At the ingress of the natural world, the geophysical coordinate from which we peer into its plenitude, a whitewashed mask and an Indian headdress await the modern-day cowboys who face its collapse. But the eco-location cannot fall on a map because its topographical specificity eludes the magnitudes that can define a viable position. From the parapet of the ice age they fear to have precipitated, climate experts stand bewildered by the protean force of a substance that mocks their metaphysics, kept on the rungs of the prison-ladder of Aristotle’s Scala Naturae. The stakes of sapience has since been to demarcate the inanimate on which the animate can act in a vertical pecking order. Yet that claim is eroded by the chloroplastic enthrallment of humans for whom agency begins to conflate the entire continuum of the living. The measure of all things, after encountering the incommensurate within an expanded flora, loses all count in the mineral. The animate extends to lichens and archaea, crystals and household dust, the once inert stage, placeholder of the living now running its own performance. At the edge of the vegetal, mosses adhere to rocks in a continuity that eludes the grandiloquence of subjectivity. Through this blurring of artifice and nature, original and copies, an object swims in its setting like a jellyfish in uncharted waters.