59500 a thinking ocean ~. In thinking about the Stanisław Lem novel Solaris, about a sentient, mind-reading ocean on a distant planet, which its earthling researchers are incapable of understanding, I arrive at this homage.

Lem is reported to have thought the various film adaptations of his book were off the mark; their failings for him amounted to turning a philosophical problem into a story focused on the erotic problems of the protagonist. In Lem’s mind, Solaris is about nothing less than the limits of reason.

In this sense, it hearkens back to tracks from my Stochastic Elegies, in which there are ‘a hundred chasms … between us and understanding’.