When you think about where we come from and where we are going sometimes you come up with a solution that makes you gloomy. The whole "Descent of Man" was a pretty depressing story for a lot of people, hence the need to suppress the teaching of the theory of evolution, and has bred increasingly impressive attempts to weave new stories which don't have a foundation in much besides wishful thinking. Billions of years before us there will be nothing and billions of years after us there will be nothing. At least that's what the Dragon says in John Gardner's Grendel.
How do you go on with that idea in your head? Must you create illusions to carry on in the face of that bit of information? Of course my ideal of working through nihilistic arguments was the Woody Allen character in Radio Days who felt that if an asteroid might strike the earth at any moment, it was a good reason to not worry about your homework.
Now here's where it gets tricky and I become inarticulate — if I haven't been before. I really think that life or the will to life and then to consciousness exists apart from this particular brew we have on earth. What got me to think of this was watching Rivers and Tides a documentary about the artist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy's a sculptor who tends to natural media: twigs, leaves, rocks, even evanescent forms like icicles. One of the media that you can see him playing with in the documentary are iron stones, which he crushes and uses as pigment or merely as dust. Goldsworthy illustrates and explains iron's fundamental role in life and its manifestation in our own blood.
I think the color is an expression of life. I am in continuous pursuit of the red. That something so dramatic, so intense, could at the same time be so hidden, underneath the skin of the earth.From thinking about iron in myself, my mind wanders to the idea of iron in every living thing. Iron-sulfur world theorists imagine iron's nature, iron's will, has taken us on a trip from there — underground cauldrons of methane, steam, and sulfur — to here. From self-replication of non-living things, to the replication of living things, to sex, to consciousness is not such a long trip. We might have started out out in a mid-ocean ridge, moved ourself to a tide pool, climbed down a tree in Africa, and now find ourselves trying to buy some coastal real estate before it's too late, but the ideas were there first. In the blackest of black holes lie the concepts of iron, life , and thought. Posted by mastr at March 5, 2005 10:20 AM