“Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.”
― Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

The suite of music featured below was written by composer Phillip Glass in 1988, and inspired by the 1915 short story “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka. Some of the pieces were written for a live staging of Metamorphosis in 1988, while others were created for a documentary film called The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris in that same year.

The word metamorphosis derives from Ancient Greek μεταμόρφωσις, “transformation, transforming”, from μετα– (meta-), “after” and μορφή (morphe), “form”.

Science describes metamorphosis is the biological process by which an animal physically develops including birth transformation or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal’s body structure through cell growth and differentiation.

However, as with Kafka, metamorphosis is often considered generally as a more comprehensive process of an individual organism’s development from the fertilized egg to its mature, adult form, and encompassing its entire lifespan. In less words, it’s about the transformation of form and capacity over time.

But what about metamorphosis as a collective phenomenon?

“Everything that exists came to be through a process of systemic development in our evolving universe. Development of a system toward some specific end, absent regulation, invariably leads to the system’s senescence, a precarious developmental end-stage in which the system, having developed to the limit of its capacity for that specific trajectory of development, is no longer able to adapt to disruptive change and is thus poised for collapse. As a result of unregulated development, our global civilization has entered senescence and has begun collapsing. Collapse of a senescing system can either be terminal — as in death or extinction — or transitional, heralding the birth of a new, incipient (undeveloped or immature) system — i.e., metamorphosis.

From the internal perspective of a mature or senescent system (i.e., the prevailing perspective held by constituents of the system), metamorphosis is inherently unpredictable (given that there is no precedent encoded in the system’s models), and in many ways indistinguishable from destruction, so at best we in the civilized world can only hope that collapse of our civilization will lead to its metamorphosis and not a complete obliteration of humanity. Despite this unpredictability, we can examine known examples in a variety of systems to gain insight into what metamorphosis generally entails and ask how often it occurs in the natural world”

– James A. Coffman

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