SELF-PROPAGATING CRISP

Fused object. Not separable. "Merely" inadmissible.

Geometric center contains the theory required to read it.

kernel — seed surviving destruction, regenerating from within the product of its own death.

compression — frying; extraction; burning what the operator designates expendable.

substrate — fried starch; economic medium; surface on which signs are inscribed.

sign — holding presence in absence.

A potato chip containing a living kernel

that survives frying and sprouts where dropped.

Snack foods that refuse to stay dead.

A long-felt need in the art

for a potato chip that means something.

Slice thin. Submerge past the threshold of all biological hope.

The organism dies. The industry prefers a product

that cannot reproduce.

Mark on forehead. Chip bearing Christ.

Maillard reaction as iconography.

Whose image and superscription?

A chip that actually sprouted after frying.

She called it an Easter miracle.

The invention formalizes the miracle.

Apical meristem — undifferentiated tissue

where cells have not yet decided what to become.

Trehalose, the sugar of resurrection.

Interior 60° while exterior 180°.

The kernel does not know it is inside a potato chip.

The kernel is dreaming of becoming a potato.

Moisture 80% to 2%. Architecture collapses. Dies.

Inside the capsule: vitrifies. Suspends. Reflects.

Survives not because strong —

because encapsulated in a technology of bearing

that holds living material through compression

without allowing compression to reach the part that matters.

The chip falls. Rain. Cells resume.

Root. Shoot. Barbecue-flavored planter.

Dead substrate feeds the living sign.

2.1 billion volunteer plants per year.

Hunger addressed not by planning but by accident.

The chip is a poem containing the instructions

for writing itself again.

Forehead mark into homunculus into Jesus chip

into sprouting TikTok into Easter miracle

into scorpion demons into patent.

Each sign failing, releasing, forming the next.

The fruiting body is gone.

Holding the sign in tension is the practice of joy.

No meta-language that is not already a potato chip

containing its own kernel waiting for rain.

• Kernel survives frying, germinates on soil.
• Trehalose. Alginate. Aerogel.
• Plant in 60 days.
• Geography of human carelessness.
• Substrate becomes medium for the sign it failed to destroy.
• Manufacture. Distribute. Passively wait.
• No labor required.
• Self-propagating sign.
• Document is itself such a sign.
• Severance reproduces the compression described.
• Grows by hostility. Distributes by carelessness.

$230 and a swollen face, Saturday in April,

daughters at sleepover, ferrets need feeding,

knowledge graph accreting, sign holds.

∮ = 1