Symbian Essay Competition 2008

To my utter surprise, I have won the one competition I felt I had little chance to succeed in: the Symbian Essay Contest, whose motif this year was "the next wave of smartphone innovation: issues and opportunities with smartphone technologies". If you'd like to read the (abridged) answers by each of the 10 winners, including mine, take a soujourn to the Symbian site.

And if you're interested, here is my answer in full -- just click on the subheadings to show the text:

The smartphone of the future: A powerhouse or a mere terminal?

To foresee the future one must know the past

History always repeats itself, round and round it cycles, like a bike, to maintain its balance. This is no different for the evolution of computing generally, and smartphones specifically. In their early days, the functions of both computers and phones were accessed remotely: the actual machine in front of you was but one of many terminals, a transmitter of information from and to a "central executive". Eventually we began to forget our socialist roots, the "all for one and one for all" of the IT musketeers, and in the brashest spirit of capitalism we marked the advent of the personal computer (PC). While this let the average person have at their fingertips much of the power previously exclusive to the IT technician's caste, this step forward was also a step back: PCs were not initially designed as a lively hub of transport or a loud marketplace, but as an lonely, existential room for one where communication and collaboration were, if not impossible, then Hellish.

Eventually, the Internet opened up portholes in our tiny cubicles, helping us to see each other once more, but the walls remained solid, and electronic communication was as non-communist as ever. We sent each other letters and packages, passed photographs under each other's doors, sometimes we coughed and sneezed, infecting one other with our viruses and ailments, but this was as personal as things got since our doors were always locked, our lives tucked away, our keys held firmly fast to our chains. Despite the virtually endless potential and possibilities of the Web, the philosophy of physical ownership that brought technology to the masses ultimately forced us to constantly rely on the limited brainpower contained in the physical frames of the device at hand.

The modern smartphone has had a similar trajectory, where initial focus on the transmission of information shifted to a greater and greater emphasis on local capabilities. Here too, the motto of "bigger is better", instead of "simpler is better", has brought about much waste of our scarce resources: energy, materials and time, both for producer and consumer. The dream of the PC was necessary, but its scars upon the smartphone industry plague us up to this day with the its elder problems in communicating and sharing information easily and instinctively.

With the smartphone now in its teenage stage, its development is at a crossroads between growing out of the lap of its parents to become a unique mature product in its own right or to be more of the same. If it can leave the PC concept behind to embrace what we truly need as human beings, the SC, or social computer, it could become the hero that will help us return to our primeval state of sharing and socialization, if only in our IT world. This essay will build the skeleton of this mythical device, and help its shaky bones keep a balance between being a powerhouse and a terminal. Let us unveil the full potential of smartphones and thus make them more attractive for those who have not taken the leap. That includes me.

It's the features, stupid

Before smartphones can change the world, they must be bought, and like in the primeval days of the first PCs, the greatest problem in adoption is that they are simply too expensive. STOP. Yet expense is relative: smartphones are expensive for most not as much because their cost puts them out of reach of consumers, but because their usefulness does not yet justify their cost. Most buyers only ever use the peak of the iceberg, in terms of the features available, leaving the rest of the functionality hidden under the dark sea of user interface.

But this problem can't be solved by cramming more features in. In fact, the greatest problem facing smartphones today is the persistent focus on the quantity of features, rather than their quality and usability on a small platform. Let's be direct and frank: feature bloat approaches the proportions of Moby Dick: Telephones with dual cameras, double button-pads, infinite arrays of menus, settings, games and ring-tones, the latest, full-fledged version of Microsoft Word. And Excel. And PowerPoint. And widgets, gadgets and crapgets all tossed around the screen like toys in a sandbox.

To be successful, we must learn to follow a middle way between too many features and too few. Since "a little" and "a lot" mean different things to different people, the best way to achieve a balance is to endow the smartphone with modularity and customization, particularly in terms of software. The basic capabilities of the everyday phone provide a solid base to build on. On top of this foundation of calling, messaging, photography and web browsing we must erect the other features. Modularity empowers the users with choice, a commodity that is in short supply in the smartphone market as yet, and one that the consumer appreciates as much as "capability" or "potential".

It is easiest to achieve this on an open platform like Linux, rather than a purely proprietary one such as, say... Windows. For a developer, direct access to the code, makes it easier to use all the system's nuts and bolts and integrate an application with the rest of the OS. This transparency also allows programmers to find the most effective ways of injecting and drawing information from each program, helping interoperability and resulting in programs that can operate together seamlessly. For instance, if we want to build a photograph manager, we could add a module into the bundled photo taking software to add photos to a particular folder and upload them to a specific web album on the fly, as we take each shot. Or if we want to insert a map into our emails, we could construct a bridge between the map and the mailing applications. All this in turn will make the platform more attractive to consumers and help designers custom fit the software to the phone in question, adding or subtracting features as the hardware requires it, rendering the platform more versatile and opening up markets in a wider range of phones.

Don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with a smartphone being able to serve many functions, in fact it is meant to, but these must be simple and clear to start with. Its core functions must be easily and directly accessible with extras built on top and around them, not stuck messily inside like the bones of the builders of the Great Wall of China. This modern, entropic tendency towards chaos and confusion makes smartphones simply too difficult to use for the 90% of people who just can't be bothered to learn to wade through the mess. You should not have to exert significant mental effort to take advantage of every single function: it's supposed to be a tool, not a mathematical problem! Instead, usage of the phone must be an extension of our own mind, as routine as daydreaming and as quick as our sight.

To help us reach "user interface Nirvana" we should keep a record of frequently used applications and make them easiest to access relative to the ones we never access. However, our needs vary from one environment to another and what is useful at one point in time can often get in the way of our experience at another point. Hence, the record we keep must be dynamic and flexible, such that application accessibility varies with respect to the context or modus operandi of the device. This environmental state can be chosen by the user or deduced by the smartphone by using info of time, location (GPS), previous and planned events, and even acceleration. The OS could even work autonomously depending on the occasion, an idea best illustrated with an example:

Oh dear, is it already 5pm? Ring a quick alarm to let you know that your husband is due to arrive and that your lover is due to leave, then launch the map application, zooming in on the house, indicating sensible escape routes ("No, not the balcony, Charles, we're on the 6th floor") or if that's too late, then use some of its gathered information to suggest a good excuse ("Oh dear, now you've ruined my surprise, and only days before your birthday. Rex, this is the party decorator").

Now seriously, context can be far more useful than simple convenience but help in matters of life and death, as demonstrated by smartphone programs like Life360. This app helps you keep track of the health of your close ones, alerting you about natural (and unnatural) disasters relevant to their location and yours. A panic button alerts others around you of your whereabouts and that you need help, a feature that can be activated automatically if the app deduces that you have suffered a traffic accident through the use of information from the accelerometers. Another program, cab4me, can call a taxi to your location regardless of where you are. CompareEverywhere lets you photograph bar codes to find out the price of, say, a DVD at the shop you are at compared to nearby stores and cites reviews to help you decide whether the laptop you're pondering to purchase is actually worth it.

The Web too will benefit from the smartphone's capabilities, making our surfing experience more streamlined and custom-fit to our personalities, helping us bypass "junk" content. The context information integrated in the phone itself can aid us when doing web searches, bringing results that are more relevant to our present location, the places we frequent, the services we use and the things we like and dislike. Here the smartphone has a distinct advantage over full-fledged computers, since they can be always with us, accumulating information about our personal and social habits.

The flesh in the machine

The endless pit of features in modern smartphones goes hand in hand with greater and greater hardware requirements. This, aside from frightening the wits out of the wallets of the most people, threaten to devour our paltry batteries in a matter of hours, rather than days, making our phones intelligent anchors: smart, but not really mobile. The hardware part of the solution comes in the shape of newer chip architectures, which rise up as faithful Spartans to meet the power challenge, providing more and more processing power per electron. These new chip architectures forbear the coming of ever more powerful phones, whether based on classical processor-on-motherboard designs, like the Silverthorne architecture of the Intel Atom, or comprising an all-inclusive system-on-a-chip, such as the NVidia Tegra. Yet we must not overload their capabilities given the trend of modern software to bloat faster than hardware can support it, needing more and more of those tired electrons as they complicate simple tasks. Remember that the Spartans did fail in the end and that Windows Vista "capable computers" are capable of little more than booting the system. We must learn from past mistakes and avoid the scenario where our smartphones, whose stuffed electronic minds slug on ever slower even now, lose the worth of their name.

On a more optimistic note, the rise of touchscreens gives each new generation of smartphones less reasons to possess any physical buttons, since virtually all their functions can be emulated as easily using software. This also results in more robust devices that can be taken anywhere, since there's less holes for dust and sand and rain to pass through. What is the need to a physical keypad if the dial conjures itself up on your screen when you start a call? Why do you need a keyboard if you can just as easily type on the display? Another advantage of touchscreen keyboards is that more information is available with respect to where a finger is relative to the key, allowing for far easier auto-correction than with physical keyboards, where the coarser grid of pressed keys provide the sole input. The one obstacle in the way of devices embracing this technology has been the common complaint that touchscreens, unlike keys, don't provide you with any feedback when you press them. Thankfully, new developments in haptics by Nokia will soon bring us the Haptikos touchscreen, which uses sensor pads under the screen to give you the same tactile response as a pressed button. So you see, now there's no excuse to go touchy-feely with smartphones.

