by Abi Andrews
They blasted the atom at the Large Hadron Collider and instead of the kernel of this atom they found a house of mirrors and in the middle a weird shaman sat cross-legged with a gong, who told them everything is everything and nothing all at once enigmatically, but what did they expect looking for a kernel inside a kernel when by definition a kernel’s kernel is a tautology?
The Mountain Men went looking in nature, as in outside of human (human Man), but this is a false dichotomy. They did not see that nature was what they threw at it. Somewhere in Texas there is a mountain and at its summit there is built a steel pyramid (I marked time, remember me), glittering back at the sky, and I think this object stands very well for Mountain Men everywhere.
You can’t break the world into independent existing units. Particles can’t even be said to exist in definite positions, they only show tendencies to exist. Probability, not certainty, is the fundamental feature of atomic reality, so the Mountain Man was doomed to fail. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and it forbids perfect knowledge. The new science says that it is only a web of approximations, it is an idealisation sometimes useful from a practical point of view like demographics of populations, or the construction of an identity.
Once he had figured it out Einstein thought of the implications of this and said it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built. Science had seemingly been undermined if the whole point was to find the very solid absolute foundational true description of everything.
But Thoreau anticipated Einstein when he said if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them, as though they were talking through time, saying, hey, so there is no such thing as the absolute after all! And absolute wild, absolute solitude; there is an absolutely pure form of neither!
And Thoreau said to Einstein that men making speeches (meaning scientists), they are banded together, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise. He said, I will tell you what is at the centre of the atom without even looking: just shitloads of tortoises! But, he said, it does not matter because the atoms together make the wood I chop to build a fire.
Thoreau was as imperfect as the rest of us, always seeking truth although he knew he could never find it. He still spoilt the magic of the mythically bottomless lake at Walden, by measuring it to its bottom standing on its centre while it froze over, and writing out the measurements so everyone would know it was he who had solved its mystery.
Subatomic science asks us to take what we can observe and fill in the gaps, intuitive like mysticism because it is just an abstraction of reality and we have to use instruments to pick it apart, we have no direct experience of it. In a similar way a mythical or spiritual belief system that is less restricted by deductive logic can get closer to the truth of the thing by admitting there is not one truth: there are many. Maybe my mum saying she does not think about space is really pretty enlightened.
Future civilisations might excavate the Large Hadron Collider from out of the ground when we are gone and try to interpret it like we do the Tarot, as a divination method that taps into archetypes we created. And in a way this is all it is.
BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART
I slept part of the night out on the peak, but it was too cold without the sun and I woke up. I had to crawl back down to my pack and get out everything warm to wrap up in. I did not get to greet the morning on the peak but now I know what it is like to wake up inside a cloud, and how many people can say that? The light got brighter at around 4 a.m. and I woke up to wonder if I had maybe died and gone to heaven. But the cloud passed, I took food from my bag and chewed it, looking at the landscape coming up all pink and new like a fresh layer of paint, and I decided not to move from off the ridge until I had found a conclusive reason to. All of my bones ached.
And as the sun came up I ached more to look at it. Nothing had moved but it looked different again and was permeated with feeling. We do not have a very good or specific word for the feeling of it but I suppose we tentatively call it love. A feeling can’t be mapped to a word without changing the feeling. I could exhaust the possibilities of descriptions, but to get the closest without ever actually touching is all science and words can do. Everything is beyond the touch of language. Why even bother to tell stories if language is so vacant?
When you are a very young child you do not understand that there are things outside of yourself, but as you begin to grow you start to feel sad or happy or affected by seemingly irrelevant things like the explosion of rockets or the size of the ocean or the contour of hills.
Everything looks happy and good in pink golden light but the beauty has sadness and sometimes this is difficult to distinguish from sadness itself and I wish I could have told Damon this. There is acute love for the thing then realising that one day one way or another it will leave you or you will leave it or the light will change, but the magnitude of this hurt is itself something that adds to the beauty. You let it enter: permeation, contamination, not-aloneness, shared knowing of this beauty. You grow with it like inosculation, and the sadness comes in knowing that it is so other to you, that it is like tree branches growing first together and then apart. We need this acute sad feeling to make us care about the preservation of otherness. Perhaps then the feeling is more accurately the love of sad beauty. Or nostalgia that has not happened yet.
Then in the distance cutting across the hue between the ground and blue the speed and effortlessness in its wings. I would know it anywhere from the way it writes itself in the sky. Peregrine. I knew that they lived here but in all my looking I had not found one. And there it was, for me and not for me. My knowing of it is not possessive; I know it in reverence. Not looking at it from below as I am used to, but eye-to-eye, I can see the world like it does, and to see with it is a mighty privilege.
What I see at that moment holds so much significance for me personally even though it means nothing really and nothing at all to the peregrine, but when I remember it all, this is how it will be capsulated; in this single image, pinky golden and perfect but impermanent and sad, but with all the promise of a new day and a new chapter in my time and I will order it as such in retrospect in my own narrative.
