The defining feature of my world today is heat.

Australia gets hot: 40 degrees celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). That is where we are going in the next few days. It can be cathartic.

The Year of the Snake is here, and not being really connected to the Chinese Zodiac, I didn’t see that one coming. As for me, I’m a Zodiac pig.

All good though: nice coincidence about the serpent. 2025, here we come.

Feeling a little pagan for the end of the year. This is what a visual AI model thinks a ‘creepy Midsommar wicker man thirty feet tall on fire’ looks like. Let’s just say, it captures the mood a little more than the earlier picture of fireworks. Still conflicted about the use of AI, simultaneously with the sense of amazement at what it can produce using only a few words.

The end. The end is the beginning. The beginning is something to look forward to: out with the old year, in with 2025. Tonight I write while the calendar ticks over.

In my university days, I was quite invested in the mysteries and riddles of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s, aka Lewis Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland. There was something about it that was undeniably spatial - falling down a hole, shrinking and growing, going in and staying out. Moving across, up and down, and games, playing and riddling. Of course, lots of playing card imagery.

“Retrace your steps”

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

Step by step.

If I retrace my steps to the inception of The Serpent, it all began with the AI-generated double-serpent image on the home page. I made this image using the prompt ‘a serpent in a garden in the style of an Italian Renaissance painting’, Being pleased with the visuals, I was of a mind to explore domains containing the word serpent, and registered two: serpent.design and theserpent.garden. Both domains come to this site.

The inconsistency principle

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

What is the role of consistency in the elaboration of The Serpent?

You don’t have to be ashamed of using your own ideas

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

It is a simple observation.

The Serpent is my idea, and I have my doubts about it…but that is alright. It is challenging to pursue an idea: it leaves one vulnerable and exposed.

I am moving forward through the doubts and the suspicions that this is an odd kind of undertaking. I have committed to it.

According to Wikipedia, Janus is the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Good enough. The Serpent is just one of two faces: you will find the other face here.

- César Hidalgo, “Why Information Grows”

The creation of physical order is the business of design. Can (and does) design sometimes create intentional disorder?

Is that an acceptable possibility? Is a disordered product made of information? If yes, is it ‘incorrect’ information? Or correctly disordered information?

Does incorrect, unacceptable information grow like correctly ordered information?

Simple subtraction

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

Take socially acceptable, ‘good’ design and simply subtract ‘good taste’. What is left? Anything at all?

Use ‘unqualified’ people

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

What is the use of unqualified people? They are useful. By what right does the designer assert her authority and make a mark? What does entry to The Club mean to her? To us?

The unqualified can (and do) impart order to create information.  Thus value (expressed as information) is created without qualifications.

- César Hidalgo, “Why Information Grows”

Designers impart order to form. They marshal structures, shapes, colours, and correlations to create change. They think this is special.

Maybe it is. Function and practicality are incidental: they are not a precondition of a designed outcome.

Gardening, not architecture

- Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt

Something grows from a seed, with encouragement and the right conditions, the right soil, a steady source of light, and regular quantities of water.

By comparison, architecture is dead, deadly. Massively destructive in its making, and finite, limited: in decline as soon as it is finished, subject to entropy, not sending out tendrils of growth.

Few things speak so clearly of the infinite as a bank of clouds over a restless, churning sea. The ocean is unsettled; both ephemerally rolling and eternally inert in turn. It is always the same, it is never the same.

The skin of The Serpent is mottled green, hazel and gold. Some have tried to capture its appearance and have failed. I look out over the garden and think of the light on its scales, the pattern that I, too, have attempted and failed to draw out, failed to reproduce.

An artisan at work seldom fails at their task, having earned their successes over many years. I see The Serpent’s skin and long to capture its figures and marks, but I can claim no commensurate expertise, no trade, and no well of artisanal knowledge to guide my hands.

So what of The Serpent?

When the light is cut to silver, many things take on a different complexion. A grey morning is less brash than a blue sky. It reveals as much as it conceals, even if that revelation is internal and introspective.

Cherry blossom trees stand in the library courtyard, and a mist has descended between the walls. Nothing will happen in this courtyard, at least not today. What could happen here? Rain will fall today, and burn the mist away. I suppose that is something.

It is All Hallows Eve.

The Serpent says: this is the surface of an uncertain body, and its skin is tattooed with previously unwritten utterances, the fragments of a lost whole. A leaf pattern disguises the scaly hide; nevertheless, the body of The Serpent can be traced through the leaves. A second head complicates the tracing of the line, but there is only one Serpent. He (for it is a He) is content in the foliage, waiting patiently.