Physarum · Track 17 · middle
Ode to Trichia decipiens
Shifts color across its maturation — green to olive to orange, the sporangia moving through the spectrum as the spores develop. 'Decipiens' means deceiving. It was named for its own unreliability: early collectors thought different color stages were different species. An ode to the organism named for its own unfixedness — the color that keeps changing, the thing that is not what it was an hour ago, that cannot be pinned to a single identity because it is always in the middle of becoming something else. | NEUROSCIENCE LENS: State-dependent identity — Trichia decipiens cannot be identified without knowing its developmental stage; the same specimen is 'different species' at different moments. This mirrors state-dependent neural processing: the brain in fear, in sleep, in love is measurably a different computational system. The organism named for its own deception is just honest about what all living systems do.
Lyrics
[Intro] Beech log, October. Seven degrees Celsius. You were green when I found you. Cool to the touch. Tacky. A promise of something else. [Verse 1] They named you for a misunderstanding. Christiaan Hendrik Persoon, 1794. He saw the green, and then the orange. He saw two different lives on the same wet wood. And he called you the deceiving one. Trichia decipiens. Because you would not hold still for the page. Because you refused to be one single thing. [Chorus] But you aren't deceiving anyone. You are just becoming. This is the color of Tuesday. This is the shade of an hour from now. The brain in fear is not the brain in love. The name they gave you was a mirror. It showed them their own need for a fixed point. [Verse 2] Yesterday you were the color of new leaves. This morning, a soft olive, the color of waiting. By afternoon, a flush of orange-brown. Ripe, and full of dust. Full of the spores you were always making. The specimen in Leiden shows it. Two colors on one fragment of bark. Proof that you are a process, not a picture. [Chorus] You aren't deceiving anyone. You are just becoming. This is the color of Tuesday. This is the shade of an hour from now. The brain in fear is not the brain in love. The name they gave you was a mirror. It showed them their own need for a fixed point. [Bridge] And what is a mind if not this? This constant shift in hue. This state-dependent truth. I am not who I was when the sun rose. I will not be the same person tonight. You are just honest about it. You wear your becoming on the outside. [Outro] Orange-brown. Ready to release. Decipiens. The honest one. The one who shows the work. The one who changes in the light.