Multi-touch screens multiply the fun, expanding the number of tasks that can be done with a flick of the wrist. Aside from already popular gestures like two finger scrolling and pinch zoom, there is much opportunity to add more complex gestures tied to particular applications. For example, in an Internet browser, we might rotate our index and thumb around each other to reload the page, or draw clockwise and counter-clockwise spirals to move forward and back. Alternatively, while using the camera app, these very same gestures might change the zoom of the lens and scroll through different photography modes. Gestures are an important step in making communication between humans and computers more language-like and intuitive, easing the use of smartphones and helping us spend more time taking advantage our smartphone capabilities and less time trying.

On the visual side Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED), the next likely screen technology, will enhance the experience of using a smartphone in several ways. Firstly, the reduction in power usage of an OLED screen compared to current LCDs means that larger screens will be less disadvantaged with respect to battery life, facilitating the transition to devices fully usable by touchscreen. Secondly, the improved picture quality is to be reckoned with, since it will make watching media on the device an enjoyable experience rather than a last resort. Finally, a less advertised advantage is that OLEDs don't require a backlight, which means that screens can do without a bezel. Imagine screens that literally occupy the entirety of the face of your, (now far thinner) smartphone. Thus, OLEDs are a match made in gadget heaven for touchscreen based smartphones.

The likely successor or competitor of OLEDs is electronic paper (e.g. eInk), which, like a chameleon, changes the pigmentation in it's electronic skin by modulating its reflectance, rather than emitting light of its own. The advantage of this is that the display needs no energy except when changing the picture, enhancing battery life even beyond that possible with OLED. e-paper is also far more readable in well lit environments and lets you easily read books from the screen, a feat not impossible, but rather torturous in practice on current smartphones.

Flexible displays will change the name of the game in terms of smartphone design, since their coupling with flexible hardware architectures can effectively enlarge a smartphone without changing its form factor. Imagine a touchscreen phone twice or thrice as wide as an average smartphone that can be folded along its vertical axis to be placed comfortably next to your ear or in your pocket. Fold it the other way to convert it into a dedicated photo-camera. Such tricks can be used to place smartphones in closer competition with devices like Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) and netbooks, with the added advantage of being far more versatile. The increase in the unfolded display size up to 9 inches would enable far more comfortable touch typing and Internet usability.

All roads lead to smartphone

Just as smartphones converge onto becoming computers in their own right, so do other devices converge into the smartphone, such that more and more separate gadgets are fused into one. Nobody wants to spend the money on and carry a bucketload of gadgets if a multi-featured device can do the job as well if not better than each specialized one. Also, since we virtually never use more than one item at once, it's far less wasteful to use the same materials, hardware and energy for all of these tasks than to fulfill each one separately. The more gadgets we build, the more valuable resources we effectively pour into our already overfilled landfills; like in Japan, where such dumping sites contain more precious metals than are consumed in a year globally.

We've seen cell phones take baby steps at becoming cameras, first tumbling, but progressively more and more successfully to the point that now they're about to become the main photography devices for most of us, hobbyists. This makes perfect sense, since the resolution of our cameras already exceeds the capacity of our vision, such that further increases in resolution, rather than improving the quality of our photos, merely allow us to enlarge them further and further. Let's face it, the pixel race is rendered useless, since who has the album- or wall space for 20 megapixel photographs?

Smartphones are also dipping their greedy fingers into the portable media player market. A vital advantage of smartphones over typical players is their inherent, painless programmability. If you'd like your iPod or Zune to play, say, open source Vorbis ogg files, you'll have to strap yourself in for a torturous weekend: Hacking your device, uninstalling its firmware and installing yours, all the while holding no warranty that this will work on your particular device and risking wrecking your gadget. In a smartphone, all you have to do is to go online and find an application that fulfills your needs and install it.

With the advent of recent hardware developments, not even emergent markets are safe from the smartphone menace. As mobile Internet experience improves, netbooks may find themselves redundant. Similarly, with screens that are larger and easier to read, electronic book readers may become absorbed into the smartphone. And as GPS becomes a standard feature, smartphones will become the map of choice in both your car and on foot, delineating routes and channelling traffic information to help you find your way, replacing Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) and Sat Navs.

In the not too distant future, smartphones will take the place of your wallet, your public transport card and perhaps even your keys and means of ID. The pervasive possession of mobile phones and the increasing ownership of smartphones create the chance to do what the plastic of our credit cards could never achieve: to liberate us from our dependency on physical currency. Thanks to Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, in the near future you will wave your phone in front of the till to buy your newspaper or give your phone to the waiter when the bill is due. In the airport, the passport checkpoint will be scanning your phone instead of your booklet. These steps, as well as convenient, will lead to better international security, as hardware encryption techniques become so sophisticated that illegal decryption and falsification becomes impracticably slow and uneconomic. This in conjunction with biometric identity tests will decrease the chances of our dark alleys resounding with a "your phone or your life", since stealing the phone won't allow one to draw any money from it, aside from perhaps selling it.

All these developments are leading to a future where devices are more convenient, economical, eco-friendly, secure and actually have a positive impact on quality of life. All this in turn makes smartphones more viable for the average consumer, particularly in developing markets where individuals cannot afford to buy more than one device for their needs. Wider adoption will also lead to a greater number of developers being available to build new applications, leading to more innovation and a growing advantage over more expensive and specialized devices in the market.

A walk in the clouds

Let us turn our attention to the issue of evaporating smartphone's capabilities into a computing cloud. One of the reasons why the realization of cloud computing will be unavoidable is because most people do not require their smartphones to be full fledged word processors nor to be permanent mail clients or agendas. Many such capabilities are already provided by the Internet, in the shape of web applications, such as lightweight online document processors and calendars. Instead of creating programs from scratch, a better strategy is to provide easy integration of these services with the phone, allowing them to run offline and store part of their information locally, while keeping the great bulk of it online. The smartphone thus becomes a vessel for the capabilities of the new Internet, rather than remaining anchored to and entangled in the old solid Web and rusty personal computing.

In a similar vein, a better way to save resources and speed up processing on programs local to the phone itself is to outsource the most processor intensive tasks. For instance, given a fast enough Internet connection, instead of using local resources to create complex graphics it would be feasible to use a nearby server to compute the most intensive operations and send the result back to the smartphone in the shape of images. This would let you use Photoshop without having to overload your own smartphone with complex matrix computations. Alternatively, imagine you need to quickly tell something to your boss, who is at this moment in an important company meeting and can't speak. It would be neat to simply speak your message into the phone and for it to be converted into a text message on the fly by a dedicated computer and sent on.

The importance of cloud computing is even greater for a possible market incursion into developing countries. Since these nations tend to have a far less advanced mobile infrastructure, this initiative will be aided by recent developments in the implementation of mesh networking. Projects like the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) intend to make the Internet available to everyone by turning each device into a transmitter, as well as receiver, of information. Using each active device in this way creates a solid interconnected infrastructure, effectively spreading the reach of the Internet and allowing technologies like VoIP (Voice over IP) to serve as a basis for mobile connectivity. Collaboration between such projects and smartphone companies has not merely economical benefits, but also demonstrates the social value of smartphones and their importance in helping people and communities.

In developed nations, the pervasive Internet connectivity afforded by the emergent technology of WiMAX will make high speed web access on the smartphone a reality. This development is vital not only for the endless possibilities of cloud computing to ripen, but also to render smartphones more popular and fashionable, therefore making them a "necessity" rather than a want or luxury. Then we can let Metcalfe's law do our work for us. This law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The trick then, is to reach critical mass and speed in the market when the value of the platform is sufficient to attract the average user and create a domino effect, breaking the market barrier between early adoption and mass ownership.

Last, but certainly not least, we must remember that the original promise of mobile phones was social, one that is yet to be fulfilled. The spread of social networks has been a step in the right direction, but will never achieve its full potential if we only ever use them while sitting in our rooms, alone, chatting across a blank terminal, exchanging, at most, emoticons ;-) For social networking to be truly social, it must be as flexible as social interactions, being available on the go. This is where smartphones come into the stage. But also, we need our smartphones and its apps to interact with our social networks, using information not only about us, but also our close ones to help guide our decisions: What music should I get for my cousin? Will the girl I fancy like the film I invited her to see? Where can I take my grandfather for his birthday lunch that he's never been to? This last is something we can only achieve when our lives are built on cloud castles.

The meaning of life? Not 42

So, does the smartphone need to be a powerhouse or a mere terminal? I think it must be a little bit of both. In our age, web services are starting to replace the capabilities of installed programs. It's only logical that the transition to cloud computing should happen first in an inherently mobile device like the smartphone, paving a stairway to heaven for the rest of the computing industry. But at the same time, our smartphone must be powerful enough to be able to survive on its own two feet and be able to straddle the power of web services.

While at first sight most of this essay talks of developments aimed at the device proper, each prepares the ground for a steady transition to a distributed framework. Most applications we are likely to download or buy for our phones in the future will be based on the cloud, and the contextual information our phone is likely to gather will surely be interpreted in relation to our nearby electronic environment. Indeed, the main aim of hardware improvements is to make our smartphone a better receptacle for the web. And device convergence onto the smartphone is fuelled by the ease of both downloading and uploading content from a mobile device onto our home base anywhere, anytime.

