A plague of ants
The other day, I suddenly found that my living room/kitchen was being invaded by ants.
I associate ants with rented holiday flats in the south of Spain, and couldn't quite believe their presence in a flat in Scotland.
I guess they're just another piece of evidence of the catastrophically rising global temperatures that our politicians so consistently and inexplicably ignore.
But there they were: repellent and hypnotically fascinating and utterly admirable all at the same time.
I keep attacking them and disrupting their scent trails with vinegar; and they keep coming back.
They seem organised and intelligent and purposeful in a way completely beyond my understanding.
They embody and represent, I guess, the infinite, inextinguishable life force that created our world and us and will keep on creating long after we have gone.
Some people, too, seem to embody that life force.
Maybe Jesus was one of them, and maybe because he was hooked into that life force he was able to heal all those people (if today’s stories are really true).
Matthew the storyteller paints a picture of him blithely disregarding the fact that he’d told the devil just the other day that performing miracles was not where it was at.
But there is: performing miracles of healing wherever he goes…
As for me, I keep on performing melancholy acts of formic destruction.
I've written about ants and intelligence before, fascinating wee things. I. was addressing an observation by an artist friend, a painter, when he saw ants working together to rescue themselves trapped in a bottle of wayer. Thought I'd share my veiw of them here .
First, ants are probably not aware of themselves as individuals in the way humans or some animals are. They lack self-awareness in the cognitive sense, for example, they don’t recognize themselves in mirrors or reflect on their own identity.
However, ants do have complex behaviours that might seem “intelligent,” such as communication, navigation, and cooperation. These behaviors arise from simple rules and chemical signals (like pheromones), not from a sense of self. In essence, an ant functions more like a tiny part of a larger system, the colony, which some scientists compare to a “superorganism.” The colony itself can show forms of collective intelligence even though individual ants don’t have self-awareness.
Artistic Intelligence AI, like yours is of a different order, it sees beyond reason, its original, authentic and visionary, not to be confused with Artificial Intelligence AI, which does not reason it at all, rather it processes, calculates, imitates, regurgitates, efficient, but blind to meaning, not unlike Ant Intelligence AI. Artistic intelligence feels its way forward, creating from insight, not blind instruction.
Three AI's. ant, artificial and artistic.