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In the context of "deep time"--which Arlo presented as unmeasurable, unimaginable--I was struck most by his nearly off-hand comment that, since "the earth's size is finite," continents that leave "have to come back," so that the movement of landforms "have their own pulse." In his narrative, time may have been infinite, but space was definite: bounded, constricting, determinative. I'm trying now to get my head around a possible correlation, in this story, between the expansiveness of time and the limitations of space. What Alice says below about the spaces opened up by poetry echoes here: bounded, finite, but infinite.

Liz and I are planning to talk, when we meet next in February, about a perspective on the world that seems congruent w/ the human-minimizing view Arlo just shared.  When she and I went to Atlanta together in November, to speak @ the Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, we learned about "object-orientated ontology" (OOO), which tries to think about the world NOT from a human perspective, but rather re-oriented from the point of view of non-human objects. Stay tuned....