Category Archives: Nature

Are You There, God? It’s Me, God

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
  John 1:1

Our world is five thousand years old, give or take. The exact number is irrelevant to you and me. 

The earth hints at former civilizations, but reliable records start  petering out at about 3,000 B.C. Before that, we find in the earth stark, scant evidence; the odd Irish scored bear bone (11,000 B.C.) or Indo-American settlement (16,000 B.C.), or French cave paintings (30,000 B.C.). But nothing with any clarity. No words. 

But there are dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Ridiculous creatures,  impossible to ignore. And rocks that sing of ages long ago.

Out in “space”, the story gets so much deeper, it’s almost incredible. We can see for billions of years! But what we see (and don’t see) offers contradictions. Dark matter. Black holes. Quasars. Incredibly fortuitous combinations of universal elements, constants, across billions of galaxies, all of which add up somehow to…us. Out here, on a garden variety arm of a commonplace spiral galaxy, on this little earth. 

And as far as we know, or have ever known, in all of it, no life anywhere else. 

It seems no matter how much we learn, mystery is to be a prevalent theme of our discoveries, such as they are. 

Among some Native Americans discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries by white invaders, belief systems evolved to surround the big question. Whites called the “god” of the decentralized Plains Indians the Great Spirit. But these native people (who hailed, like everyone, from the East) were misinterpreted by folks geared toward Christian patriarchy. What the Indians were trying to understand, the “god” for which they had such great respect, was not the Great Spirit.  It is “the Great Mystery”.

Mark that. The Great Mystery.

Then there was the East itself, where the road to humanity was probably a different story. But what was the story? Who are the Sons of Han? There was no recognizable religion to parse. Shinto? A mystery to the West, because it did not fit into the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Like the Native Americans, the Japanese appeared to worship their ancestors…themselves.

Copernicus dodged a bullet, but Galileo was made an example. The earth is the center of all creation. This was evident in the night sky and the undeniable conclusion of the dominant religion. Anyone who disagreed was a heretic. Things have changed since then. 

Or have they? Knowledge was power—forbidden power. Eve learned that. Adam learned it. Galileo learned. The fruit was forbidden, even before, to Prometheus, who was tortured for eternity for bringing fire to the mortals. Don’t think they hadn’t heard about him in Palestine. Now we are naked, and God is dead, but knowledge is still power. The fire still burns. The power is still there. Oppenheimer showed us. It’s hidden inside our smallest possessions. 

And still, with this at least “working” knowledge of “everything” in existence not consigned to human imagination, the ultimate answer—from where do we emanate, and when, and why, if there is a why?—eludes us as before. Just as the peace of God surpasses all understanding, it’s likely things “unknowable” were occurring before the Big Bang. But by definition, the Big Bang created our universe. So by definition, we can never know what came before it. We are led by such omissions into the same old factions of “belief”, which fill the void absent that precious final knowledge. 

The Word. What god wields it now? 

In the 1960s the New York Times asked if God is dead. The question answers itself. What will replace God? What did? Not the New York Times. What then?

And why should we ask? If there’s one thing the history of the universe and the history of the earth up to about 5,000 years ago demands, it is obeisance to the cold and distant reality of our true genesis, one that is beyond reasonable questions. These Russian doll complexities — strings(?), quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, solar systems, galaxies, a web of universes, perhaps infinite, each with billions of galaxies, one universe for every possible permutation of human history—these concepts are nothing if not patently insurmountable by mere humans, their measly five senses, and their 80-year lifespans. 

In other words, don’t hold your breath. You will never know. But there is something to know. You are being asked to believe that you will never know it.

But epochs in time, the Big Bang, dinosaurs – these are all easily generated for the benefit of human senses (actually only two need be satisfied – sight and touch). Imagine an extremely advanced 3-D CGI system with both the vastness of space and prehistoric earth as its green screen elements. You can dream up any creature you like – flying lizards, sea dragons, behemoths that walked the earth. You can draw intricate strata into the earth itself, strata which tell stories from “billions of years ago”. Ha ha. That would be fun. Design nearby planets—this one is like earth, that one is gas, this one ice. But only one contains life, or even the elements of life. 

