Chemicals Collide
It occurred to me that the sound of human voices, the sight of those
houses built so close to the coast made us forget that the ocean does
not care. It casts the small waves into silence amidst rock and minerals
on the shore, its welling depths unknown to such a fragile human
language of subtleties, imagined permanence. It hadn’t occurred to tell
the story from the other side, standing on the shore and feeling the
depths of suffering, how equally hard it is to be on the surface as it
is to be beneath everything but know that those incommunicable depths
would be destroyed by being spoken in such common, presumptuous tongues.
We are but the curious expression of what creates harmony below, what
strength lies in the ocean.
Our sense of logic, of scientific proof, of universal truth emerges out of our childlike experience of a world that seems mechanical, appears to be chemically stable, obeys the laws of physics but may yet be musical, rhythmic, obey the mysterious and infinite laws of mathematics. It was always hard to leave the ocean. I would imagine the number of flows, of intuitive changes in tempo and cadence, the way the world below managed to create a world above, that once sulfuric cloud turned into oxygen, giving the ocean its blue hue and its colored appearance. Animals, plants, and fungi are imbued with internal flows, the circulation of blood, water, minerals, and everything in our understanding of mechanics, music horticulture, etc. is already implicit here in the silent language of life, transformed from the acidic colorless landscape of before.
To capture is not the question, to possess no answer. It is dialogue, the witnessing of what is alive. Does the first bacterial life form learn to create oxygen from water or is it the other way around? Does the star from which life stem shine before it is seen? Quantum physics is of itself. It is a question already asked and implicit in self-aware life, and it is a question which reaches out for the illogical: what is the meaning of suffering? If Stephen Hawking’s theory of evolution implied in A Brief History of Time depends on logic and the idea that the ascent of man depends on incumbent reason, and this is truly implicit in matter, part of a duality of semantics and praxis, in which the act and the word are both equally important and fulfill one another: the symbiosis of matter with energy, with the rhythm that is already implicit in non-organic life and extends into a life form to which meaning is of equal importance to function.
As if this were all written already, and we are part of a more extensive life that is self-aware of which the fundamental goal were to find this inherent freedom that can only mean that life has to see itself, celebrate itself and ultimately transcend and see past itself, like that ocean that speaks to us in a silent language, that ancient source of life that has provided everything to the shore, in silence, flooding the world with both joy and suffering until life learns not only to swim but to walk upon air, beyond that single star that allowed so much to be self-aware. The birth of consciousness from a star. The birth of the infinite out of life which begins to program cell death, death as positive impulse, as renewing a source. That death becomes part of the movement towards meaning, that scarcity that makes us look beyond, through a telescope, and within. That utter atomization of consciousness that bends us towards a world that is infinitely incomprehensible, in which there is no single language and in which all paths and escapes are available, so long as we can go from narrow into the broad, into all possibilities.
We are perforated by a thousand possibilities which we read as negative horizon (skin cancer, tooth decay, the implications of social marginalization and the disappearance of broad meanings) and yet the world becomes a wide open space that will always continue to unfold. Viruses become saviors and the ultraviolet light that appears as such a destroying angel is the basis for the ozone layer above, the air that we depend upon. Calcium carbonate and the mineralization of soil, sea algae etc. become highlighted only after they begin to decay because of acidity and human influence upon the chemical climate. Everything adheres to renewal and destruction, positive and negative implications. And this itself is a signal, an opening for change.
It may be noted that I write this during the last few passages of Empire of the Sun and the world has already signaled its negative horizon many times. The sun has risen and fallen, and still the world renews, held up by the violent machine that lies within all change. The machine that has no mechanism, that signals only the language of survival, of life that must blossom underneath that flaring star overhead, so that it might express the thousands of meanings that we do not yet see, that are to come but require the understanding of a certain unity of all forms, that will always be violently shown until we understand that consciousness is equally shared, until the violence of opposition is transformed into the language of freedom.
Our sense of logic, of scientific proof, of universal truth emerges out of our childlike experience of a world that seems mechanical, appears to be chemically stable, obeys the laws of physics but may yet be musical, rhythmic, obey the mysterious and infinite laws of mathematics. It was always hard to leave the ocean. I would imagine the number of flows, of intuitive changes in tempo and cadence, the way the world below managed to create a world above, that once sulfuric cloud turned into oxygen, giving the ocean its blue hue and its colored appearance. Animals, plants, and fungi are imbued with internal flows, the circulation of blood, water, minerals, and everything in our understanding of mechanics, music horticulture, etc. is already implicit here in the silent language of life, transformed from the acidic colorless landscape of before.
To capture is not the question, to possess no answer. It is dialogue, the witnessing of what is alive. Does the first bacterial life form learn to create oxygen from water or is it the other way around? Does the star from which life stem shine before it is seen? Quantum physics is of itself. It is a question already asked and implicit in self-aware life, and it is a question which reaches out for the illogical: what is the meaning of suffering? If Stephen Hawking’s theory of evolution implied in A Brief History of Time depends on logic and the idea that the ascent of man depends on incumbent reason, and this is truly implicit in matter, part of a duality of semantics and praxis, in which the act and the word are both equally important and fulfill one another: the symbiosis of matter with energy, with the rhythm that is already implicit in non-organic life and extends into a life form to which meaning is of equal importance to function.
As if this were all written already, and we are part of a more extensive life that is self-aware of which the fundamental goal were to find this inherent freedom that can only mean that life has to see itself, celebrate itself and ultimately transcend and see past itself, like that ocean that speaks to us in a silent language, that ancient source of life that has provided everything to the shore, in silence, flooding the world with both joy and suffering until life learns not only to swim but to walk upon air, beyond that single star that allowed so much to be self-aware. The birth of consciousness from a star. The birth of the infinite out of life which begins to program cell death, death as positive impulse, as renewing a source. That death becomes part of the movement towards meaning, that scarcity that makes us look beyond, through a telescope, and within. That utter atomization of consciousness that bends us towards a world that is infinitely incomprehensible, in which there is no single language and in which all paths and escapes are available, so long as we can go from narrow into the broad, into all possibilities.
We are perforated by a thousand possibilities which we read as negative horizon (skin cancer, tooth decay, the implications of social marginalization and the disappearance of broad meanings) and yet the world becomes a wide open space that will always continue to unfold. Viruses become saviors and the ultraviolet light that appears as such a destroying angel is the basis for the ozone layer above, the air that we depend upon. Calcium carbonate and the mineralization of soil, sea algae etc. become highlighted only after they begin to decay because of acidity and human influence upon the chemical climate. Everything adheres to renewal and destruction, positive and negative implications. And this itself is a signal, an opening for change.
It may be noted that I write this during the last few passages of Empire of the Sun and the world has already signaled its negative horizon many times. The sun has risen and fallen, and still the world renews, held up by the violent machine that lies within all change. The machine that has no mechanism, that signals only the language of survival, of life that must blossom underneath that flaring star overhead, so that it might express the thousands of meanings that we do not yet see, that are to come but require the understanding of a certain unity of all forms, that will always be violently shown until we understand that consciousness is equally shared, until the violence of opposition is transformed into the language of freedom.
Comments
Post a Comment