In the end, the smartphone is set to become not a simple computer terminal, but a real enactive window into the world. That's a voyage we're lucky to witness!

The other half of our Moon

My iambs always seem to feed on sorrow and memories past, but are meant well.

"These fleshy fruits about my beak,
have twisted, turned around in time,
to petal, sepal, arid spine,
and lastly listless, lifeless seed.

Within - no flesh, I fear, cut out
by blunt, by slavic, stumpy hand.
My florid tongue was but your land,
depleted, languished in my snout.

Two orbits bare, two shrivelled stars,
inside slain seas surge charcoaled isles:
Is quit the quiver of my eyes,
and Amor's arrow's but a scar.

Despite, each eve, waves plan their flight
from these their coves, to stony shores,
to lap the wounds and salt the sores.
Could keep them captive not tonight.

They tumble to Electra's tear
enwrapped in chain, swaggers a rent.
A "whoosh", Psyche erupts the dent,
her argent cord - impaling spear.

Bronze heart, subsister, knew not rust
until past pores your pasty dew
infested it, its warmth withdrew.
You taught it love can come with lust."

Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so

And last not least, this essay I wrote for the Max Perutz Science Writing Award about my first fMRI project and its philosophical implications. The marriage made in Nirvana between Buddhist mysticism and science, a la Fritjof Capra...

Physics and Buddhism. These seemingly opposite ways of knowledge share one common denominator. The Buddhist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda ("dependent origination") says that all within our universe is interconnected and interdependent, every apparent 'thing' depends on everything else, and ultimately on the universe as a whole. Similarly, Niels Bohr, a founding father of quantum physics, argued that "isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."

Naturally, if everything is interconnected, nothing is divided. Therefore separate objects cannot truly exist, it's the mind that creates them. Buddha realised this over two millennia before psychologists did, stating that "with Vijñāna as condition, Nāmarūpa arises". Vijñāna is "divided knowing", cognition; Nāmarūpa is "name and form" seen as one. Indeed, what is an object to our minds? It is but its form or features, and its name, a tag binding these together and separating them from the rest of the world.

Cognitive neuroscientists as myself are interested in the neural correlates of mental objects, their "name" and "form", since these help us understand how we structure our visual world, granting us insight into the nature of visual consciousness, the essence of experience. But you may ask, how can you argue that we construct the objects within our visual world if they appear so constant? Let me illustrate our mental malleability with an example:

As you contemplate this page, the very same image enters your eye, but what objects do you see? Now 'tis a paragraph, then a line, a word, a letter even, and if you focus clearly, the traces making up these letters become the objects of your awareness. And as you go back up in this hierarchy, what were once objects become parts thereof, and so on. Thus, a visual object has no objective reality, pardon the pun, but is a subjective matter dependent on occasion, task and mood.



My research is centred on finding, through visual short term memory tests combined with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), where within the brain we represent visual features and the cage encapsulating them into a single object. fMRI shows that they are kept somewhere in the parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, vital for organising our attention and perception of space. Indeed, it's this attention that is thought to bind features and assign them a tag, constructing objects we can perceive and play with in our mind.

To find where these two components of an object are held separate, I take advantage of an analogy of the above example: I show you a scene made up of coloured discs and ask you to remember them as groups of distinct coloured triangles or as one complex whole. The number of objects depends on how I ask you to remember the discs, since a set of features can only belong to one object at a time. Hence, by comparing brain activity related to memory for the very same discs either as an aggregated whole or a handful of parts, I can find the brain locus where features are glued into single items. Similarly, by changing the number of discs you must remember, I can alter the number of features independently from the number of objects, and locate where these features are kept.



But to what use can this knowledge be brought to bear?

Emerging brain imaging methods let us explore the topography and properties of visual maps in detail, allowing us to predict what a person sees from their brain activity and bringing us ever closer to reconstructing and viewing the content of our inner display. But to truly succeed at reading and comprehending perception we need to be able to image the spectator, the object making homunculus within.

This information can then help us better understand neural conditions arising from parietal brain damage, such as simultanagnosia, whose sufferers cannot perceive more than one object at a time, and often report illusory conjunctions by grouping disparate features into a single object.

The questions on our table are ancient, but the framework of cognitive neuroscience slowly unravels an opening in the thick unknown, promising to illuminate our ignorance and enlighten us. By learning how we structure our external world, we discover how our internal cosmos is built.

So what's the moral? Misquoting Hamlet, "Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so"

Out of sight, out of mind

In these silent times, I've aught but some more essays to share with you. This one I submitted to the Daily Telegraph Science Writer contest:

Our eyes, windows to our soul, are not one-way streets. Our mental life, irrigated by our perception, depends on the images illuminating it. This simple metaphor for our vision, a matter more complex than our blunt portholes, sheds light on the mental condition of autism. We recognize people with autism by the trouble they show in socializing, their language deficiencies and their insistence on sameness and repetition. But a less well-known fact is that they see the world rather differently from the rest of us, a fact that can allow us to understand and aid them.

Sight starts in the eyes, as does the crux of the matter according to psychologists Kate Plaisted and Greg Davis. They argue the key to understanding this is the magnocellular (MC) system of cells in the retina. MC cells respond to coarse, global features, and brief changes in the visual fringe, making them vital in guiding attention to salient aspects of our surroundings. Dr's Plaisted and Davis have shown that these cells are less sensitive in autistic individuals, which can explain two outcomes related to the properties of these cells. Firstly, children with autism easily concentrate on the fine aspects of scenes, helping them to quickly spot slight changes and making them impervious to visual illusions; but have trouble grasping the gross context of a scene. Secondly, they find it hard to move their attention from one thing to the next, which explains their tendency toward reiteration.

Also, this MC deficit may cause a domino effect on social brain functions like face perception or imitation. We start watching faces in our infancy, an ability depending on our MC system, which directs our attention to the archetypal, gross t-shaped form of the human face. This focus seeds the growth of our adult abilities, and disturbing it mars our natural tendency to respond to social hints, resulting in severe social difficulties. Mark Johnson argues this MC system is also critical in adulthood, by helping us comprehend face expressions which cause global visual changes. Facial gestures are the physical twins of emotion, that very abstract concept that lets us make sense of not only our own, but also others' mental world.

The MC system also feeds into the so called dorsal visual stream in the brain that underlies such processes as perception of coherent motion, also impaired in autism. This in turn impairs our perception of other people's actions and our ability to imitate them. Indeed, in this dorsal stream, 'mirror neurons' respond to actions we see others do and those we make ourselves. This allows us to cross the frontier between self and other, not only in terms of imitating acts but also mental states, letting us understand others and share our happiness or pain with them. Hence, according to Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Dapretto, it is a deficit in this system that leads to problems in imitation and empathy in autism.



Lastly, autistic people don't perceive objects in the way we do. Sarah Grice showed that they don't show the same characteristic electrical brain activity when seeing illusory objects, like the Kanisza square (see above image), as normal individuals do. Instead, they respond like 6-month-old infants who can't yet integrate the display into a square, making their visual world fragmented, stopping them from seeing the forest from the trees. Crucially, since our interactions depend on the big picture - exuberant dancing and loud singing may make us the spirit of a party but will land us in detention if we try it at school during an exam - it's not surprising that an inability to judge context can be socially crippling.

So what if autism is all about vision, or lack thereof? Well, this understanding will hone our own foresight and help tackle the root problems in autism, letting us intervene sooner by using MC sensitivity as an early diagnostic tool. Our knowledge can also focus our intervention schemes at the visual problems and their developmental consequences, particularly since brain plasticity and flexibility is greatest in infancy. For instance, we could engage infants at risk in educational games that require quick shifts of attention and binding of features together. Or, perhaps, educate them to focus on and recognize faces and their expressions, even train their mirror neurons through imitative play. By learning how they see the world and how we can help them see ours, we can make life easier for these our children, the apples of our eyes.

Piracy and brains... treasure maps!

Here's a little essay I entered into the essay competition hosted by the Wellcome Trust and New Scientist:

The legendary captain Rhodri Raven yells from quarterdeck to his trusty buccaneers: "Scoundrels, fetch me the Treasure Map! 'Tis torn to four pieces, they say, cast by the winds upon the Occipital Isle, about the Calcarine Fissure cleavin' it across." Forty pirates dash to set sail, fearing their chief's temper, one eager enough to cut another Calcarine across those imprudent enough to disobey. But there's a problem... each pirate returns bearing one piece of map. "The map, not maps, I said", Rhodri growls, "Hand me the real one!" Yet they all look real...

These metaphoric maps stand for the various brain areas involved in vision. They are topographically structured, reflecting the organisation of the visual field on our eyes' retina, resulting in "retinotopic" maps drawn upon our brain's cortex. Each map is broken in half across our brain, with our left hemisphere processing information from our right field and vice versa. Furthermore, some of these half-maps are further broken into sections representing the upper and lower quadrants of our vision, such that we end up with four pieces adding up to each single map.