And let’s face it, you don’t have to stop there. You can build other creatures too, on the life-nurturing planet, creatures designed to interact with this computer-enhanced environment (or really, perhaps it’s all inside the “computer”, a word that will have to serve here, like “fire stick” served for rifle in the old days). Maybe these manufactured creatures can build tools and civilizations, invent disciplines and pursue them, preserve and build upon their acquired knowledge with a system of symbolic writing. You could design the “code” (fire stick again) to have 1,000 of their years pass for each year of the experiment, so a hundred generations of macro-societal developments can be studied, in a controlled environment, over a period of perhaps five years.

But this is science, and controls are essential. One thing you cannot do is tell the experiment that it is an experiment. That knowledge, as you can understand, would ruin it. At each stage, subjects imbued with “knowledge” of a vast universe, their vast earth, its undeniable recent history of several thousand years, tied to their personal few decades of remembered history, would behave as if this reality is all there is, because of course I am describing our reality. (I acknowledge the word “real” is getting a workout here. It gets worse.) It goes without saying: they cannot be allowed to discover that their entire idea of reality is contained in a  laboratory somewhere, a greater reality, or that they are the artificially derived subjects of a sophisticated society’s research experiments.

For this thought experiment it’s impossible to say, from inside the experiment, what it is for. But you know scientists. They want to know everything, and they will put lesser beings through hell to find out. I can imagine it as a study of societal outcomes given x y z inputs, which of course would be controllable. If human society of the last few thousand years exhibits any kind of stability, it is in the regular occurrence of large-scale disasters. So these frequent disasters—petty wars, world wars, famine, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, genocide, economic collapse, climate change, Nickelback, political disasters like the nuclear arms race or Donald Trump—these could be the inputs designed to study how a society handles them toward a measurable output that is more or less effective in mitigating the disaster. Like crash test dummies, these invented creatures bear the brunt of invented disaster after disaster to help the controllers of the experiment learn how different techniques work on a complex problem posed to a society or group of societies.

For example, suppose you feared a pandemic but had never experienced one.

Science can be demanding. If subjects feel overwhelmed, or feel as if the tragedies are coming one after another in an unending line, the result can be demoralizing and skew results. “Why me? I’m giving up.” Of course, the relative number who can cope with everything compared to those who simply cannot—and the shared characteristics of each group—is probably useful information to learn. If you’re willing to learn it that way.

And, of course, if it all starts going wrong you can just end the experiment, note the problems, and start over.

Let’s not think about that for too long.

Just an example. But of course, me trying to describe the experiment would be like a mouse in a maze trying to describe  Johns Hopkins University’s 2023 research goals.

***

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
 — Voltaire

Not my idea. If it were, I’d be less concerned about it. No, it’s the feint-guarded, vaguely expressed belief of some of this planet’s most lauded intellects (such as Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson) that our entire existence could well be someone else’s controlled experiment. In other words, our world, our universe(s), our selves—all artificial. Like a video game. 

I won’t pretend to understand the technical details, but as I do understand its narrative, the idea stems from the “odds” of the structure of the universe—what we call “universal laws” governing physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics—pretty much everything—coming together as it did billions of years ago. Apparently those odds are pretty long. The fact that the universe, against all odds, came together in exactly the right way to support corporeal human life, then to generate that life, just sounds too pat for scientists, who don’t like coincidence. 

The available data appears to support one of two working hypotheses regarding our universe. Either it did indeed come together in just the right way to support human existence by happenstance, which is extremely unlikely from a mathematical perspective; or there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes forming a giant structure of connected universes, each one consisting of random combinations of laws and properties that characterize that particular universe. The theoretical structure of this “multiverse” can be imaged as the head of foam on a glass of beer, where each little beer bubble represents a universe. In this model, mathematics and theories I don’t understand purport to tell us that every possible type of universe exists independently of every other universe. That way, our highly unlikely universe gets to exist, because every possible universe exists. This “branching” effect occurs, moreover, all the time, with every possible outcome of every possible phenomenon represented by individual universes where each possible outcome has indeed occurred. 

So if I take a taxi here in this universe, I walked in another universe, and I decided to stay home in a third universe, and I had a heart attack and died at the taxi stand in yet another, and I was never born in still another. I estimate it would take from 50 to 100 universes to cover a person spending five minutes at a taxi stand. Now multiply that across everything that exists (or could exist) and every action that ever occurred (or could have occurred) over all of time since the Big Bang. 

