Computer Chip

This is our tilled ground, our garden of forking paths. I picture its millions of transistors blinking, its mono-crystal silicon wafers pulsing as information courses like sap through the photolithographic veins, parsed by logic gates, blended by multiplexers. I know this isn’t quite what happens, but I keep trying to imagine it: how roots link up with roots & what leaps between them. How layers thinner than paper overlap like pages in a book that writes & re-writes itself, or like the sedimentary crust of a living planet. I know it’s not alive, that it is closer to a map than a landscape, & that in trying to re-purpose old templates I fall far short. But something about its stark dualism — the closed 1, the open 0 — & all it can gather in fills me with awe. The integrated circuit is my shepherd. I shall not want.