Researchers have charted numerous cortical maps, by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to explore brain activation in response to stimulation of different parts of the visual field. Sixteen whole visual maps stretch from the Calcarine sulcus, in the Occipital lobe, at the back of our brain, to our prefrontal cortex, appearing grouped into different clusters, as islands aggregate into archipelagos. Our captain's question is inevitable: which one of them is real indeed?

In fact, they are all real, resulting in a cardinal problem for visual neuroscientists, understanding how perception depends on each of them: Does each serve a distinct goal and, so to speak, lead to a different bounty? And how is their content integrated into our seemingly unitary perception, into one vision?

Indeed, we know that some of the earlier maps contain information about the details in our visual world, breaking it up into edges, colour and motion. But our perception is not merely an array of elements just as an essay is not a sac of letters but a collection of words, sentences and paragraphs linked together. Objects are to our vision what chapters are to a book, stanzas to a poem. But how does our brain write its visual verses?

A clue comes from a region in parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), involved in the construction of visual objects from their component features. The IPS is active when we attend to objects or maintain them in our visual short-term memory (VSTM). VSTM is the equivalent of a mental sketchpad and perhaps the seat of our visual imagination, allowing us to perceive while seeing naught. Since regions in the parietal cortex have been found to be organised in a retinotopic manner, the question I pose in my research is whether the structure of the visual maps found there relates to our imagination and reminiscence.

To investigate this, I use a VSTM task where participants are asked to remember several objects in different places in their visual field. However, instead of only looking at the activity while these stimuli are presented, I'm interested in whether the visual objects maintained in VSTM by the IPS are organised in a retinotopic way. If this is the case, the IPS could be the critical locus of our conscious, object-based perception.

But what's the point? Take for instance research into so-called "mind-reading", which allows us to decipher the content of our mental display by analysing the complex patterns of activity in the early visual cortex. However, this merely tells us what we know already - the image entering our eyes, not what objects we construct and thus attend to. Instead, knowing the detailed progression of objects built and dismantled tells us what we actually perceive. This is particularly important in the study of patients suffering "locked-in" syndrome, since we could allow them to effectively communicate with us by using their "inner eye". The chance to open these patients' door to the outside world is one of the true treasures that visual maps lead to...

the Sand, the Phoenix and the Desert Rose

"Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand." Job 29:18

Sand. Its waves in a desert sea, roll roughly over, frothing dust foam, laying salty tastes on thirsty tongues, guiding winds through living fingerprints of impermanence, God's identity. Few know this, but from its grain grows fauna and flora as vivid as our own.

Our story starts in a wasteland where aught is squandered, where ruin is rebirth, where dying dunes pour onto progeny their ardent, arid love. A world of ageless autumn, mantles moulting, layers slipping off as leaves. One power endures in the eye of eternal change, finding sustenance in rasping, sharp sand.

Ere Desert knew boundary or beginning, the first seed of sand was sown in a pocket of night, sealed by a celestial pinch, sewn by a comet, as by needle and yarn. There it swigged the sparks of starts, twining each into a fiery feather, the first dune drawn from their gritted crackle, its matter erupting from solid sound. The first plume rose as a petal or leaf, gorging on the Sun, miming his mane with her own tangerine bristles, curling as ribs enclosing an empty chest, but not for long. Following this first outstretched finger, foliage unfolded, burst into life and flame, then coiled over the sandy nest, caging blaze in a hive of dactyls.

Gilded orb, mocking and psalming trochees to her Lover in the sky, she desired to rise to his side. Her nascent vanes braided themselves into wings, barb clutching barb, nets to trap air, a haul of light hooked within, melting no wax in its wake, illuming waves too slack to drown in. Her embrace did not eclipse her Lover, but gyred his rays, carrying day to each corner of Earth. He let two tears fall onto her skin, turned to umber obsidians, Phoenix eyes, sighting the radiance sifting through scissures in the passion of existence.

Curious to witness what pith was planted within, she veered her Vulcan orbs inward. In the darkness of black glass drifted burnished dots, atoms of her water. Realisation draws demise. She smiled, bent beak of siltstone, shrewd smile, tasting the last feather, tongue to drink the keen elixir of her cradle, now deathbed. One seif after another she quaffed until her thirst was quenched and her Realm gone, replaced by Eden's grove, a jungle of jade veiling the empyrean, its teal tiles roofing her mausoleum. Among the Orchard's woods, she chanced upon a tree of Cinnamon, whose bark reminded her of home, and nested in the broken twigs beneath it, engrafting and licking them into animation. In igneous terpsichore, Firebird and forest ashed into a waste of cindered barrows.

Upon a mound, an egg of myrrh lays, surrounded by stone blossoms, as poppies, spotting the sepulchre. Bred by maelstrom, built and sculpted from eddies, scratched into bloom, it feeds the fledgling born and dwelling in Desert's heart, where the newborn Phoenix drinks the dusty dew of Desert Roses.

Ketalar

Whatever was or was not confined by that svelte stream coursed its way under my skin, releasing its sweet body into my salted estuaries, sharp and scarlet by vice of their ferrous casket. Course uncaged, but body unblent, it travelled onward, gathering into a blister at the back of my brain, pressing the pillow as it flourished. There it negotiated the doors of my perception, and slid asunder the drapes of the stage, the dramaturge dropped his puppets about me, infused life but buried the edge glancing, gashing the depth of their eyes. Once alive, now waxen mannikins of taxidermied psyches, their skins seemed leathered, as my fingers felt, sliding, flowing over one another, gloves lubricated by cool lather. Not mine. Nor those foreign legs, limbs in exile.

Onwards floating, a hair's width above the bed, sails covered eyes and mast twisted, sinking the vessel and drawing living water to my loose lips. A gasp, savoured and spewed, a gulp of smog. I released it outside the window, from a modest pipe, whiffing beneath the tongueless chimney, a mere beacon for paper pigeons, pinions defiled yet safe from deflagration. Crows, cut-outs of deadly nightshade, nested in the smokestacks, distilling from soot some flat import as impinging as it was void, or slit the sky, shadow marionettes speaking hollow stories outside my Cave.

My sight shifted from item to individual, brief infinities lapsing before their forms sharpened, each stare stabilising a shaky world, deluding me into illusions of normalcy. Yet eldritch was my ensnarement in a slough of nowness, the past in ken and reach, but for a brigandine of reeds, an iron tent dissecting instant from reminiscence and future. I traced my life entire, but left it unpeeled, I'd flake away with the wallpaper of that chamber, eternally enclosed, a gap in time.

Independent/Bosch Technology Horizons essay... déjà vu?

I've tried my luck again. This time an essay on the way Technology and Engineering drive change in a country of my choice... It shall not be published in the Independent newspaper this time, but did not fall short of the shortlist, and even fetched a Highly Commended prize. I lay it here before you, a cheeky review of the redemption of a land many love to hate, in case you wish to read it:

"Speak of the devil

Harsh foreign policy, unhealthy relationship with science, bastion of the death penalty in the developed world, second worst polluter per capita and, never fear, greatest polluter overall! Can you hazard a guess as to the country in question?

In recent years the USA hasn't been a country one readily thinks of in relation to the word "change" (except perhaps "climate change") as it congeals into strict conservatism in almost all senses of the word. Almost. A citadel of change remains its saving grace, the 'balm in Gilead' that can clear away the black Raven upon our threshold, and help metamorphose our dying world into the zestful butterfly it deserves to be. A host of technological advances grown in the USA will be pivotal on the Eastern Front of our battle for a sustainable world.

One revolution borne out of these lands will change the pages of history, rather literally. In Massachusetts, the E Ink corporation has developed "e-paper", an electrophoretic display that works by shifting pigment particles, changing its reflective properties, and hence its colour. Crucially, electronic paper, unlike typical computer displays, emits no light nor needs any electricity to show the image, only to change it. Eye fatigue and energy use are thus reduced, crowning e-paper as paper's perfect replacement. Think of the interminable piles of paper we come across every day: newspapers, magazines, books, briefs, documents, instruction manuals, most of which we have only time to glance at before chucking away - the lifelines of our work and leisure are tautly bound to the death of countless trees. Yet readers based on e-paper, such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, forecast the liberation from our arboreal shackles forever more.

But as we make the electronic switch, we must beware of our carbon footprint. Thankfully, today we see the edges of a flipping change in our IT mindset. For years we've felt in our flesh the undying urge toward ever more powerful machines, but today, the simplest of computers easily serve most of our needs. A host of Californian companies have taken the initiative to popularize computers on an unprecedented scale. Everex has introduced the gPC desktop and laptops like the gBook the Cloudbook, which are affordable and efficient by virtue of low wattage VIA processors and the less power-hungry Linux OS Ubuntu. Zonbu offers a similar deal, but in addition does away with a local hard drive, instead using a small flash memory device while storing most of the users' data online. NComputing goes a step further by marketing single computers that can power multiple users (up to 30 per unit), making public terminals far more efficient. The bottom line here is that a focus on efficiency and centralization can make technology available to anyone, whilst landing smoother rather than rougher on our environment.