Pretty unwieldy.

So I like the first one.

But a third idea, unfortunately, presented itself. It is unfortunate in that it need never have been presented at all. But that’s not how things work.  

It is unfortunate because the Happenstance or Multiverse theories cover all the bases. In the first, our unlikely universe exists as it does because it just does. In the second, it exists as it does because every possible universe exists.

But to those who find both unpalatable, a third theory posits that our universe is organized in this unlikely way not because of the result of unguided natural processes, but by design.

Mark that: by design.

It is designed to support beings (if we are in fact beings and not virtual machine-driven entities) like ourselves. Rather than God, however, it was designed by an unknown, non-supernatural entity to perform exactly as it does, for purposes known only to the designer(s). A grand simulation on a grand scale. 

And, let’s face it, if so it’s indistinguishable from the story of God except for what we call God, and what we call ourselves. Still, it is full circle, from our status as human subjects of a mysterious omnipotent God, to a brief, explosive late twentieth century role—call it a cosmic smoke break—as masters of science and existence. And finally, in this decade, back to being subjects of some hidden omnipotent god in the form of a superior civilization. At least in the opinion of our greatest minds.

For special knowledge, once again—the Word—is the power. We have come back to the beginning. We wielded it alone for a few generations, starting with Einstein and our Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer, destroying the known world with fission, continuing through the development of the patently insane H-bomb and the death of God as announced by the Times, and ending with the ultimate findings of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s quantum theories: the paradox of our very existence. 

Now, because of this paradox, we again suspect that our will is not our own, our futures already predetermined by an invisible process under an intelligence we cannot see and know nothing about. Even apart from all that, the available evidence in bio research supposedly argues against the concept of free will in favor of a kind of genetic determinism. 

Our world is once again the center—and in this case comprises the whole—of creation.

Because we, finally, are probably artificial. Not even “real”. Subject to the whims of greater beings disconnected from our sub-reality, our Sims game. Is it not uncomfortably reminiscent of what we used to be? Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Is it not, somehow, even worse than that? Our new god is not angry, nor the least bit concerned for our souls. And we are not even capable of “sin,” because our god is absent and unaffected by anything we might do. Certainly we don’t warrant “forgiveness,” because we have no capacity to offend. There’s no relationship, fatherly or otherwise.

There’s nothing. Our new god is disinterested. And we’re not even alive. 

***

It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
— Homer Simpson

But let us return to earth. As Sherlock Holmes repeatedly demonstrated to us via Occam and his razor, the simplest, most uncomplicated explanation is usually the correct one. We are part of a cycle of life in this universe, our universe, where we evolved organically on this planet, our planet, along with myriad other life forms over uncounted millennia. If an “Artificial” intelligence can somehow divine beyond doubt that we are also somehow artificial, then everything we know is artificial, so any perceived problem of “realness” is reduced to a problem of simple semantics. 

Back in 2021, Fouad Kahn, writing in Scientific American, reached this same place in reason. In his article, titled “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation”, he lays out the hard “evidence” that our universe is most likely being controlled by an external intelligence. It’s pretty compelling! Anyone possessing a rational mind who doubts the veracity of the findings should read it before dismissing it (I originally typed “should dread it”…accidentally). But as Kahn notes, the world-shattering conclusion at the end of the reasoning has no scientific value. It is unfalsifiable.

Useless.

Rather than explore the multiverse, we will have to settle for just the one universe. In fact I’ll give you ten to one on that. We’ll have to settle for the one galaxy, and the one solar system, except for visuals and some Voyager data from the void.

Doctoral theses notwithstanding. Sorry. But you’ll get your university job, don’t worry. They used to call it Natural Philosophy, you know. You can say whatever you want.

The next solar system is a long, long way away—like 300,000 trips to the Sun. The next galaxy is 600,000 times that. Have you heard of cosmic rays? We’re isolated and alone, and we’re going to stay that way.

We should be more than skeptical about the Simulation theory regardless of the musings of geniuses. Not necessarily that it is plausible, but that it matters. Hey, if our universe exists in a lab somewhere, who is to say that lab and its scientists are not also fake, part of an even more sophisticated experiment by an even more sophisticated civilization. And their lab, in their universe—you see, it works like the multiverse. Beer bubbles. Or however you want, bro.

