Shit rules dynastically: from all the many colors, shapes and forms of the food they eat, people regularly give birth to a succession of near-unvarying smelly brown cocoons, like a butterfly’s metamorphosis in reverse. But yet these cast-offs retain enough value and fertility to bloom forth anew in plants and flowers and trees. And when such trees grow large and strong enough, humanity attacks them yet again to produce bleached white sheets of paper, like Platonic forms culled from their hides. Many people object to electronic voting, and insist on paper ballots. So: the gods of Greece may only have gotten a swine or ox as sacrifice a couple times a year, whereas we ought wipe out whole forests every year to show our love…for the swine. But these clean white voting cards pressed from resurrected dung still, as Darwin said, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origins. And so the dynasty reigns.

On the other hand, a sheet of paper, when a pen’s in hand, can be enough anchor home a mind adrift, the scratching pen like a bird’s claws scrabbling for a perch. Even if the writer is just plagiarizing their own unconscious.