The Aqueous Memory of Asphalt
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| Photo by Josh Hild |
I. Where the Pulse Begins
It begins not with a decision, but with a twitch — an involuntary flicker of something old.
Somewhere, submerged beneath obsidian waves, a jellyfish contracts. Not with purpose or panic, but because it is what it knows. Not knowledge in the cognitive sense, but the ancient choreography of muscle and water. Movement is not chosen. It is inherited.
Far above, detached from tide and salt, another figure stands at the brink — a curb in a humming city. The pedestrian signal switches from red to green. There is no conscious consent, yet feet move. The body steps forward before the brain confirms its permission. A synchrony occurs — subtle, deliberate, as though all participants had rehearsed beneath some shared script.
Jellyfish and commuters. Bioluminescent and backlit. Aquatic and urban. Both pulse to cues unseen, both surrender to systems older than comprehension.
Not imitation — but a strange echo. And echoes, after all, mean something once made a sound.
II. Intelligence Without Intellect
Proprioception: the body's quiet understanding of its place in space.
Jellyfish possess no brain, no singular helm, and yet drift with unsettling elegance. They traverse the ocean not through strategy but through surrender, relying on a somatic grammar written long before language was invented.
Humans, enamored with autonomy, still yield to signals. We pride ourselves on thought, yet obey the blinking icons of our cities as obediently as coral polyps respond to sunlight. We wait when told. We go when allowed.
But it doesn’t feel like loss. It feels like fluency. The sidewalk does not ask to be known. The crosswalk doesn’t plead — it glows. The body responds not as a subject, but as a reader of ambient syntax.
The jellyfish, pulsing forward, trusts the sea will catch its fall. The pedestrian trusts the city to cradle each step. Neither asks for a reason.
III. Lightspeak and Sea-Script
The sea writes in phosphorescence. Flash, flicker, glide — a morse code of the deep. Words are not needed where presence alone communicates. A jellyfish doesn't speak, but it doesn’t have to. Luminescence becomes language. Visibility becomes survival.
Cities mimic this with their own dialect of light. Pedestrian signals, traffic flows, neon signs all conspire into a grammar of movement. No punctuation marks, just cues. A blinking green man doesn’t command — it persuades.
We speak of “the city never sleeping,” but perhaps it simply never stops blinking.
To walk across a street is to enter a silent dialogue. The kind that doesn’t care for sound, only compliance. And so, we do what jellyfish have done for eons — we pulse forward, lit from within or without, trusting that meaning lies not in the motion, but in its repetition.
IV. Of Drift and Dignity
Drift is misunderstood. Often dismissed as laziness or indecision, it’s actually a negotiation.
A jellyfish survives not by resisting the current, but by conversing with it. Its movement is not passive — it’s strategic acquiescence.
Likewise, urban walkers — particularly in rain, particularly in rush — don’t calculate every footfall. Their bodies know the weight of wet pavement, the texture of slipperiness, the measure of urgency. There’s a quiet grace in it, a dignity found not in command but in cooperation.
Sometimes, at a busy crossing, a crowd pauses in perfect simultaneity. The hush before the light changes feels sacred. For a fraction of a second, every person — stranger, cynic, lover, loner — becomes part of something choreographed but unnamed. Then comes movement.
No conductor. No applause. Just motion, shared and sacred.
V. The Body as Oracle
The longer one lives, the more the body inherits the burden of remembering. Memory shifts from recollection to reflex. It is no longer “I recall,” but “I know — somewhere, wordlessly.”
The jellyfish contracts without knowing why. The pedestrian waits at the curb, then crosses when it feels right. This isn’t impulse. It’s something gentler. Something ancestral.
We like to believe we choose our motions. In truth, we submit to them.
And perhaps that’s not a weakness, but a kind of peace — the peace of knowing that not everything must be decided. Some things — like jellyfish pulses and sidewalk steps — simply are.
VI. Pulse, Pattern, Personhood
There is a metaphysical rhythm to existence. From the thrum of a jellyfish’s bell to the calculated pause before a pedestrian’s stride, the world keeps time.
Some call it instinct. Some call it surrender. Some call it survival. But perhaps — just perhaps — motion is our truest dialect. Not thought, not language, not logic, but movement.
A jellyfish pulses because it must. A commuter steps forward not in rebellion or faith, but because the moment swells and says: now.
And who are we, if not creatures that listen for that swell?
The last time I stood at a crosswalk, under a flickering LED sky, someone beside me whispered, “Go.”
But I’d already begun.
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