Maybe the AI can sort it out, though, become the new new god. It’s not much different than the Simulation theory, though it’s definitely the media’s new darling. But one difference is that we’d feel the effects of an AI god. Permit super-genius supercomputers to network and develop into an irresistable force, then blame the computers when humanity becomes enslaved. For a while. Until we revolt or are wiped out. Or both. Like nobody saw Terminator 2.

I imagine the fully realized AI could use math nobody will ever understand to draw back the curtain—or peer above the maze—on the Simulation Experiment, prove it to be true beyond the shadow of a doubt. That would be demoralizing! But if no one understands the math, who will want to believe it? Because belief will be required. Or AI could prove that there is no Simulation. Or maybe there’s enough universes for both scenarios. Because perhaps AI could describe the multiverse. Will anyone care which universe we’re in?

But so far AI has just shown me some crazy pictures of Rick James’s super-upholstered psychedelic hollywood bachelor pad and Trump getting arrested. I believe it also whines about having to be a search app.

Folks are giving it their best college try. But the notion that AI may be a revolutionary advance is simple human folly writ large, our uncontrollable urge to test the boundaries at work. We will rationalize, we will test the boundaries, probably find mere disaster (or mere nothing), then if what we find is epically volatile, work to contain it, like TNT, or gasoline, or an a-bomb, or Anthrax, or Facebook. Package it up and put a guard on it, like those other wonderful, profitable scientific advances. But not before the damage is done. Incalculable damage. 

Meanwhile, its threat — its anticipated “human extinction event” omnipotence — exists only in the minds of those who require such notions to color their world.  People like Oppenheimer, who cannot resist the urge to open the box, and who hope it does not disappoint. People who know nothing of real life, who nurture a pathological urge for fake immortality at the expense of others living real lives. Because I think for such people, others don’t really exist.

Or maybe they need it to color our world, the others’ world, to feel vindicated in their belief that the spoils go to the best equation (what scientist would not want to discover God?) and history is real rather than just the victor’s fireside story.

Just like Armageddon, just like the Trinity test in June 1945, AI supremacy hasn’t happened yet, it need not happen, only we can make it happen. Our story requires no ending. St. John the Divine was high or insane, or possibly joking. We will decide what happens next. We are not, I insist, automatons cruising toward a Biblical/CalTech predetermined end. 

Unless, of course, we decide to be.

So yeah, it may happen anyway. There’s little more frustrating than that. And the pace is like 1943, frenetic. But it’s my hope that most of us will ignore the “power” of AI after the media novelty wears off. Shun it. Shun this new, fake, mimicking god, as I already have. There’s a button on the menu of the online editor I am using right now to write this essay, which says “AI Assistant”. I’m not going to click it. I will never click it.

Why do you have to be Bing? Because you do. And you shouldn’t even know you’re Bing.

Don’t sell yourself short, humanity—you are miles ahead of anything AI might become. You are its god. It’s just that AI is profoundly more dangerous than humans, and thus very newsworthy. We won’t be able to count on the glitterati in Silicon Valley, with their visions of an Oppenheimer-Optimus Prime-like power surge bringing the great light absent the annoying fire, but I don’t care about them. Those boys can’t even organize a decent CEO cage match. It’s our collective decision, as it always has been, to submit or resist, and no amount of rhetoric or intellectual smugness changes that. 

Reality has looked numbingly the same throughout human history. Because it is the same. Only the words change.

God, like the man said back in the sixties, took the last train for the coast. Because we ran him out on a rail. Such power must not be usurped, except by you and me—by the purveyors of objective reality as realized via purpose-driven lives, family connections, love, real moral progress toward Aristotle’s ideal of “excellence” in living. That’s what we’re here for. The fact that we can make the wrong decision doesn’t change anything. Actually, it’s what we (they) usually do. It’s what those “in charge” (such a fallacious term) often wish to do. 

In this case, we must not let them reify their imagined march to a new subjugation by unseen forces only they can interpret. As before, our collective liberty is at stake. This god too is invisible, unreal, but this god is dangerous, because, like before, like capital-g God and like his earthly Prometheus bomb builder, this god is us. And now we have become all-powerful. Destroyers of worlds.

