Atoms Contemplating Atoms

It’s a Thursday in late January, cold and rainy. I go for a run. I’m fascinated by a house under construction at the end of Bigelow. It’s been going up so fast. Within a week, I’ve seen walls and a roof appear on what is a two-story house. It’s fun seeing something evolve like this on a day to day basis.

The puddle on the other side of the McGraw Street Bridge crossing the astonishingly deep Wolf Creek Ravine has become so large due to the heavy rains of the past several days that it should have a name, Lake McGraw or Lake Liliuokalani, after Lydia Kamakaeha, the first and only reining Hawaiian queen. Why name a puddle after a Hawaiian queen? No reason whatever. I like the name, and will stick by it, although it is unofficial, and no one knows about it but me.

I smell food cooking when I pass the Five Corners Hardware Store. It must be coming from the Bite Box next door, a new restaurant of sorts. I can’t quite tell what it is. That little business section there has always been a bit of puzzle. There’s an Edward Jones financial advisor office next to the Bite Box. You can buy a screwdriver, enjoy a snack, and plan your retirement all on the same block.

I pass Malena’s Taco Shop and notice that there are still cracks in the large glass panel of the entry door. I wonder how that happened. Did someone try to break in? Did someone leave in high dudgeon over a soggy taco and slam the door?

I pass an abandoned armchair getting soaked in the rain at the corner of Garfield and Sixth Avenue West. There’s a birdhouse nailed to the telephone pole.

I did not see any birds at all during my run, other than a few crows. This is very strange. I’m guessing it has to do with the wildfires of last summer, heavy air pollution and habitat loss.

I drop off a DVD at the library, Flamenco, Flamenco by Carlos Saura. R and I love watching dance, particularly flamenco. The dance in this movie was phenomenal. The grace, the foot-stomping defiance and life-affirming bravado are fantastic to behold.

January 19^th, Friday evening at about 5:30 I lie on the bed, my feet and legs angled so as not to disturb Athena who is napping nearby, and read Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority by Gaston Bachelard. It’s all about our imaginative engagements with the material world and supplemented by many instances gathered from literature. Bachelard believes that our intimacies with the material world inspire happiness and reverie.

Reverie is an important word in Bachelard’s lexicon. It refers to a dilation of being, an expansion of soul and a highly nuanced multiplicity of perspective, a deep immersion in our experience of the world and how our sensations and feelings are converted to dream and poetry, how they reveal, through our unconscious, the deeper secrets of existence.

I’m currently immersed in the chapter on labyrinths. These aren’t the multicursal puzzles we see on coins and rocks and sidewalks, such as the terrazzo outdoor labyrinth on the north side of Grace Cathedral of San Francisco, which is there for pedestrians to do a walking meditation, an opportunity to enjoy some reflection and calm the mind.

Or the maze in the Laurel and Hardy movie A Chump at Oxford, in which the two men get lost in a maze of hedges at Oxford and sit down on a bench to sleep and a hand reaches through the hedge and removes Oliver’s white handkerchief form his breast-pocket and puts it in Stan’s breast-pocket and tickles Oliver’s mustache and makes him sneeze.

Bachelard’s labyrinths are subterranean, chambers of serpentine geology, some real, some gleaned from dream. All caverns are inherently oneiric. We – like Laurel and Hardy – frequently get lost in them. Being lost is a state of mind. One can be lost in one’s mind. I can attest to that: it happens all the time. I get tagged by a worry which lures me into a maze of my own making, a cognitive maze of ramifying anxieties, which may lead to a bright light of revelation, a Platonic opening that leads out of the subterranean realm into the blinding rays of the sun and ultimate reality, or just get me more deeply entangled in my cerebral convolutions. Sometimes the best way out is to discover, à la Neo in The Matrix, that none of it is real.

