(from Whatever it takes: a novel in the form of a journal)
- In a breath of stars
Supreme tactician, Geoffrey Donne, having successfully maneuvered Maya out the door for a little privacy, gazing from the field behind the barn tonight, with the sole light from the back door of the house shaded by the great bulk of Neal Wright’s genius. The noise of the stars is bright—needles of light on the black slate of a chalkboard; stars too thick to the eye to count. But still, just as Neal Wright would have seen them. And taught them to his children. And as all the heroes of human history would have known them, minus a super nova or two. I say that thought out-loud to Maya. Even in that dark I can see her roll her eyes.
Brightly, I say, “Right there is the continuity—the conversation,” pointing out at that tapestry of light and dark “The sight itself is not an answer to anything. It is just a part of an ancient conversation, like the weather, between them and us, through time. A sort of animated cave painting. An ancient script. This is where we are on our map. We are human beings and this is what we see.”
She is practical, as mothers are. She says, “Stars are difficult to paint. Not just because of size. They have no true shape. They change before the eye.”
I say, “Van Gogh did it,…but he cheated. He made them big so they would stand still.”
And she shakes her head, “That’s only bending the truth. That’s not a lie. The same as saying stars are ‘noisy-bright.’”
I admit, “That’s right.”
It seems to me now that the clash between man and machine is only natural. Inevitable. “Mankind created the machine to do his work. Improve his life. In the machine there is a bit of himself, and for that he always suffers some small loss of his humanity as a consequence. Perhaps only a missing finger, or a toe. But usually more. That’s the double-edged sword of all of that creation. Nature does not reckon with the mind of man, because it is in us. Nature made man—call it God if you wish—and now, it must deal with the mind of all that creation. All of that’s a part of the conversation too. All of that is the internal conflict. An eternal conflict perhaps, if we survive.
I say, “Just words. Our tools. Words are machines too. Our rhetorical hammer and chisel. Neal knew that.”
Maya has moved away a little, out of the small light from the house, further into the shadow of stars.
She says, “He was hiding words in his wall. Why was that?”
My thought was, “The words betrayed him.”
Maya is frowning. I can hear the frown in her voice, “When they took his children away?”
But that was not something that could be understood by me. Not in mere words.
“He saw it as a punishment of God. This was his Eden.” I change the direction of that and say, “Imagine, just one small interruption in that conversation between mankind and nature, one small flare of anger or careless outburst—just the arm and fist of a solar flare and we are all gone.”
The Biblical fall of man from the perfection of the Garden of Eden was the consequence of a quest for knowledge. Lots of it. And it continues. We are still falling. Me, most of all, I think.
As if reading my mind, she says, “No. You have already fallen. Past tense.”
I think she is smiling now.
I say, “He knew that Eden was not machine-made. But if Eden was perfect, why did man want more? Why did he want more? He might have been guilty about that. God would have known that the quest for knowledge is at the heart of man. At his core. Because God would have made us that way.”
Maya says, “That would just be the sex. Don’t blame me. Guys are always blaming women. I’ve only done what nature made me do.”
I object. “No. I hope not. Love seems like so much more than sex…Were you compelled?”
She nods, purposely, so I can see it.“Yes. By nature. You gave me no choice.”
Very confusing.
The suffering of man is a consequence of nature’s imperfection as much as his own—It’s all the same. If that life can be called imperfect when set out on the cold and dark slate of physics, it is the physics that is wrong. The stone has no opportunity to be perfect, or want to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, forever, what it is. There is no story there. No narrative. The story of mankind is in us. In our mistakes. And that is the slate we are writing on, now. We are still falling. That is what stories are all about. We are in Eden even now, and we are still falling.
E = mc2. Mass and energy are the same physical beings and might be exchanged, one for the other. Like bodily fluids. I can see how that might apply. Even at the speed of light. But why not slow down. There is gravity to consider. And love.
That man is not a match to nature, nor an opponent—he is of nature itself, that’s not the problem. It is the physics of all the universe that’s outside of nature—and nature’s God—that is, all living things—that’s beyond the physics of it. I figure, Einstein would have balked. He must have known. But the physics of the universe exists. Period. It is only nature that is perishable. That is the true conflict. And the words to describe that—there is the story. That we ‘shall not perish from the earth.’ Lincoln had that right. Has this not been discussed before?
I say, “The machine is only mankind’s attempt to manage physics. Is that the evil? But by that same turn, the machine might manage mankind. There is the evil. Just the way words do. We invent the words to help us communicate, but then the words determine what we say and how we say it. The natural clash between man and machine are the opposite edges of the same sword—the natural clash between nature—the will to live—and the inanimate physics of an entire universe. But we cannot be an opponent to physics. It’s not a fair fight.”
She is ahead of me on this, “The mind of nature might be in the creation of mankind as an agent in the ongoing clash between all life and physics…I suppose it’s our task is to deal with that.”
I wasn’t feeling smart enough for this. “Then, I must be a secret agent,”
She says, “But I think it’s even simpler than all that”
She is probably right, again. I am suddenly reeling with the possibilities of being an agent of nature in a cold universe, and feeling very blasphemous.
“Just the same as machines and words were created by mankind to deal with physics and all the reality we can perceive, Nature has created man as an agent to deal with some larger reality—something that is in the breath of stars—and the noise of the stars is in all that breathing…Much the same as it is in a kiss.”