When the world was created, it would be an awful comfortable thought that it was done with prudence, each to its place and all that. I suppose it would fit with our base level of understanding to see some order, some reason, and above all, some purpose. It's comforting, us as children, something to cozy up to and to reassure in times of intense physical distress. But reason was invented by us. Logic, thought up in the human brain. The natural world spins and wheels without any intelligence, and further, no magic stop sign. No, the truth is that survival drives everything, nothing wants to go down to the sunset, the totality of nature driving towards procreation, continuation, the circular rainbow.
It's not anything to despair over, in fact it's liberating. As you gaze in wonder at all this static, all of these straight and bent lines making shapes and revealing themselves in pleasing forms, it's nice to have a blank mind, to have it play out like a school of fish flitting to and fro, taking position and breaking up, always the show. After all, it's really all subjective, you only ever paint a picture of yourself (thanks, Chuck). I guess it's a struggle, in some ways, to knock down that sense of self, to observe this natural phenomenon and have no previous experience with which to relate to it, to search for meaning or structure and find none, and then to just sit, dumb, staring at the world working.
Adventure masks itself in this way, experience sometimes simply watering down all of the moments of self-awareness, knowledge gained in its purest form, without anything to build it upon. The basic element of experience is that learning, that acquisition of first-hand knowledge, something to store away in the Grey, perhaps to relate over pints some day. Somewhere along the line, however, experience was co-opted and became commercial, a package, something quantifiable. And then it became a numbers game. How much, places visited, things seen, rating systems, upgrades and super sizes.
The thing is that we're too small to do this. There are still corners of this earth where the right temperatures and tidal shifts create entire galaxies of biological activity that put our complexity-of-life to shame. Order it is not, more like layered opportunism, a sort of time-halted evolution. This coral universe starts with vegetation, and eventually it builds entire islands, civilizations to compete with one another, never dying, simply building and shifting, riding the tide and climate shifts. Such a world exists here, not for our eyes, nay for our excitement, a human-free zone, where exploration ends at observation. Why does it grow? Why does it change? Where is the form in it all? Questions volleyed to the depths, never resounding, lost to the creatures of the black.
I suppose in some ways this is that "draw to the sea" that Melville talks about, that yearning to discover and be amazed by the opposite of our natural home, the darkness to our light. And yes, there's truth in there, but I think the truth is simpler, something with a name. It's called progressive ignorance, forced dumbness and wonder, without words nor expressions with which to process the sights and sounds. It drove the space-men, and it drives us, although in smaller doses, and always with the element of safety looming. But to stare at that sun, those stars, this underwater fantasy, to stare into it is to accept that we know nothing, and that all we can do is see and feel.
It may make you feel less human to do this. But that's probably a good thing.