I want to tell Damon that this is it, this is exactly it or as close as we could come. It is the feeling of space-time in and out of you and connecting you to all of it and none of it. To be able to look down from a mountain and feel sad is the whole point. Damon renounced all of this because it was the one thing that was his to give up but the thing he gave up was the point in itself and the point does not still stand without him. His little death meant nothing to the mountain and it all goes on despite him. There is no wilderness when we are gone. It needs us and our words outside it like proprioception, to define its contours, the same as we need it. And from the realisation onwards, we can adapt and new synapses can be found.
And when I looked at the road this time I felt something different to the taint and diminishment of before. When I looked at the road I felt very small and I remembered Stan saying his bit about girls being social inherently, innately, by nature, like it is in our geometry. The tug I felt when I looked at it was of a thread in the fabric, a tendril through me and it. But that tug is the reminder that you were attached all along. A tug does not mean I failed to leave properly; I could never really leave. None of us, not even Mountain Men, can ever really leave.
I stayed put for most of the day, steadily brimming up with purpose. But I was also brimming up with urine from drinking the snow melted with the propane. My appetite was building back up and what little was left of the food was back down on the plateau. I considered briefly weeing up there just to be practical, but it conjured the image of a dog leaving its scent. I thought I would not want all the smelling animals that might come up there to think that of me, even
if none ever did, probably just the crows went there and they can’t smell. Besides all of this I did not want to do that to the mountain.
I took a last long look, blinking my eyes like they were shutters and I was capturing still photographs of this scene to file away in the far crevices of my mind, the special self-defining crevices that stay secure and well preserved and accessible for life. Then I climbed down, set off to the place below the snowline and got there before dark, in time to make my tent up again and pee in privacy from whatever behind a rock, and heat up the last of the food.
ALL MY LIFE NOW APPEARS TO BE ONE HAPPY MOMENT
Trudging down the mountain was much easier than up because the scree that was a hindrance before became an ally and I got to the bottom in half the time. When I reached the timberline I turned to look up at my mountain from its most imposing angle before I was under the tree cover and could not see it any more.
Behind it in the pale blue sky the moon was full and almost exactly above the peak but skewed just a little, as if it was being floated there, as if it was a Malteser the mountain was blowing to hover over its mouth. The moon was a very pale white blue disk, only just not the colour of the sky. I had not seen it while I was up there, but I suppose it must have been behind me all along.
The mountain and the moon sat across from each other like telegraph hills, and I imagined I could light up a beacon on the mountain and the lady with the rabbits up on the moon would look down and see a small flare burst out of her image of Earth, an iridescent badge on the black felt of infinity.
From a mountain vast cities are pinpricks of light and from the moon they are tinier still. Follow it back further still, this image, of Earth in space getting smaller and smaller the further away you get, speeding much faster than the speed of light away after the Voyagers, but the stars behind Earth do not seem to move at all because they are already so far away, their constellations still look exactly the same as they do on Earth. You have to get about thirty-six light years away past Arcturus, which the Inuits call ‘The First Ones’, and only then do they start to merge into each other, and by this time you can’t see Earth at all.
Earth looks insignificant in the vastness of space, as everything does from far away. But we don’t live far away and can only imagine what this looks like because we made some very clever machinery that can change our viewpoints. New viewpoints give new perspectives. That is what astronauts mean when they get the Overview Effect. From very near by in the grand scheme of things Earth really looks perfect.
Larus told me that when NASA were working on ways to detect life on Mars for the Viking programme they called James Lovelock, maverick scientist and inventor from England, to California to come help them. Lovelock told NASA they need not send a spacecraft to Mars because he could tell from the atmosphere that there would be no life there because Mars’ atmosphere was at chemical equilibrium and lacked the dynamism of Earth’s atmosphere. This got Lovelock thinking about life altering its atmosphere and that is how he got on to the Gaia Hypothesis, which he wrote with Lynn Margulis, the symbiosis lady.
They were interested that the sun’s radioactive output had increased over aeons of time but that Earth had not heated up in turn. They postulated that Earth as a whole was self-regulating to maintain this stability, that all of life and non-life were part of one single ‘organism’ of sorts. All parts of the biota worked together to regulate the biosphere, the hydrospheres, the atmosphere, etc., and everything on Earth had evolved reciprocally with the end of keeping the planet stable and optimum for all life. This worked through a cybernetic feedback system that meant that things always fluctuate around the optimum, like a thermostat which changes its output dependent on its reading to maintain a relatively stable, but never perfect, temperature. This was homeostasis.
Lovelock decided that without biodiversity we might not just be lonely, we might actually not have a liveable and breathable climate and atmosphere, that as we upset the balance the planet will get more hostile to us.
