Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic (2018) — III: Acceptance
5) Devonian: Nascent
Devonian Period Hallmarks
- Trees emerge, dominate the land
- Jawed armored fish emerge, dominate food webs
- Fish and Arthropods move to land → Complex land food webs → Seasonal rhythms become more important
- O2 decrease → Dual-phase Late Devonian Extinctions
Anger and Grief
A monotone hum gives way to a tranquil opening. Rising notes play with hesitant strings coloring a sonic structure founded on a low, somber viola. The shared awareness of Life and Earth emerges into an aerial dream, “soaring above the surface,” as a wary percussive acuity sets the emotional tone for “horizons shifting in blue.” The angry confusion of Life is gone, replaced with something appreciative but uneasy.
It has begun to move out of the subconscious of the ocean and onto the self-awareness of the surface and land. So it is now aware of its own super mind and no longer fighting it, accepting its own fluctuations, symbolized by the novel importance of seasons to a Life newly emerging from the stability of aquatic temperature regulation.
This newly waking Life sees that there’s a path for it to follow, but it’s overgrown, difficult to find, “elusively kept.” And Earth won’t respond as to what it should do. The iterations of the sleep for which it recently yearned beginning to fall into a larger scheme. So Life makes it a priority to articulate the protean contents of this new beautiful mind, full of soaring thoughts, before they are lost to sleep again.
Life then looks up and gains a deeper clarity for the vastness of the cosmos. If the Silurian day marked its realization of the Earth being a substrate of the Sun, the Devonian day is when Life comes to appreciate the existence of other Suns, and therefore its own replicability, and its paradoxical solitude given this replicability. Gaining awareness of itself as an iteration of an outcome in a cosmic equation rendering at an astronomic scale, Life simultaneously becomes aware of itself and its forlornment. Lamenting that it could have such unbounded dreams and no one to share them with. Because the Earth still won’t respond.
What would Life ask it? I imagine whatever one would ask a parent, or a god:
Why did you create me? Why must I die? Why do I find beauty in things if only to die?
While these questions come to Life, they don’t come in words. Kind of like how a dog can think and feel but without an articulate language. So Life struggles, fettered by this inability to give a shape to its thoughts, “A song that remains unsung, chain around my neck.” Especially worried about the impending night and the potential it would deny, “This violent storm ahead, of time never spent.” Sleep is no longer something for which Life yearns.
A build up. Processing this cruelty of circumstance before erupting with gutteral force, one word — “Nascent.” A child lamenting that it would die.
The beauty of its dreams replaced with the the bleakness of its fears, these are now what soar in this young mind, but below the surface, descending as it journeys to a place inside with shifting horizons. Life retreats back into its subconscious, feeling only its fears as sleep comes. A tragedy that something birthed into airy, respiring, beauty would die in cold, sinking despair.
6) The Carboniferous: Rainforest Collapse
Carboniferous Period Hallmarks
- Increased O2 + humidity → Swamps and rainforests emerge
- Temperature fluctuations → Life concentrated along stable equator
- Reptiles and large insects emerge
- 2 largest continents fuse → Oceanic humidity can’t reach inland → Most carboniferous forests die
Flux
No lyrics. Carboniferous Period permeated with consistent strumming notes at a moderate tempo, echoing the increased activity of the time. The song also has this skipping percussion whose volume fluctuates and crescendoes in acute cadences.
This was a time where wild temperature fluctuations made it impossible for life to exist away from the equator, a minority region of stability, and that is reflected in the sound.
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Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic Essay —
III: Acceptance
