Perhaps it is because of the time of year. It is late February and the only sign of spring to come is the increasing strength of the sun and its length in the sky. The snow from last December is still on the ground, crusty and pock-marked by animals feet and hooves, and the fields stretch out as white and forlorn as ever. The cold is unmoving, relentless, as if it will have no end. Perhaps that is why these old memories are stirring, ones that have not been felt for decades - memories of cold and snow going back to the beginning time, when all was new.
And tough. One memory that came forth was of me at age 4. I had followed the older boys to a municipal building somewhere - it seems to be a school, but where could that one be, for none were close? - and we were involved in the most secret alchemy. Here, I was to learn from the cognoscenti, the first and second and third graders, how to make a wind-up Godzilla. I had been forewarned and had brought the necessary ingredients - an empty wooden thread spool, a pocket knife, a rubber band and a bobby pin. Taking me out to the nearby woods, everything encased in old crusty snow, I was shown how to carve the all important "claws", or jagged tread marks in the spool before the real mystery began. Then, the rubber band had to be threaded through the spool's center, and a stick, just the right size (thus the trip to the woods) to keep it in place on one side. On the other, the bobby pin was put through the opening of the elastic, this resting in the loop at the end of the bobby pin, the pin's end to be used as a "tail." Then one wound the elastic up and placed it carefully on the ground. If all had been done right, the kinetic energy in the wound- up elastic would make the spool crawl across the ground (or hard snow) at a casual pace, self -fired. It was a veritable Frankenstein, a living thing made with my own hands!
And it was indeed alchemy, a mystic art as I understood it then, because I did not understand it. How could this be? How could an elastic unwind so slowly as to make my Godzilla crawl as if alive, menacing every ant that might crawl, if it had been summer and there were ants, and every tiny imagined mortal human as well?
That it was beyond my understanding then is now hard to understand - how easy it is! But, then again, I had a horrible time understanding division in the 4th grade, a tough time with Spanish in the 7th, difficulty understanding poetry and calculus in high school, and an impossible task in understanding the great European thinkers in philosophy class at college.
There were other things that were tough in the past, too: how could one figure out how to get girls to go out on a date? How to work oneself up the ladder in a job? How to understand the even more arcane craziness of social thinkers while in grad school? But while all of these things, from thread spools to philosophy to math to girls, have not been entirely figured out, they at least do not appear as enormous obstacles. If faced again, they would be fairly easy, in fact. Instead, however, I have placed myself in the world of writing and getting that writing published, something that has so far eluded me for the most part. It is alchemy, a mystery with which I continue to struggle.
We might see this as evolution, as survival of the fit, for if all were easy, there would be no competition and no need to work hard at all. And yet, it's not as easy as that. We are told by 19th century ethnologists that the Northwest Coast Indians, the Salish and Kwakiutl and others of the Oregon territory and western coastal Canada, that their life was fairly easy. All that they needed was supplied in abundance, from the great rich forests to the never-ending supply of salmon that each year supplied them with enough fat-rich fish to dry and eat until the next spawning. Yet they competed, so fiercely that they continually upped the ante in their annual potlatches. Here, every big man of every clan would pile up more and more riches and burn them in an astounding waste of wealth to show everyone just how rich - and undisturbed by such richness - that they were. Because of this, the people of the clan would have to work that much harder to buy the European goods that were flowing in so that they could burn most of them again the next year.
Whether consciously or not, they made their lives much harder than they had to be. Go figure.
In fact, it seems that if we do not get the challenge from the natural world, we will invent it. Few are in that position, however, as only necessity seems to cause invention. If we had had the technical knowledge back in the early 19th century that we do now, with 700 million instead of 7 billion people on earth to keep alive, we would have been in fool's heaven. But, as Malthus pointed out (and more correctly than many think), we will always press our boundaries, always catching up with need rather than outpacing it.
It seems, then, a natural law that whatever point we are in life, we will be challenged to the point of anxiety. Retired on a comfortable income? Well, here comes your children's children in need, or here comes the unexpected pain or lump under the armpit. Even the comfortably born are as often as not miserable - they cannot ever meet with dad's approval, or worse, they are so bored they get themselves into a mess with drugs and vices and, if all else fails, there come the suicide attempts and mental illness. That we are always taxed and never complete for long rises from evolutionary competition to cultural competition to personal competition. It is the nature of the world.
Why? Is it something simply inbred, just this product of natural evolution through competition, or something more?
There is no answer that will satisfy everyone, I know. While it is hard to prove, the pure evolutionist would say that the mind reflects nature, just as it is nature's product - or, as I have heard, that the human brain is an aberration, unnecessarily large for its purpose and given to unnecessary abstractions. The latter I reject with ease - the brain is nothing like the appendix - its function is much too complex to have accidentally stumbled into the realm of the vestigial or excessive organ. On the former, I believe it is correct, but this does not answer the question. Rather, in a world that came into existence by a random alchemy of its own - we know of no experiment that can reproduce it - why would it have such a "law?" Why would evolution always push its limits, and move, as science has proven very recently, always towards the larger and more complex? Why not have a limited eco system where limits are natural,and not caused by competition and feeding? Why must the rabbit breed until it is overcrowded, or more to the point, why would that initial species of bacteria have to continue to divide? Couldn't it just relax and live?
