The tides have twice flooded and ebbed. The solar orb has made her transit. Another day has passed. We are not inured to these things; Gutterland is a beautiful place. Just beautiful. And it is this beauty that gives us succor when, again and again, those around us fall short. For it is the nature of men to disappoint, the nature of nature to replenish.

One man who does not disappoint (or, rather, has not yet) is the mysterious Gutter reader—now in almost nightly contact, his obscurity increasing by the keystroke—who has given us in recent weeks these classic missives. We don't know his name; perhaps he has none. But last night, to be sure, his addled mind was moved to muse—glass sponge musings—and he was moved to share:

One single thought sustains you, the chronically underwhelmed observer, as you survey the landscape of heartbreaking mediocrities, overplayed hands, foul hackeries and cynical illusions that make up contemporary design in the big city and the small world. That thought: Nature Will Save Us.

Somewhere out in Nature, just as the cure for cancer awaits within some as yet uncatalogued pollen molecule deep inside an Amazonian valley, so does some structure, some formal paradigm, some nano-pattern, some sublime vegetal complexity——so do all of these lurk latent in Nature, ripe for co-opting by architects on cold trails, ready to bring a dose of the sublime, the real, the divine, the earthy, the god-damn natural already, to our desperate artifice and fakery. Gaia herself will bring us back to earth. Geology plus Biology equals Authenticity. You know the drill: clouds, flocking behavior, seed pods, mysterious rocks of all description. They will jolt us out of our complacent ennui. They will save us from the tyranny of style. We can quote Semper, and think, yes, the 19th century germans are on my side, I must be doing okay. And then you flick open Science Times, the last great section, and you think, eureka, there it is: Silica particles, yes, filaments, yes. Spicules I said yes, and then larger spicules, grids, yes, cylinders, yes, and yes and yes again. And it's glass. And it kind of looks like a carbon nanotube. And its ALIVE!!! IT'S ALIVE!!! Somebody call Kipnis. (And, those shrimp who swim in, grow up, and are too big to swim out. They must mean something, they really must. Something about Society.) And just as you fire up the ol' software to put together a late entry for say, the Coney Island Parachute Pavilion (that old tower is another spicule-tacular structure, you think, another cylindrical meta-matrix. That could work, you think, it's near the ocean, the sponge lives in the ocean, it'll all work...), just then, an alarming flicker of a memory pops into your mind. It's 2004. 1994. 1984. Somewhere long ago, it doesn’t matter. It's a studio crit you stumbled onto. It's Parsons, RISD, NJIT. There's a cryptic plaster of paris model on the floor. There are intricate texture maps and mesh-like diagrams with a thousand sharp little arrows indicating, say, the flow of seawater. Someone is presenting, they're holding a wooden box. Wait, what's that they're saying? Let's listen: "And here's the specimen I got from the aquarium," as she gingerly lifts a glittering cylinder to your eyes. "Isn't it great?" And you think, well, yes it is. It's the glass sea sponge.

Oh Gutter, What does it all mean? It means there is no undiscovered country. There is no more new world. There is no more nature. Culture is always already there, sea sponge at the ready. It means that no matter what you or Mother Earth think of as you contemplate Creation, some slinky smart Parsons girl from 2004 has been there first.

Posted in Our Fallen World, Simply Sublime, Words, Words