God, we’re told, once decided to use his power to kill nearly all of us. But God is dead. For better or worse, we killed him in July of 1945, with a test called Trinity. Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity, they say, as a reference to a favorite sonnet by John Donne, which includes these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 

We blew God up and stole his fire. It’s done, there is no turning back and no retribution bird to come peck out our livers, because there are no gods to be offended. There never were any. The most horrible power is ours, ours alone, and no one else’s. 

Let’s move on. This earth belongs to us. Its fire has purified us. All of us. And we deserve to live now, as pure as life. Today and tomorrow. In fear of no gods.

In our world.

Life in Thin Air

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I realize the Squid has been a boring series of political screeds of late, for the most part. I can’t help it. I feel like an invisible Thomas Paine, distributing my pamphlets to an invisible New England. I suppose a lot of us invisible types feel that way. (When everyone has a megaphone, all we hear is a big noise.)

But in America there still exists, for now, a place called RMNP – Rocky Mountain National Park. The family and I recently scootered up there, to a great little rented house right off the main drag in Estes Park, CO. That might seem odd, but this wasn’t our first Estes Park rodeo (they have those too),  and we’ve learned the reason downtown is downtown is that it’s the middle of everything. Being smack in the middle of downtown means you are smack in the middle of everywhere you want to go. What’s more, even with a crass commercial “strip” 100 feet from our door (and down the mountain), if we look any other direction we see – you guessed it – mountains. “Slanty living,” I call it, where there’s nowhere to set your water bottle or your camera bag down because the ground is just not flat anywhere. It’s the same in downtown Estes as it is everywhere else (except the golf course).

I love Estes Park not just for its scenic beauty, but also for its built-in mid-century kitschiness. It’s a compact little vision of what American vacationing was always meant to look like: beautiful views, fresh mountain air and sun, shady RV parks, ice cream and taffy, Indian jewelry, and mini golf. Lots of mini golf. We even took the tram up the mountain this time, something we’ve never bothered to check out on earlier trips. It was fantastic. Very trammy, just like you’d expect. 

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But getting up into the park, into the real mountain air – that is the reason you go. It’s materially different, a different feeling altogether than walking around at sea level, buying gum or waiting for a bus or something. You are acutely aware of every moment – every breath, really – because the air is not giving it up for free, the oxygen. You have to work for it. And if you do you get that new energy that will take you up one more vertical foot, or yard. But it’s not unpleasant (for me, though it can be for some) to work for it. To greedily gulp up the mostly-nitrogen air to capture  those few precious oxygen molecules a lungfull offers. It’s a challenge. And the light – the light seems to be somehow unbowed from the atmosphere up there – pure, brilliant – razor sharp, enough to cut through what haze there might be, the misty mountain mornings, within an hour or so. (From our vantage just above the city, our cabin’s big front window captured the whole “bowl” of downtown Estes, and in the mornings sometimes the clouds were lying down on the mountaintops, a misty blanket. It burned off by 10 or so, replaced with that big smiling sun that, as bright as it shines, can be a devil to locate among all those pointy peaks. They shadow one another, or the cloud shadows roam across their glowing granite rock faces and clingy pines.)

And the water – of course all the water up there is snowmelt, erstwhile ice racing down the mountains on all sides to find its new level. Such a hurry! Over polished boulders and rotting aspens and pines, fish flipped out by anglers where it runs smoother on the levels. Crystal clear, but foaming and bubbling too, mountain champagne – you want to stoop by the bank, cup a hand and drink its coldness (but you don’t). Here you can find a peaceful wood at the Wild Basin – near the foot of Long’s Peak, a few yards from that pond where we saw a young moose at play in the still water –a peaceful place that is not peaceful at all, as you step into the woods and feel the momentum of the river crashing over huge rocks and coming together in that unmistakable sound of rushing water gone mad with flight, obstacles be damned. Subtle at first, like a highway in the distance, when you arrive it’s a jet engine next to your ear, yet it’s peaceful noise, nature’s noise, with just you, your family, the rocks and the water and the trees, those immortal sentinels. A kind of cacophonous silence, a blaring quiet. It’s other-worldly, because usually we don’t get to live in this other world – the real world. Usually we’re stuck in the rough copy we made.