Bachelard references a work by Adolphe Badin titled Grottes et Cavernes, in which is described a narrow ladder for descending into the darkness of a cave. At the bottom of the ladder is a very narrow hole. One must lie on the floor and move forward by gripping what Badin describes as cakes made of honey. Bachelard seizes this detail to make an allusion to Trophonius, a hero of Greek mythology who may have been either a demon (a daemon in the Greek sense which was a spirit guide or tutelary deity) or a Chthonic hero ('chthonic,' from Chthonios [Χθόνιος] meaning “Zeus-beneath-the-earth"). 

There was a cult surrounding Trophonius, who was consulted for oracles. Whoever desired to obtain an oracle from Trophonius had to descend into a cave that was so full of horrors that when they re-ascended to the surface they were so frightened out of their wits that they forgot the whole experience. It was possible to seat the devotee upon a “chair of Mnemosyne” (the goddess of memory) which was conveniently located near the entrance to the cave, and priests of the shrine would jot down all the ravings from the oracular spelunker.

As a metaphor, this sounds quite familiar to me. Anyone who has descended into the depths of their psyche, or, propelled by psilocybin or some other hallucinogenic aid, journeyed into inner space and gleaned information from the unconscious and its various archetypes and chthonic monstrosities, is going to have problems relating these phenomena in a language corralled by reason and grammar.

Soon after, writes Pausanias, a Roman writer and geographer of the 2^nd century who wrote extensively about ancient Greece, the visitor to Trophonius’s dark realm recovers their sense and laughter. Everything out of their mouth suddenly seems funny, all those subterranean abnormalities spooks in a carnival haunted house.

We went to bed and listened to some podcasts. I particularly liked one called Movie Crush in which Groundhog Day was enthusiastically discussed.

I couldn’t get to sleep. I was worried about a number of things, the melting of the polar ice cap, an erratic jet stream creating havoc everywhere, frost-quakes in Ottawa, a wildfire in Greenland, the rise of fascism, the government shut down, millions of people divested of health care due to the Republican tax reform, many of whom may die, orderlies in a Baltimore hospital depositing a patient dressed only in a hospital gown at a bus stop in thirty degree weather, the privatization of education for the rich, ignorance and incivility on the increase, a decaying infrastructure, floods and famine and habitat loss. I shut off my tablet and the Bluetooth device on the radio and began listening to classical music on King FM. I started drifting off and was abruptly awakened by a hypnic jerk. It shook the bed. I closed my eyes and tried to lose consciousness again. And then there was a power outage. Fuck it. I put on my flashlight headband and went out in the living room to lie on the couch and read The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein.

I heard the constant din of sirens. I put on some clothes and went outside to see what was going on. The air was mild and still. Only a section of the neighborhood was without power. The rest of the city was fine. The sirens appeared to be coming from the bottom of the hill on the south side, Roy Street or Mercer. When the power returned, I discovered that approximately 12,900 customers had lost power due to four circuit breakers going haywire and creating a cascading effect and a small substation fire. That must’ve been what the sirens were for. Power was back on by 6:15 a.m.

It’s hard to think of a future at this juncture in time. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a one. Not for humans. Or thousands of other species we’re taking down with us.

Has the human experiment been a failure? Is experiment the right word? If so, whose experiment are we? I seriously doubt that human beings are the result of experimentation, unless one adopts the very broad view that everything in the cosmos is an experiment. My guess is we’re just an evolutionary quirk, “atoms contemplating atoms” as the cherubic-faced British physicist Brian Cox puts it. Somehow geochemistry became biochemistry, the inorganic became organic, phosphorous and nitrogen became conversation and polypeptide chains. Mud and sand and rock became quivering blobs of synthesizing protein which became corals and worms which became vertebrates which became able to walk erect on two feet which led to the evolution of a tongue capable of speech which quickly escalated into consciousness, whatever that is, self-awareness and books and dignity and meaning.  

Valentines and sonnets and airplanes.

Dance and flavor and religion and guns.

At the end of the day, who are we? No one knows. No one may ever know. We were here. For a time. And then we were gone, cooked by an overheated atmosphere.