Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic (2018) — II: Confusion
3) Ordovicium: The Glaciation of Gondwana
Ordovician Period Hallmarks
- Tectonic activity → Gondwana (pre-Pangea, supercontinent)
- Tectonic activity → Sea levels decrease → Isolated island habitats
- Isolated habitats & O2 rise →Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event
- Jawless vertebrate fish emerge, dominate food webs
- Small plants first life on land, dominate → CO2 crash → Ice Age → Ordovician-Silurian Extinction
Confusion and Law
Life’s voice emerges and reveals a frustrated helplessness as it watches the Earth split open, spilling its fiery guts. The Earth is on its own quaking, lethal, molten rhythm that Life simply can’t predict, “You show your true colors only in my absence.” It can’t read Earth and complains about “communication” between them, confused why Earth killed so much of it to close out the Cambrian. And Life has only recently developed teeth, hence the references to “grinding your teeth” and getting “[kicked] in the teeth.” Life feels betrayed even if it hasn’t developed self-awareness yet; even a worm knows to fear/hate the thing that would kill it. It needs Earth and feels like Earth “[makes] believe [Life] was never here.”
The response we get from Earth is at the end, “I turned the tables on you after you seized everything that was not nailed to the floor.” Once Life left the ocean floor and began to swim, encroaching on an ocean that belonged to the Earth, Earth responded in the name of “justice and equity.” This is an Earth that does not nurture; it exacts. You take from it, it expects something back.
We also get the first imagery of the ocean as a house of evil, “The devil takes the hindmost,” both an Abrahamic idea as well as a reference to natural selection. An image begins to emerge of The Earth being something that shares many of the unpredictable and mysterious features of the Abrahamic God, who giveth and taketh, an entity that nourishes but also extinguishes all but small remnants of Life en masse arbitrarily. Especially when we encroach on its Law, something Life can’t comprehend yet.
Although this sort of encroachment is a natural thing for Life to do. After all, the single defining feature of Life is a resistance to decay, which growth and proliferation serve. So Life is naturally confused. It wants to know what Earth wants — maybe even articulated in the form of a law/guide book of sorts (in a different album) — yet Earth remains mysterious.
4) Silurian: Age of Scorpions
Silurian Period Hallmarks
- Glaciers melt → Ice Age ends
- Dog-sized sea scorpions emerge, dominate ocean floor food webs
- Jawed vertebrate fish emerge, dominate oceanic food webs
- Sea levels decrease → Bottom-feeders die → Silurian-Devonian Extinction
Fatalistic Solace
This is a song about Life, who wakes this time seeing a dry, dusty red. I can’t find anything about the Silurian skies being red other than the sun being closer to orange-yellow in color, so I think this is simply a way to visualize how Life is feeling — angry.
We also see the emergence of a shared subconscious between Life and Earth, where shadows move around. These shadows are symbolized by the sea scorpions that dominate the oceanic depths of subconsciousness, in contrast to the surface air that Life was previously fixated on. This ocean-consciousness double entendre is explored in another album, Pelagial.
Life realizes that this uncomfortable darkness exists in a part of its mind it also didn’t know existed and laments the inevitable extinction approaching. Which is how we learn that each Period is a geological day. Life is essentially waking at the beginning of each day as a geologic period after Earth almost kills it; sleep is the cousin of death after all. Every time it wakes from this near-death it tries to understand why the Earth keeps doing this.
And makes some progress. If the Earth is trapped in orbit of the Sun, slave to its light in order for Life to exist, then Life starts understanding that the Earth is beholden to its own substrate too. In light of these larger cycles and systems, Life begins to embrace the uncertainty of its future. Maybe it will wake from the next night; maybe it won’t.
Life and Earth have communicated more than before but its meaning is unclear. Why does it have to be this way? Life thinks of gratitude and kindness for its next day and yearns for sleep. It doesn’t yet understand why because it keeps forgetting its previous cycle but seems to know that the cruelty of sleep isn’t the end.
Life now sees blue skies, its anger replaced with peaceful acceptance of the inevitable. It’s okay if it never wakes again. And somehow knows the Earth is proud of what they have already achieved together.
Important to note that in the Ordovician track, Life was merely a bundle of simple emotions, where here we see its collective psyche push that darkness into a subconscious layer as a higher, conscious layer emerges. If Life is a naturally occurring phenomenon then so is consciousness, which means that in this album concept, Life’s mind emerges as Life evolves, dependent on Earth in the same way that our thoughts depend on our brains. Each time an extinction happens, it frees up food chains to begin again from the evolutionary heights the previous extinction cycle was able to reach. Jawless invertebrates were the pinnacle of biotic achievement at the end of the Cambrian, which serves as the starting point for the Ordovician and probably why it comes to be dominated by jawless vertebrates by its end.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic Essay —
II: Confusion
