Now that I'm completing my first straight read-through of Quammen's "The Tangled Tree" and reading as many YouTube vids as I can find that explain the 3rd vagal nerve and other neuroresearch results, I feel ready to sketch a first attempt at a new understanding of a what a human being is and what that means in terms of what to do.
I'm hoping to reconcile two compelling interpretations from two points of view: one is the fantastic development that has made life possible on this planet, a story far beyond Darwin's version of evolution because it is about a sheet code explaining how elements make molecules, molecules form cell structures, structures order genetics and form purposes, and the codes drive time both hierarchically until cells become self-conscious and sideways across classifications, while at the same time still dancing to the code, holding hands, still transforming.
The other interpretation is the Lakoff/Johnson mind-as-metaphor account of how I could even think of all this stuff, building stories about what has been called the "reality tunnel" of each life as it forms out of 9 months in a protected womb and then 3 years in a guiding culture (the 9m+3y rule) until it is a toddler embarking on the sometimes remorseless eco-economy of the planet. The last noted maturation step takes twenty more years (20y), that is, until 23 or so. Not genetics so much as ideas, big and little, individual and group, will form our fates. These two bodies of thought are illustrations of that. "Ideas" are just another version of "experience" and I feel free to use my own "reality tunnel" to explore that.
(So much of this is in quotes because there are so few proper names for things and people keep twisting their definitions. One small phrase may imply concepts of astonishing dimensions.)
I'll try to make a note of various emotional mechanisms like attachment, social forces like stigma and war, how clumps of behavior relate to place and become allegiances, identities, and desiderata. I know I won't start an organization and I'm unlikely to write a book. But there probably is going to be a helluva lot of blogging. I have a feeling that a bibliography will quickly become dated and then obsolete because there is a steady inflow of more material. I'm getting old. Not quite falling behind . . . yet.
This winter was so cold, so painful once I dislocated my shoulder and therefore so impossible to sleep, so problematic in terms of water management (not freezing, just bad plumbing), so terrifying politically, that it was hard to maintain balance. Today the town and fields are deep, unmarked and unmelting white. The streets are mostly empty all day. The businesses are folding. With only one arm I can't shovel snow. The cat boxes are overwhelmed. Thank goodness I never have company.
And thanks for the local store that brought groceries, thanks for the friend who drove me thirty miles to emergency care, thanks for the postal workers who bring me my mail accumulations, thanks to the mystery person who plows out my driveway.
They say the winter is due to arctic vortexes and they are also blocking the usual snow-eater catabatic winds. (The roads into Browning are currently closed by drifts.) Maybe the movement of the planet's magnetic north pole from Arctic Canada over to beneath Siberia has something to do with it. All the magnetic guidance systems had to be reconfigured. The help I get may be due to the original neighbor culture that was here in the days when we all knew our neighbors and they were like us. But what is the source of this drive to understand it all? I'm not the only one working on it.
But it sets us apart from those who believe in a life circumscribed and still working "as is" to some degree, those who stubbornly refuse to change what they do and think, can only think "go back go back go back." These two approaches I'm taking to the "meaning of it all" -- one based on deep time and thick history and the other limited to what one lifetime can know and act on -- are to some degree simply matters of focus. The metaphors of one person, their trajectory through life, is only a tiny part of the unimaginable, uncontrollable, irresistible surging of this pointillist moving tide of existence.
Some folks are calling this a theological problem because we're between formal institutions and bureaucracies -- too freeform to feel safe. It is once you give up the idea of going back to childhood when (if you were lucky) a loving parent was your God, your Theos. We've always known we were simply irrelevant when the working order of the world we devised lasted more than half a century. We had thought we had done that once and for all. We have always known that work, families and nations would change. But theology would have reminded us that existence is too vast to care for individuals. But that we can care intensely for each other. And it would have given us a set of metaphors: candles, wind, enfolding wings, flowers, bread.
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