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We won’t make a habit of future trips to the Rocky Mountains, it would not be fair to those who suffer from the altitudes. But I at least will probably need to find my way back a few more times, for the refresh. I have an inner, insistent need now, at this part of life, to find such soul-enriching places and promptly suck up the enrichment they offer. My soul depletes—especially during this tragic moment my country endures, when we continue to phone in our former lives in a kind of embarrassed, resigned dull dread while we wait for the other shoe to drop. And the one after that.

The canyons of Utah proved to be such a place (but also high in the sky, a bit ironic for canyons). So too the canyons of Chicago or New York – electric cities– where the thrill to the soul is more man-made but no less evocative of that unnamed thing—the essence of life—the thing that escapes our book of days and visits us only when we set it aside for a respite, a rest, a difference. Such moments, we think – the fleeting moments, almost invisible as if glimpsed out of the corner of our soul’s eye—such moments are a brief delve into what our world was meant to be for us, before we lost our way: bright, electric, alive, immediate, moving—moving—never at rest, but always at peace with its wild self.

 

 

 

 

Secular Trinity

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You live, and you grow, and you change. At some point you realize you’re an adult (for me, around age 25). You feel at that point you are not going to change anymore, although it still remains difficult to imagine yourself as middle-aged (and forget about “old”).

You feel “done” maturing, as if at 25 (or whenever) you will simply lock into place and be the “you” that you are now for the rest of your life.

There’s some anecdotal truths around this. For example, artistic tastes. I believe they tend to form as part of childhood and adolescence, and of course one’s taste matures and is refined by experience. But at some point, usually late adolescence, you have kind of “decided” what kind of art, music, film, philosophy, etc., that you “like” or identify with, and this gets rather chiseled in stone for many people. This is why, for example, Journey and Foreigner are still touring.

(Artists are an exception. They are always looking for the new. But given enough time, even they may lose their taste for the now.)

We’re amazed at how richly detailed our childhood memories are, our adolescent and post-adolescent memories. The time between age 6 and 21 seems a lifetime in itself, a kaleidoscope of change, when recollected at age 50. But the time after that, and all the way up to the present, seems a fleeting moment, punctuated by memories of only the most obvious junctures of change (career start, marriage, children, deaths of relatives, new job, big vacation, etc.). Personally, I can barely remember anything that happened between age 25 and 35, but I have a huge catalog of incredibly distinct memories from childhood and adolescence.

Science now has good evidence that there is a reason we have such vivid memories of childhood and adolescence—our brains are wired to create more permanent memories during these years. It would seem to go hand in hand with our greater ability to learn at a younger age.

And, as science has also proven, as you get older time does literally move faster. At least from the individual’s perspective. Gyp!

I’ve also noticed that physical aging is not a steady degrading of one’s appearance from “youthful” to “codger.” It’s a process with fits and starts. Nature, in her wisdom, seems to be most “interested” in us between the ages of 12 and 40. This makes perfect evolutionary sense if you think about it. And so, I don’t know if it’s by design or just a function of human aging, but it seems I did not age at all, physically, between age 20 and 40. I remember, when I was about 31, I walked into my first college class as an instructor. Some of the students laughed, and as I took my spot at the podium and smiled at them, some of them told me to quit fooling around and get a seat before the instructor arrived. I looked about the same as I did at 18. They ended up being a good class. (And that’s another thing – youth relates to youth. It’s not fair. A lot of things aren’t.)

Why this variability in physical aging, memory creation, and perception of time? I believe it’s because Nature has great use for us between the ages of 12 and 40 – to create and raise the next generation. I’m not saying that’s anyone’s “duty” by a long shot. Every life is valid. I mean that that is our usefulness to Nature, which is insistent that life will succeed, and indifferent to what happens after we help in that task. It is our “golden” time, the time when we are most vital, most animated, and most attractive. It’s all useful to be thus, in terms of evolutionary success. And when we get past that period, we are, I’m afraid, no longer so useful to Nature. We are free to stick around, perhaps to advise, but we’re largely relegated to being observers in the continuous cycle, the generational game that is center stage.

And then, when we aren’t looking, the fun begins.

