Ice Cream Aloha

The Desire

  The remote upland forest stares across at the lime-green ocean that extends far beyond the horizons stretching to ...where? It allows Suzi to sense the reservoir of biological diversity; it rises into the cloud on the western shore, the river-laced coastal forest. It never blinks with its thousand-mile stare, as if wondering about Suzi in the work station, steeped in forest and mountain computation; theJungle, never a quick access to the hunter, theHuman hunter, the one with a veneer of morality (really?), exploding urbanities, devastating the rain forests of the world behind the mask of want. What a surprise it must have been, the day they had discovered this, the day they discovered theNature had endured its own jungle empty syndrome under stress(J.E.S.U.S.) computations for centuries only to emerge as a landscape of green silence. What could it have felt to have its own designs on value systems, its computations with varieties of objects and logics found waiting to be gathered, its extensibility, allowing itself to operate under its own power? Was it—really, now--a cave art to spin its own writings and drawings with its own built-in measures and marks, sensing its intertwining of theDNA, sensing the possibilities of treaties being broken with laws of the forest? This couldn't have been, Suzi wonders, the place where the hand of theHumans began. Here would have been crafted the first of the newest tools long before the computer, nature's finest moment, the opposable thumb—theDNA's expressiveness of single ideas and images, the original tool for writing and measuring; and yet, still the small tendrils remain, slender leaves with essential oils, resins. thin feathery leaves never cultivated, pleasantly scented in branched crowns. Are these the headwaters of desire?