Merging power or branching dissipation?
The Anastomosing Dendrite, a newsletter about Connectedness, Classicism, Cornbread. Stuff like that.
Dendritic and anastomosing patterns are both alike and unlike. From a distance they seem the same. When one looks longer, thoughtfully, the profound difference emerges.
Above is a dendritic drainage system. Water flows from saturated earth to brook to stream to river, ever more powerfully, carrying with it more and more clay, then sand, then gravel and finally, perhaps rolling boulders. Each dendrite is nearly alike, different only in scale, contributing their capacity to a greater and inexorable flow to the sea.
Perhaps the river encounters some different terrain ahead. The water is quick, shallow and can easily move the powdery, light clay but sand it cannot move as well. The sand falls and stays, the river divides, divides again and so on. Sometimes some branches merge, briefly, or avulse again, leaving islands to become their own ephemeral worlds.
Which way is the water flowing in the river above? To the left or right? Is the large channel on the lower right flowing into chaotic dispersion to the left or is it being fed by the network of smaller streams flowing right?
Imagine being the water in the large river. As the river braids (avulses), you confront ever more choices, each leading to smaller river, then smaller streams, and soon you are alone, in your own stream, not knowing you are flowing parallel to dozens of others streams. Some streams cut themselves off completely, become stagnant and fill with mud. Some years are dryer and the smallest streams disappear altogether.
These morphologies provide metaphors. Shall we provide flow, however small, to the great river, the Great Conversation, that is Western Culture, using its vast, time proven power, never fearing it will change course, avulse, in a single season?
Or:
Unceasingly shout self-righteous indignations along evermore dissipating streams to fewer and fewer friends. In our studies, should we continue the post-modern multi-furcation of learning?
Droughts are inevitable. The smallest streams will dry to dust, or stagnate, stinking. A poison no animal will drink.
Vale, amici mei.
See: Fluvial Geomorphology if you really need to nerd-out.