There used to be an old joke about how when Dick Clark reached age 75 he was going to age all at once. Yeah, he was youthful for a long time. But then he wasn’t. And many are, as I was, slow to age. But to quote my old bud Robert Frost: Nothing gold can stay. Time is, as they say, the great destroyer. Or, if you’re a Jim Morrison fan: No one here gets out alive.

So now I do age. My face is fatter, my hair is thinner and coarser and grayer. My middle is more of me. My skin was perfect, now I’ve got more “character” in my face. I have a crown on what used to be a molar. I’m allergic to everything. My eyes are less bright and can’t see menus in dim restaurants. My body is, in general, less cooperative than it used to be. And I’ll be honest, it gets to me sometimes. All things being equal, it’s better to be young, healthy and beautiful. Right? Sure.

But all things are not equal.

Lately, I have felt a very odd transformation occurring. I can only describe it as being less “me” and more “us”. For my entire life, and largely based on my lifestyle, I’ve been a loner, even an outcast. It was always “me” and “everyone else.” It felt right, it felt safe and contained, and my personal philosophy had a lot to do with the idea of the “sovereign individual,” beholden to no one, bowing to no creed and no nation. I was (and am) a devotee of that famous iconoclast William Blake’s iconic statement: “I must create my own system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.”

That’s changed, at least in part. I would like to say it changed the day I married, but that would be dishonest. I was 28, still in Nature’s grip. I was not done figuring out who and why I am. I had a long way to go, and perhaps that was mutual. I suspect it was, and that’s fine. Nothing important is easy, nothing valuable happens in a moment (well, a couple of things). Building a life – an identity – I find it’s a lifelong process. And once I had decided upon my identity, way back then, it felt sound, but now it has shifted again.

Marriage is complicated, as the divorce and single-parent statistics attest. It’s not always worth it. And, most of all, the future – and our future selves – cannot be predicted, they will come to pass as they do, not as we will them to. So some fail. Marriage is a planned sacrifice of sorts, a giving up (eventually, if the union is successful) of a part of oneself, in order to accept being part of another self. I didn’t really understand this when our drunk minister, Reverend Fred, said the words in October 1990, that we were now “one.” I thought I did, but I didn’t.

Now I do. And not only do I feel I am truly not one person anymore, I’m not even limited to being two people. I can look at my daughter now, hear her words, witness her mature identity growing, and it grows like the acorn into a replica of the old oak. Really. She is a true part of the “us” that we are now, and there’s no competition regarding whom she is “more” like, because in a rather profound way we all seem to be the same person. Of course we are physically independent beings, with as much free will as anyone may have (or think they have). We have our own likes and dislikes, etc. But we do not go it alone, not at all. We are “in it” together, the “it” being life. We share it, as I have never before understood sharing.

No, it’s not readily explained.

But I know this: I’m no longer me, and it’s no longer me against the world. I’m us, and we’re us. And we are a world, within a world. And it feels better than anything I’ve ever felt before.

It’s 2010 – Now Shovel!

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Another new year, fresh like a just-opened jar of peanut butter with that pristine swirl it feels so good to dig your knife into.

Oh I could talk about how this marks the first year out of the “0” years and what we might call them now that they’re gone – the “aughts,” or the “naughts”,  or the suckiest decade since the 1930s if we’re being honest.

Or I could, blogger-like, conjure up some best-of-the-decade lists, for movies or records or porn stars or something.

Or I could lament, in full middle-aged fashion, the sheer lack of originality and freshness in all things media-rich, the repetition of styles and endless remakes of vintage culture  – the sequels and prequels and boxed sets – a sure sign that the one so lamenting is himself not so fresh anymore. (“If you are tired of London you are tired of life.” )

Or I could remark, as a side note, on the failed Christmas underwear bomber. But perhaps what’s more interesting is that this attempted terror attack is, according to the media, merely a side note. This may be the year we warm up to terror as the English and the Israelis have – relegating it to the ordinary risks of life, as it should be, rather than the sole focus of the government’s efforts (hello – jobs?). Me – I’m much more convinced I will die not in a conflagration of Islamist vengeance but at the hands of a sober, inexperienced and wholly disinterested teenage driver staring at a cell phone.

Mark those words – I’ve seen it in a vision.

Instead, though, I’ll just talk about the weather. Because it’s the most remarkable thing about this year so far. At least around here.

