> mechanistic, dead universe. This is a very Christian and
> post-Christian notion alien to the pre-Christian world, where
> you have self-guided forms bursting out all over the place.
>
> Heidegger talked about this kind of thing a lot.
And Kabalistic Judaism, Hinduism and other versions of pantheism.
My favored literary metaphor of self-reproducing nature comes from Eastern European literature: Bruno Schulz, _The Cinnamon Shops_ http://www.schulzian.net/cinnamon/treatise1.htm
<<<-DEMIURGUS-said my father-did not possess a monopoly on creation; creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is prone to infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital power and, at the same time, the beguiling strength of temptation that entices us to fashioning. Deep within matter indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions are constrained, congealing attempts at figurations. All matter ripples with infinite possibilities, which pass through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the invigorating breath of the soul it overflows endlessly into itself; it entices us with a thousand sweet encirclements and a softness that it dreams up out of itself in its blind reveries.
Devoid of its own initiative, voluptuously pliant, malleable in the feminine fashion, compliant in the face of all impulses-open to every kind of charlatanism and dilettantism, it constitutes outlaw terrain, the domain of all abuses and dubious demiurgic manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless essence in the cosmos. Any may knead and shape it, and to each it is submissive. All arrangements of matter are impermanent and loose, liable to retardation and dissolution. There is nothing evil in the reduction of life to other and new forms. Murder is not a sin. Many a time it is a necessary infringement, in the face of stubborn and ossified forms of being that have ceased to be remarkable. In the interests of an exciting and valuable experiment it might even constitute a service. Here is a point of departure for a new apologia for sadism.
My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of that uncanny element; such was matter.-There is no dead matter-he taught-lifelessness is merely a semblance behind which unidentified forms of life lay concealed. The range of those forms is infinite, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. Demiurgus was in possession of valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these he called a multitude of genera into being, renewing themselves by their own strength. It is not known whether those recipes will ever be reconstructed. But it is unnecessary, for even should those classical methods of creation prove once and for all to be inaccessible, there remain certain illegal methods, a whole host of heretical and illicit methods.>>>
I think it makes a nicer read than Heidegger ;)
Wojtek