Life Is Not Precious; It’s Temporary (Photo – Faith @101).
The purpose of all existence, from quantum to biological to cosmic, appears to be the making of connections, such that, like an infinite mycelium, a photon on Venus senses what is happening to a photon on Mars.
By Thom Hawkins
Animate life, on the other hand, does not excel at making such long distance connections, whereas rocks can sense each other across eons and infinitude without making out. Making out, especially excessive bonking, is life’s most counterproductive activity, and, as you well know, there is a whole lot of bonking going on.
At Home Depot recently, a man holding his baby was speaking with a clerk in front of the yard poisons. I overheard the young father say his baby was getting bitten by mosquitoes in their back yard; he wanted advice on which poison would kill the most babies, although he said bugs. Bonking is why our stressed-out planet is sagging in the middle, much like an overworked mattress. We are desperately trying to avoid entropy, the dominant state of both quantum and cosmic matter.
There is evidence that the tendency of animate matter like humans to evolve in the direction of self-destruction comes from the same basic entropic drive of inanimate matter as it seeks equilibrium, what humans call death. In other words, evolution is nothing other than the quantum tendency of all matter to become inert and stable over time, rather than dynamic and changing: a death drive that suppresses the life drive’s efforts to escape entropy. The more greedily we grasp at life the more we guarantee our oblivion, the great flame-out into the cauldron of elemental preservation–pure connection to all existence.
Thom Hawkins was a staff writing instructor at UC Berkeley for twenty-two years and has published books and articles about teaching, as well as short fiction and poetry. He is currently preparing his first poetry chapbook, “Wild Decrepitudes,” that will be available later this year.
This Article was mentioned on brid-gy.appspot.com
#Human life is precious and temporary.
“We believe that the roots of our crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories that underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.”
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