In Timaeus Plato said our planet was alive and the rivers and lava were its circulatory system. From the eighteenth century onwards there were a few geologists and geochemists who posited that the biosphere could affect the geology and chemistry of its surroundings but they were pretty much ignored. The German Romantic Schelling would talk about Earth like it was alive and the American Transcendentalists Emerson and then Thoreau, they read Schelling.
This started a tradition that birthed John Muir, father of the American national parks, Jack London, who was in the Bohemian Club with John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, who pioneered environmental ethics. It also inspired the Beats, Jack Kerouac calling himself an ‘urban Thoreau’ and going by ‘Jack’ instead of his given name ‘Jean-Louis’, after London, and then the Beats led on to the counterculture of the sixties and John C. Lilly of dolphin tank fame, who hung out with the Beats. Rudolf Steiner also read Schelling, and it was William Golding who was friends with Lovelock and gave him the name of Gaia for his idea and put him on to Steiner. So really Lovelock was a product of a long tradition and his and Lynn Margulis’s ideas took off because they were compatible with the post-space race zeitgeist.
Metempsychosis. That is what the Ancient Greeks called the transmigration of souls, similar to what the Inuit believe in. E=mc2
is the famous equation by Einstein and what it means is that the amount of energy in a particle is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, and what this means is that the Inuits are right again. It means that energy and mass or matter are interchangeable. It means that matter can be transformed into other forms of energy. When Lovelock channels Plato, this is metempsychosis of sorts. Rachel Carson has gotten into me by metempsychosis, which is also like the homeostatic process that Lovelock called feedback.
Homeostasis is also how we maintain a stable identity. We as individuals build from and into a shared image of ourselves. There are tendrils that anchor us to an adaptive and receptive way of knowing and being, building a view from a body, my body.
When we die we usually get an epitaph. Inuits in Greenland do not write words on the headstones of their dead, because they know an epitaph traps an identity and undermines its freedom to transmigrate.
Ideas and words are metempsychosis, are the weaving of the tapestry, are love for the mountain, are the deep relation between past, present, near and far, are the consciousness between us. Newton’s ball was never alone: it was cocooned by the fabric of space-time. Solitude is an illusion but so is loneliness and it was Emerson himself who said, ‘We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.’
I think of it, rather than a unanimous whole that underlies everything, more like a collaging of shards all patched up like a quilt, overlapping like a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram.
Lilly, Kerouac, Sagan, Einstein, Newton, none of them was unblemished by patriarchy but we had to have them all to get us to where we are now. We had to get to the moon with Apollo so that we could look back at ourselves like this. I had to come out here and follow Damon and get lost enough to realise that’s what I was, so that I could find my way again. We had to have Descartes and his dualisms even though they are atomising and not real and identify the self with an isolated ego that exists inside a body like a cage, and this inner fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation of Newton’s world of matter outside as a void within which separate objects and events happen all alone, forever lonely, so that we could have Einstein and the rockets that could take us up there to look at ourselves and see the seams of this, to use the moon like a mirror, like children or parrots recognising their reflection for the very first time.
These are our new visions, the macro and also the micro, the seeing for the first time and knowing and loving the microscopic creatures in our guts that we could not live without. And it is because we can look so closely and see things inside things and look so far away and see things
outside our solar system that we can realise the arbitrariness of our distinctions. Our myopia undone.
The moon is our mountain. The Hubble telescope is finding higher mountains still. We had to get up there to look down with the eyes of Gaia (another useful myth), so that we could see how to mend our fragmentation, see that Earth self-regulates to keep everything in balance, as if we were allowed to get clever enough to get sad looking at mountains for Gaia to be able to see herself and think, bloody hell, isn’t that good. Be good now.
This sudden new knowing of deep connection is a new Copernican Revolution. It’s just that, as with the first Copernican Revolution, we do not quite know it yet, it is still filtering into us, we are in the process of many incremental viewpoint changes, so many and so quickly that we don’t have time to keep up. It will take decades for them to diffuse, but we are in the process of realising our new position and responsibilities as members rather than stewards.
And this dawning comes right at our make-or-break moment. In 1870 the novelist Wilkie Collins predicted ‘the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that war shall mean annihilation and men’s fears will force them to keep the peace’; and in 1951, just as he prophesised, the hydrogen bomb was invented, 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed and is still in the process of destroying Hiroshima.
The rocket technology that got us to the moon was originally created in mind of annihilation, and you can follow the creation of the atom bomb deductively to its logical and predictable conclusion, unravel unravel until you get to here, the singularity.
Millennial anxiety is anxiety about this annihilation aimed back at us in abstract, about things so far out of our control as to be seemingly self-perpetuating, is why we frantically mark time, time-capsulise. It is not an innate impulse but a situational one. What annihilation threatens is this web we have spent so long building and our means of transmigration and our sense of self. And Damon felt this anxiety and he gave up his identity because of it, by self-annihilation.