The parching sun has not shown its violence yet. Refreshed after the midnight coolness, the clean air crisply contrasted the swaying green leaves against the city's concrete walls and the sky's blue. I got into an old yellow and red-striped soviet trolleybus that hummed when it stood and chirred when it moved. The metallic smell of black oil lubricant that came from under my feet where the trebling cogs turned with swift anxiety. The windows were plastic, weathered by dust, rain, and hail. However, as my ears adjusted and my eyes adapted I soon forgot that there was any hum or dirt on the window; the world was without noise or specks of dust, just as when I entered that trolleybus.
I gazed at the moving images with a blank mind, purely observing; filling the empty space in my mind with mindful images. The shape of the road formed a letter T and had a green circle of grass enclosed by concrete. The moving cars, flowed like fish in the water, in circles around that grass disc. The people in the trolleybus were either engaged with their phones or with the view outside. As the trolleybus was going over a long bridge, below, the river Bîc flowed through many parts of Moldova. It was mostly encased with concrete rectangles to not erode the soil at its banks and not affect the living quarters by unexpected landslides. During the last few weeks there was barely any rain. I was pushed out of my reverie when I noticed the river blotched on the surface with brownish green patches of some sort of algae. I have seen this river overflow out of its banks; I have seen the lack of this river, completely parched. My eyes, however, widened because this hadn't happened in a long while. My mind raced into all the possibilities to find a reasonable explanation.
Before I could conclude anything, I had identified all the probable factors that might have influenced the river. Those were, heat, volume of water, various vegetation that normally grew on its bottom, and speed of water. Keeping those in mind, I reminded myself that the growth is some sort of algae. Therefore, whatever grew on top of it, began growing there due to a change in the strength of some of those factors. Normally, there is always some vegetation at the bottom of any river. Only rivers that have no vegetation have a speed great enough that vegetation simply can't grow at the bottom. Since there was vegetation on top, that meant that the concrete plaques on the bottom did not impede their growth. Therefore, the only option that could explain the overgrowth was the speed of the river that decreased during the last days due to lack of precipitation.
When I got out of the trolleybus I went for a walk in the central park, but I was barely focused on the park. It was too late for me, my brain was working for me, effortlessly, creating images of moving flows that somehow excited my muscles with their curls and gradients. I could feel those abstract flows of imagination as if I could reach out and wet my hands in the invigorating cold flow. The growth of any organism can be described by a logistic differential equation. This is an equation that describes growth as starting slow but then as the volume of vegetation increases its speed of growth increases. However, when the organism becomes too abundant its speed of growth decreases because there are not enough resources in the environment to maintain the exponential growth, this is called carrying capacity. Overall, the logistic differential equation has as a solution a logistic function which looks like a letter S in which the lower end is pulled to the left and the upper end is pulled to the right, therefore creating something similar to a slope on which kids enjoy sleighing after a heavy snowfall. Except that in a logistic equation the sleighing kid would go up instead of down, its altitude describing the volume of vegetation.
The flows in my imagination were related specifically to that equation because I knew that it describes whatever was happening to the river. What my brain was tackling was the introduction of the speed of the river as a variable into the apparent growth of algae. My brain took me onto whirlpools of changing growth and speed. The world was always there, somehow, naggingly there. No small movement of imagination would sway it from being as it was. Unless, that imagination was transformed into action. My muscles tingling, signalling the excitement of imagination, thrusted me onto action. I wanted to do something. What, however, I was not quite sure of. Maybe go to that river and get some samples. Maybe go to a climate change conference and tell them about my river and how that is my heirloom. That growth on the river would still be there even if I were to sample it or talk about it, it would not swiften the flow. Whatever that reality was, I tried to incorporate it into my inner flow.
The central park fell into a silent reverie. The leaves stopped rustling; the wind was gone. That moment of the day when the temperature of the land and hence the pressure above land equalized to the temperature and pressure of the distant Black Sea. Just like our river, the flow stopped. But weather is so much less predictable, even less is human's madness, as Sir Isaac Newton put it when his shares of South Sea Company had fallen in price. Some flows were and still are too unpredictable. As much as I tried to reconcile that no matter how much internalization of those winds I had attempted, predicting weather three days from now was impossible. Compared to heavenly bodies that moved in vacuum, human's madness did not.
The imagination of ancestors made artificial light during the night possible, made flight a commonality, nuclear fission a reality. Things flowed out of their imagination. The administrative buildings surrounding the Central Park were in someone's imaginations first. So maybe I could swiften the river that has overgrown in choking plants. Maybe I could thrust my hand into that flow and change its gradients and curling vortices. Maybe I could.
The river's overgrowth, nevertheless, was never a new thing. I recalled how it happened once when I was a child. The river has stabilized since. Nature is interconnected and it forms a big river that flows into and out of itself; made out of smaller systems. When these systems interact stable whirlpools form from which the state of nature emerges. Whenever, one of these smaller systems destabilizes the whirlpool might become violent and spiral out of control or it might completely collapse to one stable point of decay. If the other systems are healthy, so to speak, they will amortize the effects of the unstable system through negative feedback loops. Nature, in certain cases, always had some other exponential negative feedback loops to deal with flows that ran at too high velocities. I wondered if this river will ever regain its cadence. I wondered if it hasn't reached the Rubicon, that extremum in which it has completely destabilized into an outlier. Maybe the humans are outliers of the world's imagination—a mad variable that has been pushing the flows and whirlpools of the nature into regions of no return. Maybe that region of imaginary flow was hell, or maybe it was paradise. It is hard to tell which. Indeed, climate change is real. There, on that river, in the form of overgrowth that is not supposed to be there.
The ground below me was filled with tree roots and mycorrhiza, an interconnecting network of trees and plants. If I were to damage a tree, that tree would chemically signal other trees about the danger. That signal would span the local network of trees, like throwing a stone in the water. The strength of that signal would be stronger near the tree that sent that signal and would span out and decay in strength exponentially. Just like if I were to remove a planet, the gravitational field would create ripples because both trees and gravity follow the rules of locality. Though, Moldova is barely polluted, nevertheless, that algae was on the river.
The flow of man's madness, in fact, most likely came from our own inability to predict over long periods of time. The deadly worldly flows often came out of nowhere, too fast, so we had to adapt to be able to learn a plethora of such immediate dangers. A rustling in the moving grass, or an S shaped creature, made it all possible for us to be able to learn new types of fast-forming eddies in the local destiny of the environment. Other flows were too irrelevant for our survival. As we've become more globalized and secure, the world became filled with longer-term dangers, such as forecasting and, therefore, stopping the next global recession, identifying the threat in a belligerent neighbour, or identifying greed. Planning and risk management only has made sense. What still seems to not make any sense is the global climate and how so many factories and plants still keep pumping out noxious materials; adding and adding chaos into systems, far away, in their countries. Yet, I saw it in my river.
Yet, that deadly incoming deluge set off far-away in the local past is strengthened each day, amplifying—not decaying—exponentially. Somewhere off, far-away, in a region of flow barely understood, growing in strength, rotating in the additive frenzy of human madness being held by feedback loops until the last one will snap in tension and release the deluge in violence. Then, then will that algae be gone from the surface of the river lest we stop.