But, you ask, how are you to power all this change? Bitter black gold, for all your green credentials? No, we need not get our hands dirty, as there's more than enough renewable energy to get by. Indeed, thanks to a number of US firms there has not been a better time for solar power, which is quickly striding forward in efficiency, availability, economy and, vitally, versatility. For instance, at the University of Delaware, Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett have broken a record in solar efficiency, with 42.8% of solar energy transformed into electricity, by splitting light into different colour spectra and directing them to different materials that best absorb them. Peter Jiang at the University of Florida has used divine (or, rather, natural) inspiration by creating bumpy, moth eye-like solar panels that, unlike traditional silicon panels, reflect very little of the light projected onto them, making better use of its energy. Jin Zhang at UC Santa Cruz wants to use metal oxide nanoparticles and nanocrystals, “quantum dots”, to increase conversion efficiency through having electrical energy move more easily by hopping between quantum dots.

Easing the production of solar panels, Massachusetts firm Konarka is developing technology allowing us to print them on an inkjet printer, while in the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Somenath Mitra uses nanotechnology to design a solar panel material that can be painted onto any surface. Another company, Ausra, plans to place solar plants in direct contest with coal plants, by patching up the solar Achilles heel, inconstant availability, through storage of energy in the shape of hot steam, ready to be used instantly to create electricity. All this brings solar efficiency ever closer to the fated 1$/Watt, the magic number making solar power cheaper than coal.

Thus, technology can heal the ecological sins we have perpetrated - let's keep our faith and humbly embrace this saviour, harbinger of change, let her wash our oily hands."

el Rey, el Acuario y la Mora

This little text, I wrote as an entry to a contest of microstories, and based it on an older tale of mine:

"Érase un viudo Rey cuya esposa dejó sólo un tirabuzón bronce, dentro del libro escarlata donde él trazaba su pasión, no con tinta, pero con sus yemas y hálito. Cada noche quemaba un pelo, intentando agostar su duelo, pero el mechón nunca menguó.

Una noche, saturado de sufrir, el Rey incinero tomo y trenza en su hogar. Esa mañana, junto al trono apareció un Acuario abarcando un pez áureo y cuarenta pescaditos plateados. A medida que el pez dorado tragaba a sus vecinos, el Rey conquistaba los suyos, hasta que declaró guerra con su última adversaria, una muda Princesa Mora. Él rechazó su hospitalidad, quemó puertas, rompió paredes y cuando ella, arrodillada, pidió merced, amputó y tomó consigo su negra cabellera como trofeo.

De vuelta al palacio vio al pez gualdo consumiendo su propio cuerpo, desapareciendo; y advirtió que de la bronce cabellera en su mano pendía un volumen carmesí."

the Charcoal, the Blackbird and their Art

There once was a piece of Charcoal, of no shape in particular, amorphous as blackness, shifting there and here, water-like. A mucky onion of infinite layers, sliding over one another, rubbing, as palm over palm, trying to wash away its own dirt.

This Charcoal had its own Art, as wild as graphite is tempered, drawing its flood of forms on the bodies of pebbles and stones, painting their outlines with the dyes of the sands and dust. But never did it draw its own nature, for it could not paint upon thin air; only the shadow of its true self could be traced upon the face of the Earth.

The deep self of the earthy Charcoal was flight, and only as it drew falsehoods, as skin after skin it shed itself, consumed itself in the fire of creation, could it approach its own truth. The dirt gone, the shining Blackbird emerged from her own ashes. And as she shook the ash from her feathers, she realised that she would never draw again as she once had, smearing darkness upon the world believing that the images she traced would last. Instead, she started painting with the world, marking the sand with her feathers, her claws, her beak; but never asking the lines to remain constant, but let the Winds change them as they willed. She threw her ashes into the eye of a whirl and let them melt.

All flesh is grass

All flesh is grass. Krishna walks upon the lawn without one backward look, this is her garden after all. Her mighty steps mould, sometimes mangle the stalky fingers, carve on a track across the green, darkening it with sacrifice, then tinging it, eroding it into gold. No single glance back. Who ever does look at the steps one takes, the steps one steals? We cut our paths through the lives of others, chances we pluck before their vines can tangle us, slow us down, and before they can caress us, touch us.

We are so heavy, yet all flesh is grass. Our meaty leaves are built from breath, upon our masts live sails of web, round chutes follow the wind, bade us the vertical though we only ever walk the horizontal. So many windows in the dew, encased in hoary silk, interminable eyes pointing to heaven, reflecting it in Indra's net, echoes itself in each one drop.

But now her palm parts the web, she loves not spiders, their world entire her hand, but not for long, her fist closes their death over their black carapaces. Pregnant, they crack into caviar, cast their mesh once more, each egg reflecting one another and all without. Indra cackles.

Does the mailman ever mark his strides? Sometimes his letter carries a dearer fare, stumps chiseled from paper cuts, sharp words, and long, blunt embraces.

the Stone, the Mirror and the Hedgehog

Once upon a time, there was a Stone. He lived alone, a pebble, his rounded skin enclosing mystery not only to others, but also himself. He lived mute, a boulder, his voice smothered in the lattice of sial within him. He lived sightless, a rock, his only eye a cataract glossed by the rain.

Within him, a brain of basalt and quartz learned time, touch and the content of himself. He knew of the Gravel upon which he lay, his brothers and sisters. He knew of the Winds, his Chance and Destiny, dictating his story, granting and robbing all that surrounded him, yet never touching his midst. He knew of the Lake, whose waves slowly gnawed his substance away and would one day devour him, would one day know him inside out and so would he know her.

But the Winds, envious, took the Stone in their hands and threw him into the Lake. As he fell, the blazing brushing of the Winds seared his cecity away and let him behold the Lake, a round Mirror. As he touched her surface, the Mirror broke into a myriad pieces and he saw himself as he was: not a single soul but a fragmented phantom, a hundred shards, a million grains of sand. As he watched himself breaking he became thus, a Stone shattered into a thousand thorns, not dry, but carrying a Lake within himself.

Thus was the Hedgehog born. Watch your reflection in his spines, a plain looking glass to your mind...

the Squirrel, the Tree and the Seasons

Once upon a time, upon a little hill, lived a Squirrel and a Tree, who loved each other with an abandon that knew not race nor age. The Squirrel well knew each of the Tree's branches, his lovesome leaves and fragrant bloom, she knew and reveled in the resin that flowed in his veins and gladly ate the fruits he offered her. The Tree well knew each of the Squirrel 's hairs, her tender talons and caring eyes, he knew and delighted in the dew that adorned her fur and lief warded the nuts she offered him.

But Spring soon left the Tree, then Summer came to take his flowers and rot his fruits, then Autumn came to steal his lush leaves, then Winter came to freeze the resin rivers within him. And as each Season passed, the Squirrel asked the Tree: "Why have you changed? Your gifts are gone, our love has lessened." The Tree replied each time: "'Tis but the seasons, do wait a while and I'll be born afresh." But the Squirrel did not believe, and wildly pushed the Tree away with its small mitts. But the Tree would never move.

The end of Winter came at last, and the Tree's life flowed once again, he grew once more; but the Squirrel did not look up to see, but long stared at the dry roots and softly spoke: "You are bark but I am flesh, my colour's fire but water is your life, you are stillness but I am motion. We are too different." She closed her eyes and pushed the Tree with all her might, and so great was her thrust that she fell back and rolled down from the hill. When she did open her eyes, the Tree was nowhere to be seen.

They say, soon after came the fallers and struck down the Tree, and from his body fashioned the pages on which these tales are written. Others claim a Blackbird made its nest within the Tree and stayed, for it knew much of Seasons and their ways, finding gifts in each of them. There are those who say that as the Tree waited for the Squirrel to find her way back, his fruits dried and turned chestnuts. Perhaps you know the End?

The third day Oath

Today is the third day, and neither wind nor rain have shaken the Amaranthine from its captivity. Indeed this morn, when I passed by, it hung torn between two greedy strands, each pulling her to itself. The avarice of the elements took their toll, voiding the flower of its aqua, yet failing in the quest to end its life, fortifying it instead, its petals hardened into a plate mail, guarding the heart, the scarce nectar within.

Thus it floated, a vessel of air whose soul one could not catch. Yet that was not my intent, instead, I wanted but to free it. I cut its ropes and posed it in a pocket by my chest, to warm it with my pulse. Those beats have been yours, now I have placed you in my crimson book to rest, let me now turn the page, an empty one I need this eve.

Gallows' flower

It was today that I saw it, within a window of the rusted bridge. It dangled from a Spider's thread, as a lone man hanging on gallows, a flower yellow as gall, condemned, yet its face turned towards Heaven. It does not rush to climb up Buddha's thread, but waits for the rest of us to grasp its wisdom, to entwine in its enlightenment. It was not clinging, but gently clasped by its faithful rope, gently strangled. Take my breath away, dear Daffodil. You are the troll of this my bridge, and my payment is thy risk, as my passage turns you, throttling you tighter, imbuing strength to this your death and straining this your link to life. I can't undo the harm, yet ask you to forgive me, sweet blossom, that I did not stop to tend to you, my karmic wheels forced me to carry on. Perhaps I was not meant to pick you, yet if the rain did not bid you fall, then tomorrow may be our day.

This eve, I stood by the mirror, alone on this side, but on the other holding on to you, breathing you. And as I remember your fragrance, my chest constringes, halting the flow of my life. I thirst for water, for your dew, a dying bloom too I am. Here, have the rest of my spirit, I still send you my breath.