Apparently not. And if you are sitting cozy right now, you won't be for long. You will have another "Godzilla" moment any day or month now. You will be forced to understand, to stretch your current abilities. That is how it was made, and "IT" certainly seems to have a point, a direction, at least to me. FK
And tough. One memory that came forth was of me at age 4. I had followed the older boys to a municipal building somewhere - it seems to be a school, but where could that one be, for none were close? - and we were involved in the most secret alchemy. Here, I was to learn from the cognoscenti, the first and second and third graders, how to make a wind-up Godzilla. I had been forewarned and had brought the necessary ingredients - an empty wooden thread spool, a pocket knife, a rubber band and a bobby pin. Taking me out to the nearby woods, everything encased in old crusty snow, I was shown how to carve the all important "claws", or jagged tread marks in the spool before the real mystery began. Then, the rubber band had to be threaded through the spool's center, and a stick, just the right size (thus the trip to the woods) to keep it in place on one side. On the other, the bobby pin was put through the opening of the elastic, this resting in the loop at the end of the bobby pin, the pin's end to be used as a "tail." Then one wound the elastic up and placed it carefully on the ground. If all had been done right, the kinetic energy in the wound- up elastic would make the spool crawl across the ground (or hard snow) at a casual pace, self -fired. It was a veritable Frankenstein, a living thing made with my own hands!
And it was indeed alchemy, a mystic art as I understood it then, because I did not understand it. How could this be? How could an elastic unwind so slowly as to make my Godzilla crawl as if alive, menacing every ant that might crawl, if it had been summer and there were ants, and every tiny imagined mortal human as well?
That it was beyond my understanding then is now hard to understand - how easy it is! But, then again, I had a horrible time understanding division in the 4th grade, a tough time with Spanish in the 7th, difficulty understanding poetry and calculus in high school, and an impossible task in understanding the great European thinkers in philosophy class at college.
There were other things that were tough in the past, too: how could one figure out how to get girls to go out on a date? How to work oneself up the ladder in a job? How to understand the even more arcane craziness of social thinkers while in grad school? But while all of these things, from thread spools to philosophy to math to girls, have not been entirely figured out, they at least do not appear as enormous obstacles. If faced again, they would be fairly easy, in fact. Instead, however, I have placed myself in the world of writing and getting that writing published, something that has so far eluded me for the most part. It is alchemy, a mystery with which I continue to struggle.
We might see this as evolution, as survival of the fit, for if all were easy, there would be no competition and no need to work hard at all. And yet, it's not as easy as that. We are told by 19th century ethnologists that the Northwest Coast Indians, the Salish and Kwakiutl and others of the Oregon territory and western coastal Canada, that their life was fairly easy. All that they needed was supplied in abundance, from the great rich forests to the never-ending supply of salmon that each year supplied them with enough fat-rich fish to dry and eat until the next spawning. Yet they competed, so fiercely that they continually upped the ante in their annual potlatches. Here, every big man of every clan would pile up more and more riches and burn them in an astounding waste of wealth to show everyone just how rich - and undisturbed by such richness - that they were. Because of this, the people of the clan would have to work that much harder to buy the European goods that were flowing in so that they could burn most of them again the next year.
Whether consciously or not, they made their lives much harder than they had to be. Go figure.
In fact, it seems that if we do not get the challenge from the natural world, we will invent it. Few are in that position, however, as only necessity seems to cause invention. If we had had the technical knowledge back in the early 19th century that we do now, with 700 million instead of 7 billion people on earth to keep alive, we would have been in fool's heaven. But, as Malthus pointed out (and more correctly than many think), we will always press our boundaries, always catching up with need rather than outpacing it.
It seems, then, a natural law that whatever point we are in life, we will be challenged to the point of anxiety. Retired on a comfortable income? Well, here comes your children's children in need, or here comes the unexpected pain or lump under the armpit. Even the comfortably born are as often as not miserable - they cannot ever meet with dad's approval, or worse, they are so bored they get themselves into a mess with drugs and vices and, if all else fails, there come the suicide attempts and mental illness. That we are always taxed and never complete for long rises from evolutionary competition to cultural competition to personal competition. It is the nature of the world.
Why? Is it something simply inbred, just this product of natural evolution through competition, or something more?
There is no answer that will satisfy everyone, I know. While it is hard to prove, the pure evolutionist would say that the mind reflects nature, just as it is nature's product - or, as I have heard, that the human brain is an aberration, unnecessarily large for its purpose and given to unnecessary abstractions. The latter I reject with ease - the brain is nothing like the appendix - its function is much too complex to have accidentally stumbled into the realm of the vestigial or excessive organ. On the former, I believe it is correct, but this does not answer the question. Rather, in a world that came into existence by a random alchemy of its own - we know of no experiment that can reproduce it - why would it have such a "law?" Why would evolution always push its limits, and move, as science has proven very recently, always towards the larger and more complex? Why not have a limited eco system where limits are natural,and not caused by competition and feeding? Why must the rabbit breed until it is overcrowded, or more to the point, why would that initial species of bacteria have to continue to divide? Couldn't it just relax and live?
Apparently not. And if you are sitting cozy right now, you won't be for long. You will have another "Godzilla" moment any day or month now. You will be forced to understand, to stretch your current abilities. That is how it was made, and "IT" certainly seems to have a point, a direction, at least to me. FK
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