by reptiles, and saw the first dinosaurs emerge along with the first pterosaurs. Therapsids declined overall, but the first true mammals evolved from this group. The climate was hot and dry, but eventually became more humid as Pangaea broke up.
The Triassic–Jurassic extinction event wiped out conodonts in the seas and most archosauromorphs on land.
The Jurassic period was dominated by dinosaurs and introduced the first avian dinosaurs. (Yes, birds are dinosaurs). In the seas, the first sharks appeared.
The Cretaceous period had a warm climate with shallow seas and forests to the poles. Flowering plants emerged and spread quickly.
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event wiped out pterosaurs, large marine reptiles, and non-avian dinosaurs. Its defining iridium layer was caused by an asteroid strike.
"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."
-- Bob Ross
"Ever make mistakes in life? Let's make them birds. Yeah, they're birds now."
-- Bob Ross
The Paleogene period featured the diversification of mammals.
The Neogene period saw the emergence of the first humans, Homo habilis. The climate cooled, leading to glaciations.
The Quaternary period is defined by cycles in ice sheets and climate changes.
The Anthropocene epoch depends on human impact, but people disagree about how to define it, largely because the easiest clear markers (like the nuclear bomb) came long after major impacts had changed the Earth. Among the biggest impacts is the Holocene extinction or Anthropocene extinction, which is comparable to rates in previous mass extinctions. Congratulations, humanity, your contribution to Earth approximates that of a comet. But you're still not the most destructive species ever: that was whichever alga invented photosynthesis.
Bob Ross once demonstrated (in Season 11, Episode 13) an advantage of alla prima painting (wet on wet). If you don't like how the painting is going, you can simply scrape off all the paint, leaving only the values behind. Then you paint something new over that background, which then serves an underpainting. This is very much like what happens in a mass distinction: all the details disappear, leaving more basic lifeforms that can be built up into new iterations.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-14 02:39 am (UTC)Also, this would be interesting to see illustrated, especially if someone was skilled with multiple art mediums.
Thoughts
Date: 2022-12-14 02:52 am (UTC)Sadly, most of my friends are writers, not artists.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2022-12-21 02:58 am (UTC)