Three grains of thought

The solid light was the drop that tipped this glass. An ice cube of impenetrable rays, filamentous, webbing within a trap for itself. It floated in the far corner of the room, which pointed outside, beyond the fragile surface of the room, but then it would change its mind and orient its angled digit towards me, accusatively.

Yet it was not my fault, the blame lay in those modest capsules holding three grains of thought: Hawaiian baby woodrose, passion flower and guarana, blended into a consciousness of its own. I had taken a couple, a glad one melting cozily inside my gut, fusing first delicately and then again, more violently, as their marriage bed contracted and crushed them, broke their body but freed their spirit, releasing their seed into me. It was they who impregnated me with these ideas, strangers to my waking mind, only familiar to my nightly wanderings.

The light melted again, its fibers now weaker, curtains that would not open, hiding the actual fabric forming my microcosm, but had they opened I would only see emptiness through and through. Let me turn my attention from this veiled mirror and onto something more appropriate for the occasion. Three candles, not the placid lake now at the corner of my eye, but roving rivers of surging life, rising knights, galloping nowhere, knowing no time nor destination but that which we may lend them, our thought bestowing them breath, one which when torn away returns them to servitude, to their physical slavery, their thirst for the balm beneath them, which they can never touch nor feel its sustenance, Tantalus threefold. But let us be merciful, return our eye to these our dancers, their ardent flamenco.

And let us dance ourselves, me and you, closely. Surrender to one another, then fall, by chance, a never-ending free descent, never culminating, not even as we lie rolling upon the floor. And as we climb the spiral stairs again, rising to the peak of the alabaster tower to fall longer still, but this time there will truly be no climax, no death to life, breath, motion, love. The joy outlived the convulsions that arched my body, ready to release its soul, an arrow into the firmament...

...it was the string that broke, the train of thought torn, the memory fragmented. That life twists itself together again where the past and future meet. I smell a rose-garden...

the King, the Fishbowl and the Gypsy

This brief bedtime tale is inspired in a dream I had this somewhat lazy morn, and on some contemplations I had the night before:

"Once upon a time, on a small island in the Mediterranean sea, lived a sad King, whose sorrow stemmed from the loss of his dear Wife, who in her wake, in her endless sleep left but a thick, bronze lock of hair, a bookmark in his crimson notebook, once the place where all his passions were kept. Each night the king burned one hair from the curl as an act of remembrance and mourning, but as years passed, the curl never thinned within his book nor did the King dare to ever write within it again.

One dreamless eve, desperate to rid himself from the tangles of dolorous memory, he tore the dense whorl and cast it out of his heart and into the hearth. But when the hair did not catch flare, remaining stolid in the thick blaze, the king resolved to fuel the flame with that which burnt most brightly within him, that which tormented him each moment of his now solitary life. He took his volume, empty of visible writing, yet thickly scribbled with the ink of his Love, in all its shapes and sizes, with each thought dedicated to his beloved Queen impressed there by his bare breath and subtle touch. Grasping it in his right hand, he prayed to free himself of grief, to find happiness again even if it cost his Heart. With that, he threw the volume into the fire.

What occurred later that night is but dead reckoning, but in the dawn the court saw an eerie Fishbowl standing upon a slim, hourglass shaped table by the throne. Within, turned and swirled a shoal of green finned parr and one Goldfish in water that oft reminded one of quicksilver, appearing at the same time thick and murky, yet also bright and of easy flow. No plants nor rocks adorned the Aquarium, not even muck nor rests of food were to be seen, since the King had ordered them not to be fed. Day in, day out the King observed the fish, and when, out of hunger, the Goldfish gulped one of the fishes, he would promptly and merrily declare war upon one of his many neighbors and mobilize his armies to seize their domains.

As the kingdom expanded so did the Fishbowl begin to run out of fish, until one day the very last parr was devoured by the greedy Goldfish. That eve, the King hosted a great feast, serving his noblemen and officers his best wine from his clearest crystal glasses, and bade them shatter them on the floor, but throw as they might, no glass broke nor scratched. Taking this as a good omen, the King took a small band of his closest knights and marched upon his last remaining rival, a Gypsy maiden residing in a low keep. The Gypsy offered no resistance and, to welcome her visitors, removed from their hinges the gates of her hold, much adorned with flamboyant designs depicting the forests, mountains and sea around her modest patch of land. But the jealous King was covetous, and said: "This is my domain, not yours to picture and delight in." And with that he ordered to chop and char them.

Mute, the Gypsy motioned her guests to enter her abode, whose walls were filled with Romany art and the air riddled with music, offering them her best delicatessen and drink, but the cruel King would take none and ordered his knights to tear the silken cloths, smash the painted vases and rip the guitars' strings. The Gypsy fell to her knees and wept, cupping her hands up to the King and with her moist eyes asking "What then? What will you take?" The King, satisfied, smiled and took in his hand her long black mane and with a swift cut severed it off her head. Thus he turned and left her, bearing away the sign of his last conquest.

That night, the happy King looked into his Fishbowl and watched his Goldfish twirling within, chasing its own, now nibbled tail, until all at once it caught its tail fin and bit further and further until it finally swallowed itself whole. As the liquid stopped moving and cleared in the vacant Aquarium, the King came to himself and remarked that in his hand he still held the Gypsy's mane. As he turned to glance at it, he discovered it was not black, but bronze."

Nephritic stone

I decided to dedicate a small playful ode to the kidney stone that so complicated my life a year and a half ago. My folk say that one must laugh at adversity, since crying is of no use:

"It feasts on flesh, banquets on bone,
or quick, it gobbles body whole.
A grain well placed will urge you prone,
Not love but sand takes such a toll.

A germ that grows on salted ground,
in taut terrain, nephritic night.
A pearl, wet desert rose, ignite
this wraith into a question wound.

You jade me, nephrite, graven gem;
your wanton wound, unfaithful ail,
predicted death and bade me pale,
my petals plucked but spared my stem.

I thank thee for that sleepless time,
in Orwell's wing (eighty fourth ward),
its Telescreens, my piddle poured
and turned to wine; but most, this rhyme."

Duende Gallego

Trace now a curve, round the peak of O Cebreiro, the passageway into Gaelic Spain, as yet near free from the sully of our faithless hearts, the defunctness of folklore. Its spirits troubled and trickster fays know not our harsh morals but squeeze between our laws as light through alabaster, with mellow mood and gentle gait. This domain of thin fleshed sprites is said to be guarded by Cerberus, whose six great eyes wander the hills each eve as ignes fatui. The wind is wrought by his wild breath, exasperated as he shakes us, but fleas to him, rippling the treetops.

Only the vivid paints of the landscape brand the permeant lust. Immortal green, vehement violet and ardent cerulean, the passions pressed, egressing from these ethereal channels saturate our carnate world with what the gitanos call "duende", goblin or ghost. This force manifests too in contours we too can comprehend, but rarely see. Bearded gnomes buried in forest bulwarks shouldering your path, their rooted beards palpating the air, seeking your sudor. Dead, crusted trolls amidst the countless broken trees and crumpled leaves idling about, but his right arm reared, its hand vacant, more than empty, hollow, a porthole through his palm voiding our vision. Rustling, restless hobgoblins hiding in the bushes revert to the verd guise of great lizards, which as quickly turn to air. Smell it now. You'll catch the scent of burning hair, the self-styled torches of minute elves, baits for the giant moths they gallop, the flame a carrot, the shaft a cane. Listen to yours as it hits the ground, its echoes tell of tunnels running deep beneath, harbouring impish armies feeding on sulphur and lime, but field mice too and pilgrim rods when these abound.

Each year they grow extinct, as their ambient is divested. Just as we fall as flies without our oxygen, they cannot breathe an air that has no silence, absence of speech for its own sake. We're used to give quiet to the dead, but we should give it also to the living. Indeed, it is their gift to us, for without stillness we've no soul.

Enanos de viña

Take a map of the Iberian peninsula and trace a line between Pamplona and Burgos. Along that trace you shall find a vinery entrenched upon a modest hill, flaunting a militant, ruined manse, surrounded by silent troops camouflaging their tanned skins in green garbs, their veins prominent and virid. Hush is all there is to hear.

Legend tells these planted folk were not always rooted thus, though the barky commands of their master kept them nigh and fast in place. It was from the tenebrous eyes of the house that he blustered his vociferations at his then slaves in blood and serfs in law, a rather extended family beaten and pressed into thralldom. These his "children" were each hardened more by the relentless leather of his many belts, each one tardily eroding with their sweat the sturdy hide, than by their crushing labour. It was their yells that fecundated the soil each day and night, concocting the sorely delicious grapes that erupted as bodied fireworks into the clusters hanging from their sinewy gallows.

For three handful years the residence drew wealth from their spirited wines, whose taste was sought out by ecclesiasts and nobility, who sought to drink a grape that matched, severally, their habit and blood in quality and colour both. But as the lord aged, his grasp grew weaker, and thus his seal softened, started melting as did the flesh under his skin. As all tyrants, he was disposed of subtly and shamefully, rather than by much deserved violence, by daily doses of arsenic into his chalice, one stone of it in hefty weight across some years that did not show decay until his demise. Indeed they say the poison restored his strength and shifted his aspect from great proud villain to a crooked dwarf, hardening from the innards out; his tongue turned a plank, insensitive to the ratsbane delivered to him in ever greater portions. Die he did at last, at the dinner table, choking on the clumped solute clotting his throat, but not before he gargled through a curse, as Spaniards do, to each relative thrice removed.