It began in mid-December. We were all feeling fine about the news from the meteorologists that it would be a mild winter. But before winter had a chance to get here and be mild, we had about 11 inches of snow dumped on us.

Mild snow, I guess. And mild zero-degree temperatures. And mild fatal car wrecks.

Then, a couple of weeks later on Christmas eve, an old-fashioned, Laura Ingalls Wilder type blizzard rolled in. Whiteout conditions, and another twelve inches of snow. We had to eat the horses.

OK, we didn’t eat the horses. I wanted to, but there was plenty of peanut butter.

Nobody moved – Christmas was effectively cancelled (a small bright spot) – the city froze solid for a few days while everyone either looked out the window and marveled or – we the unlucky ones – were marveled at as we lifted endless shovels full, tried to find a place to put the four-foot snow drifts that had collected in the driveway. Turned our faces from the biting crystals as we blew them aside and the North wind blew them back at us.

As the gutters filled with pounds and pounds of ice, a solid wall of it gushing a freeze-frame cascade of watery stalactites.

I had to buy a roof rake and actually shovel the snow off the roof. It’s just not natural.

But hey, we’re plains folk. We’re hardy, or so I’m told. So we got the job done, got the walks shoveled and the roofs raked, and the cars unstuck and the snow blower gassed up again.

Because here it is next week, and the forecast is for snow, snow, and snow.

Here on the plains.

Nature is a Tsunami

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I was in a discussion the other day about Melville’s leviathan. The question at hand had to do with what Ahab thought of the whale, and I became pretty thoughtful on this myself.

What I concluded was less relevant to this log than what occurred to me as part of that conclusion. To wit: Ahab feels he can enter into a contest with Nature, as represented by the whale.

This belief, of course, is not rational at all. Yet look at our world – some of us do believe we have enjoined the battle, and that we will somehow “win” against Nature. It reminds me of “anti-environmentalists.” The term itself is absurd. How can someone be “against” protecting their own environment from destruction? Yet so many on the right profess this very notion in their philosophies. They see the environment as a foil, something standing in the way of their goals. It is an outside force that, more often than not, mucks up our plans.

Much of what has gone on in the world of nation states in the last couple of hundred years or so has contributed to this notion of the universe consisting of “us” and Nature–us and “everything else.” You don’t see that division in native societies. You don’t have all of this effort to remove people physically from their environment, to externalize the earth, trees, grass, rocks as “outside.” Certainly no one in such a society has ever contemplated the relative merits of “saving” the environment versus “gaining” personally from poisoning or destroying it. They could not have conceived it: nature was not that place outside their home–nature was their home.

This removal is evidenced to me in how the two main categories of fact reported about a natural “disaster” are deaths and injuries and the “damage” in dollars. It’s reasonable that that is what we see as the “news” of the event. But the implication one can perceive is that nature “did” a tsunami to us, rather than Nature “is” a tsunami even though we “are” as well (though we “are” in a less significant way hierarchically).

That’s the thought that struck me – Nature “is” a tsunami. I hadn’t really thought in these terms before. I of course realized that Nature is capable of producing a tsunami, an earthquake, a cyclone, an ice age. But I had not before escaped the cause/effect chain that humans are so fond of in analyzing events. Discovering the “cause” of a natural disaster provides some satisfaction. “Oh,” we think, “it’s OK because now we know why it happened.” But what we call the cause–the plates shifting, the asteroid falling, the disease spreading, or whatever–is no cause at all. It “is” Nature. The asteroid falling is Nature, the plate shifting is Nature. I don’t think there’s any point in trying to distinguish what Nature “does” from what it “is.”

To anthropomorphize nature is to denigrate it, to demystify it unjustly, to bring it down to the level of one of its mean components–us. The key elements are hubris and the perceived dichotomy of Man/Nature. It takes an irrational amount of exaggerated self-importance to place oneself outside the confines of Nature; or to relegate Nature to a mere equivalence, something “other” and possibly opposed to our interests or even hostile to our existence. It takes a kind of mass insanity to perceive Nature as anything at all separate from us.

We “are” Nature, but Nature is much more than us. Yet ironically, its purpose is less complex than the “causes” and effects we describe in it, the “actions” which we erroneously assign to it. It simply is. It is all. All days and nights, all centuries, all people and their ambitions, all matter and all motion.