I approached the leaf and the vine from behind a camera. I manipulated the apparatus to make them seem rounder and curvier, and then to their shaped roundness I linked a song in the Darwinian genre of jazz, with solos evolving into one another.  The new record backed up its Piltdown hoax with a lyric that was detectable only with a fossil apparatus.

The leaf and the song had merged into an ensemble. Their lyric was a fuller, jazzier sense of a preexistent word: in this case, the tumid old word “swell.” Now it sounded lifelike. Having been looped into white noise, it linked the prehuman locution “Let there be” with a flip side of words.

But from the beginning, the record had always been scheduled to end. In his groove, the philosopher of the scientific method understood that fadeout has always been anatomically a trait of any flora you once could see.

—
https://jonathanmorse.blog/2025/07/14/swell-2/

Francis Bacon, “Of Truth.” The essayes or counsels, ciuill and morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, 1625.