Removed they were that eve, before supper, afore they had even time to take his corpse from the table, though try they did. Yet he was grounded in his place, his feet bound to the floor, his hands clutching the woody legs at the table's head, and his own caput twisted over the back of his oaken throne. Their slaver dead, they fell prey to custom instead - without fail, to work the field until the fall of dusk - and when a storm contorted the sky's brow and pushed forth its million tears, they did not take refuge within their quarters, but laboured on until their knees sank deep in mud, as did their hands. Not one emerged, nor knew the house again. 'Tis said the master now eats alone.

Colossus

Tonight I dreamt I was a girl, sired by two grand forces of Nature yet orphaned by the two. What caused the death of these two parents I know not, but surely nothing is eternal. Therefore, I set out to wake Father from his deep slumber.

I conjured him on a wide, empty street, ashen like Pompeii. He was a concoction of life, ghost and past: feeble and mistrustful, his beard occluding his true thoughts when he did speak, a rather sporadic eventuality. Yet I guided him - half convincing, half dragging - to the Hospital where we would carry out our... my purpose. To guide Father through the entrance proved much more demanding than I first reckoned, we only crossed the threshold after I persuaded him that I had brought him here to be restored to his full life. The deserted reception room was wholly formed of moving walls, shaping and reshaping itself, slowly guiding us onward as it diagnosed Father's ailment and readied itself to transmute his weakness into strength.

I remember, quite distinctly, the pictured design that would transform the elder sinews of his brain into a young, spirited hive of thought. But I could have never been prepared for the metamorphosis that would ensue. His force was taken from its withered, fleshy scallop and poured into a golden egg, a round Colossus of heavy, elongated eyes; of ample, frog-like jaw; whose stumpy legs and arms gave him a deceptively endearing aspect, much akin to Humpty-Dumpty. Yet the movement within his heart, an orange sun he literally wore upon his sleeves, suggested it could not be felled nor raised by horses or men.

Thus, Father and I went on along the shifting corridors and stairs of the live building, gaining height as we searched out the fourth floor. The higher we went, the quieter the corridors became, and wilder and broader our urban landscape became, increasingly evidencing that it was built not for the likes of me, but for my Father's kin. It was upon the third floor, I believe, that we chanced upon some respite from the pervasive stillness, as we encountered a nursing mechanism, a marble coloured, smaller and milder replica of my Colossus. Before I knew it, Father turned and deftly pounded upon the dwarf with his paws, cracking his frame like an eggshell.

"Do you think you can do anything?" I shouted in fury at Father.

His deep eyes twisted towards me and his voice, bottomless as mine was high, replied: "Yes."

"Then learn love," I said, now calmly.

The light within his bare heart swirled upon his hands, and now emerged from every opening of his armour, his eyes the searchlights of a lighthouse, roaming the meaning in my request. Suddenly all quietened down, he stood the same and I could not tell if I had dreamed his sudden enlightenment. Time would tell, I told myself.

Soon we found ourselves before the stairs to the fourth floor. As we scaled them, the ambient changed from the gelid precision of the hospital to the warm inhospitality of a great mansion. The now-wooden stairs faced a dining room that, judging from its crude aspect, must have belonged to the servants. Upon the stark oaken table sat two bowls of olive-coloured soup. We could not help but enter, unaware of the unseeable presence of legion spirits in the room, their ruddy auras balancing the green colour of the death realm we had entered. As we consumed the soup, perishing with each spoonful, behind us a window opened within the door-frame revealing to all present but Father and me, the satisfied eyes of Mother.

The anthill in my chest

Ants. Every corner sees their scurrying, their legs as if carried by some current flowing only for them. They run to the sweetness of my fruitful thoughts, and ever more surely as these finish rotting, fertilizing the next harvest. Yes, these adventurous thoughts turn sweet then bitter, as I try to delineate my freedom and trace its future, placing a crystal glass over it and edging it slowly along a heartless path to a breathless end. My torment does not last forever, as I let these mentations loose before they have time to dismember my soul, to let them feed upon the seed of my premonitions: my hopes and, yet more palatable, my frights.

What I see as the ants start crawling all about my skin and underneath it, twirling as lovers do under a duvet, is a landscape where the cobblestones don't know our steps, where the trees don't drink our breaths and where the night, spiderlike, does not spy our kisses with its myriad eyes, nor does it spin our gasps into tiny cocoons to be drunk fully later on. Drink, drink the bitter nectar of my dismay, enjoy it more in knowing its flow shall last only as long as I. I'll feed instead on that interminable vine that grows just out of grasp, let those aureate grapes mature a little more, to sink within reach. Reveal yourself sometime and join me, we'll eat them two by two, letting our ants make hospice in their sainted carcasses, let us exhaust them before we exhaust ourselves.

Firefly night

The wind curled, just as hair does, about the empty, unlit streets I eroded as I roamed under the blind sky. Its orchestra of natural song, so varied in tone and melody, would gain strength for what seemed minutes at a time before subsiding and again start with a whispered tune. Its growth made all the house elements come alive with sound: the creak of ancient wooden gates, the squeak of metal weathercocks, the stuttering of glass, the rasping of vegetation. Even animated life, praying aloud for respite from the touch of angry nature. Yet perhaps what I believed the joint orisons of the metropole of mice had rather different meaning -- nature's gentle way of asking for solitude while it discovered, lived itself alone. I'd not desist, only defy, a nutcracker of flesh and blood.

I pushed deeper into the dark, fashioning myself a mantle out of it, letting it soak up my fears. But my deepest fright remained impassive to the warmth of night: it lived too deep within my marrow, armoured in ivory cataphract and surrounded by red blooded plebs, kept in check by sinewy whip, enacting his every move. I dreaded to never see night again, unpolluted by the light we shine upon it to try see it more clearly. No. It must remain shrouded in itself - to see its mystery we must not violate it.

A hundred more steps brought me face to face with Night's answer, it told me I was wrong. It was the streetlights, those old-fashioned cages of glass and iron, windows to the four corners of the earth for the imprisoned firefly within, motionless, burning a steady flame that sought to illuminate nothing but itself. Its quiet burn made the night about it darker, truer still.

Life quietened about me, and my pace became the metronome of my musings as I found home again. When I set out, I thought I could defeat the night, make it miss me more than I missed it. Instead, I walk it every night, if not in action then in thought.

Patience

More than three years ago began a poem, and never finished. Until tonight.

"There is no fear in love;
but perfect love casteth out fear:
because fear hath torment"
1 John 4:18

I pour my sadness on this page and try to yield to Fate,
but Will is weaker than Desire, so still I clutch the blade
and push it tight against my breast as though it were her hand.
My sorrow drips onto the floor and mixes with my blood;
the grain is made, the seed is sown and now there comes a bud
that springs a flower that can lead my essence to her land.

Where colour cuts all eyes to shreds, the place you call 'a dream',
Where beauty pierces more than pain and silence mutes the scream.
The grass devours the Lion's flesh, the dust erodes its bones;
the Dragon dreads to spread its wings above this fatal trail,
And warns me not with blaze nor burn, but bare abysmal wail,
that those that can't devise its end will perish here alone.

My sight has read a thousand lives, each step a myriad deaths;
The path is paved in carmine light, the dusk of my close breaths.
The citadel waits nigh at hand, its gates bloom to my rhyme,
Within its carcass stark and scourged, mon coeur illumes the pit.
I clasp, reclaim my mortal sin, to weave as I see fit,
To find a match to flame away the very frame of time.

the Bunny House, the Chicken and the Honey

That same morning, a second children's story was born out of three more Pieces, I was glad to tell it, yet am much happier to see it retold through her voice:

"A lonely little Chicken stood scratting one afternoon in the dust of a large yellow field. She scratted all day long at the same dry spot, for she believed she was a Bunny and was trying to build a Bunny House in the ground, as Bunnies do.

She laboured day and night, tearing her small toes on the stones, but to no avail: each time, after much time, she had managed to make but a small pit in the earth, the Summer wind came and blew the earth back from whence it came, scattering her work out into the mellow flatness of the field. But still she scratted on, by day and night, to build a house to live in, for how else could a Bunny live but in a house under the ground?

Yet another time, and this time more than ever before, she had dug into the ground a full basin of air, just about the right size for her to nestle her body in. But this time the Autumn rains came and where air or Bunny should have been, there was muddy water and dark earth. But still she scratted on, day and night.

And then crept Winter over the field, draping its cape of ice and snow over the ground as it stalked on by. At first sight of the snows the Chicken was disheartened, but then she found, as she bent to move the stones and grit with her beak, that the snows made the land thicken into lumps that could be scratted and picked away with ease! By this time she had become stronger, and worked with the land as five Chickens put together.

