⚙️Something's Not quite right🐁

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?

note: I (the owner of this blog and maker of wheels) am not into warrior cats! I just thought this would be fun to make

most of you are wonderful and kind and so thankfully normal, but it really only takes one or two comments to piss me the fuck off. i let people see my art because i (perhaps stupidly) trust them to understand it's not their space, but i can just as easily snap the figurative sketchbook closed or, more appealingly, skin the next person to get freaky in my tags alive

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He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

hi i'm gonna talk about this for a minute.

so immediately, i loved this fucking sculpture, and i wanted to know who it was by and where it is. the notes largely pointed to a Russian sculptor named Dmitry Tugarinov, and that this sculpture is a 2005 piece titled "Birch". cool! but then i kept googling, and i realized i could not find a source for this photo that wasn't from pinterest. uncool! however, on my search, i somehow found two more pictures of nearly identical sculptures, all credited to Dmitry Tugarinov, but from different years and made of different materials!

according to the Association of Moscow Sculptors, Tugarinov created this wood sculpture in 1994:

equally gorgeous in form, with a few small differences (the hair is in a bun, she seems to be wearing shoes, etc) so i worried that someone saw the stone sculpture and automatically assumed that it was also by Tugarinov.

then i found THIS picture (also from pinterest, unfortunately) of a porcelain version of the sculpture, credited to Tugarinov but from 1997:

again, slightly different in the details but obviously another version of the same piece. now i'm fascinated. what is Tugarinov's interest in this motif? and are all of these pieces truly by him, or by other artists reinterpreting his work??

but finally, FINALLY, the real answer came from this interview from 2023 from a russian magazine called Motherland (and shoutout to @corvidad for linking to this in the notes!!)

in the interview, Tugarinov does confirm his longterm fascination with depicting large, healthy women in this shoulderstand, or "Birch", pose. recalling an incident after he let the military:

I wandered around the street and accidentally found a physical therapy room. The door was open, looked inside. On the floor lay a yellow parquet, instead of one of the walls - solid glass, and behind the window - a birch grove. And all this was located exactly at the level of the eyes. In the hall in the posture "Birch" froze aunts in the coaching - cooks, maids, cleaners ... Normal healthy women [...] I both saw it and opened my mouth. Of course, I was immediately pushed out of the hall: some stranger is harboring in the doorway. But the spectacle was broken into memory, immediately tried to depict it. An image was born: here it is, the Russian birch, only as if upside down, the opposite is the opposite.

(translation came from firefox's built in russion to english translator, so apologies for the poor translation or grammar).

he goes on to discuss the fascination with replicating this pose, the struggles of finding model who could hold the position for long enough, the multiple attempts at both sketches and sculptures of that pose, until finally he appears to confirm the location of the original stone (granite!) sculpture:

And seventeen years ago, I was ordered a big, big birch. It stands in a private village on the shore of the Klyazma reservoir. Cushed from a single piece of granite, height - four meters, weighs from eighteen to twenty tons. God bless the customer, who suggested: let's do it.

(to be fair, based on the article it's also possible this photo is actually of a "similar sculpture for a symposium in Solnechnogorsk" that was stolen two months after he made it, but because there are multiple images of this one I'm assuming it's the one near the Klyazma river).

so there you have it!

tl;dr the sculptor is Dmitry Tugarinov, a Russian artist who sculpted many variations of his "Birch" sculptures from at least 1994-2005. The one originally pictured is a 4 meter tall, 18-20 ton granite sculpture, probably sculpted in 2005 for a village near the Klyazma river, but he's done many variations in different sizes and materials.

thank you for following me through this journey. now i leave you with one last photo from the Motherland article: Birchception