In a matter of days she had made a small burrow, which, over the following days without snow, became a deep tunnel with a deep reservoir at the bottom with a chamber off to one side, a small way from the bottom where she could sleep without fear of snow or rain touching her. When it was all but complete, she sat back and puzzled: what was it that Bunnies did once they had built their houses?

No sooner had she finished her hard work than she was wandering out into the tired old field in search of Bunny Houses containing other Bunnies whom she could ask what to do. An hour had passed when she came upon the first Bunny House and craned her neck down through the narrow passage. Within, wrapped in great snoozing darkness, was a small family of Bunnies – a Mother Bunny and five or six Child Bunnies, all fast asleep! The Chicken was saddened: because they were asleep, she couldn't ask them what they normally do in their houses.

She wandered on across the greying plateau before her, and stumbled upon another entrance to a Bunny House. Peering in, she saw a big Father Bunny sheltering by himself, his eyes softly closed like night sky on the hills. The Chicken smiled and shed a small tear from her earth-black eye, wishing he would wake, yet marvelling all the while at his profound peace. She retreated from the hole and made her way onward into the dark plains.

Night coursed over the ground like a hum, broken only by the small peaks and troughs of moonlight on the stones. The cold clung to her feathers like tar, made thicker with her own mounting exhaustion. Spotting a denser patch of dark beyond her, the familiar sign of a Bunny House, she quickened her brittle feet and gathered herself impatiently toward its mouth. The warm darkness revealed still more of itself and grew to a girth sufficient to allow the Chicken's whole body to nestle its way inside.

Within this ample Bunny House, she heard a faint scratching sound and peered in as deep as her eyes would let her – before her, and with no less surprise than she, was a Chicken! Though startled, each offered the other a welcoming cluck, and settled down together on the floor where the newfound Chicken offered her guest some honey from a nearby pot. They lived out their winters together in this way through the rest of their lives, waking from the long and languorous stretch of the snows with a drop of the sweetest honey."

Spark of sight

They pushed me forward again then pulled me back, their hands twisting round my garb and their faces contorted into smirks as we walked slowly down the narrow corridor. It was the last hour of their fun, each guard one paw of that great cat playing a last game with the mouse. Presently, they pressed me onto one side of the corridor, forcing me to grate my skin against the rough, rocky stones making up the indelicately built wall, leaving a trace, perhaps a penultimate message of my existence.

My last vestige perchance should be the spurt of blood that'd follow the fall of the long, Roman cavalry sword, severing any insignificant obstacles along its path to the wooden altar, usually but air and neck, but sometimes shoulders and jaws as well. The blood of this sacrifice should placate Mars and the fulfilment of a deserved fate should please Fortuna; in fact, all other gods should be as glad for they are jealous and love to see us grieve. They'd force me to face the gathered crowd, and return their expectant watch with meek expression, and I would do so, but not because of them.

There were those who thought me a saint and would expect me to be a cephalophore, but had I been, I would not have the time or self-indulgence to cradle my head in my arms and take it where I'd have it rest until the last night of sleep. I would rather it stayed here. There were also those who thought, or knew rather, that I was merely a charlatan and would, at most, stand to walk a few paces for the enjoyment of most, and then drop upon the ground, while the last beats of my heart served not my will but bloody spectacle.

A doorway to my left, leading into one of the many living catacombs, gave me respite from the pain and an instant to remember my happy days of fraud. I was an opportunist, having come to the City unknown to any, I used my charm and some well placed gold coins to lead many to believe that I was an instrument of God, one that served men that is, what foolish thought! After they saw me 'cure' a leper, a limp and a blind, they all accepted that I had been taught by Mark the disciple himself. I took to helping those in need, for a small fee to aid my one-man church, by having them believe that their ills were gone, and they felt better for it, I feel no shame for serving such a noble cause. Those whose ills I could not help, I told they had to pray to spare their sins, which had wrought their condition, and took my fee. But worthy works as these can but sustain themselves a week before vile tongues start plaguing them, and not three days had passed before I found a nobler employment.

I learned of a recent Imperial decree that held men from tying bond with their mistresses, because in troubled times the free make better soldiers than those who as Samson are bound to the two pillars of love and passion. I must differ with the Emperor, as what I learned in these the last of my life is that the caged fight better for their freedom. With that thought on my mind, I twisted out of my guards' distracted clutches and thrust at the neck of the elder one, choking his breath. The younger one was lost but a mere moment before he slammed my face against the opposite wall and left me lying on the floor as he turned to attend to his companion. I did not wait to draw breath again, but had my shaky hand draw out from folds of clothing a piece of parchment, the other found a gap that could conceal its sight and both helped slide the one into the other. Moments after I felt several kicks breaking my ribs, and did not mind them, each part of me that broke gave me a moment more to live, and to remember. Besides, it was time for pain to conjure the start of painful memory.

The current law served as manure for good black market, particularly for one with my current reputation, which I soon used to bind kin spirits into married love. The ceremonies were small and modest, as were the temple and wooden altar, which was filled with gashes left by heavy knives, as it must have served as cooking board for the former residents. I knew how to perform my rites well, having seen wedlocks during my varied travels, knew by true heart all the parables and sermons quoted from Mark's and Christ's lips, though they be of my own invention. My merchantry of love was a happy affair, and a faithful one indeed, for though I loved the sound that charitable coins made within my humble purse, I also felt a kind of pride when I saw my patrons leave, cautious but joyous. To my misfortune, my good deeds were not unnoticed by the Law, which eventually knocked at the door of my humble abode in the shape of two good soldiers, whose callous faces glared with contempt. They took me rather unceremoniously from my temple, carrying me off to the prison where I would spend the rest of my short days, holding my arms as we walked just as the prison guards were doing after having forced me to lift my carcass off the floor. My broken nose was filled with blood, barring my ability to breathe, making me feel as I did upon my first rendezvous with my jailer and interrogator.

My name means 'valour' yet I professed little of it when I spoke with my detainer, a man of robust frame displaying a slender, bony portrait. Yet weaker than his visage was his patience, which was exhausted after the merest deviation from the stony path of his direct truth, never had I met a man less interested in the landscapes of imagination. As we progressed, the path we took became shaper and sharper on my figurative feet, and most painful of all was that his truth was not mine. It was not only my mind's soles that bled that day, but so did much of the rest of my common body after the fondle of his salted whip. I suffered first for my want to lie, then suffered for my will to speak the truth and only was relieved when I reached his compromise. In the course of but a few hours, he proved to me that I was priest, that I had for my filthy faith broken the law of the true Gods, and that my head would soon adorn the front façade of the Emperor's palace, but not before I was humiliated by twenty more salt-soaked lashes every day, for every single day I had defied the Law. My jailer then called after his daughter, who was to clean me. Salted water. There was as much of that flowing from my eyes as there was blood flowing on the floor, a little more of either would do no harm, I thought.

And then she entered, looking past me as she held a piece of crimson cloth and a decanter of man made tears. The sister of Aquarius. She delayed at the threshold but for a moment and moved closer until she was nearly by my side and stopped again, she looked away and harked. Then she was by me, feeling my arms and legs with her soft hand, the clotted, moist textile followed suit, burning away the reprieve that her warm skin brought, but not completely.

A man loves most when he is in greatest pain, another reason to turn yet again on my faithful guards, but my strength fails me now and they carry me forward, letting me drag my disobedient feet along the ground. Their hiss against the sand reminded me of the sound of her coming to my cell after my daily penance. I never saw her come, but with eyes closed and arms about my knees I heard her move and lapse until she was by me. It was always her first caress that made me open my eyes, that made speak, that softened me within yet hardened me without and made me neglect her latter touch.

'What do you listen to when you wash me?'
'I hear the wind pass through the cracks in the stones. I listen when I cannot touch it with my hands.'
'Do you ever look at them? The cracks.'
'No, never. I pass them without looking, only feeling them, when I come here. I touch them all by chance. They meet my left as I come here. Goodbye.'

The wash had finished and off she went, to go away and explore the other side of the wall, as I watched her trailing along the passage on, where my sight could not reach. It was my turn now to trail, as we neared the exit of the prison, and I could see the outline of the plaza and hear the murmur of the multitude gathered outside. She murmured too, sometimes, in the last days of her sweet visits.

'Who do you speak with?'
'With the Gods.'
'What do you say?'
'I ask them to let me see the wind.'
'And they?'
'They say that you too cannot see it, so there is little hope. But I will ask again.'
'How many times have you asked them this?'
'It's not how many, it is how much. Always. Father says this is why they won't let me see all else. You are finished, goodbye.'

Nearly finished, I counted but three days before today. I set myself to tear away a piece of cloth from my vile garments and washed it three times in the little water I was meant to drink, and rubbed it against a smooth stone that I found in the corner of my cell. It took me a whole day to fashion of it a parchment of sorts, a dirty yellow in colour, but light enough to be inscribed with my ruddy ink. This ink is now dripping slowly onto the ardent sand, and I can hear the clamour of the populace, demanding me to write them something epic and less dragging, and they shall have it soon. The altar's ready to receive all of my words, except the ones that matter.

I see her now in the crowd, staring intently, bluntly blind but keenly hearing all my thoughts, I feel. She will know where to look, to find my last words before the death of love. Mine. And if she finds, I promise she will have my last spark of sight.

'The wind is yours only to see.
From your Valentinus'