Brilliant!
got a thought for the past few days. i'm going to just write it out; this is loren eiseley commenting on his thoughts as he thought of the connections of humans to a fish he called the Snout, our very earliest forebearer if you believe in things like macro-evolution. I found it to be one of the most obvious, but unthought of, perspectives out there.
"I have long been an admirer of the octopus. The cephalopods are very old, and they have slipped, protean, through many shapes. They are the wisest of the mollusks, and I have always felt it to be just as well for us that they never came ashore, but-there are other things that have.There is no need to be frightened. It is true some of the creatures are odd, but I find the situation rather heartening than otherwise. It gives one the feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part of it.
There are things down there still coming ashore. Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity. It gets into your head- the certainty, I mean- the human certainty, adn then you miss it all: the things on the tide flats adn what they mean and why, as my wife says, 'they ought to be watched.' The trouble is we don't know what to watch for. I have a friend...who drops in now and then between trips to tell me about the size of crodile jaws in Uganda, or what happened on some beach back in Arnhem Land.
'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat...We were pushing a dubout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when SMACKO we jam this mangrove bush and the things come tumbling down.
What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody ought to keep an eye on them.'
'Why?' I asked
'I don't know why,' he said impatiently...'A fish belongs in water. It ought to stay there- just as we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping and contracts. See what I mean?'
'I see what you mean,' i said gravely. 'They ought to be watched. My wife thinks so too. About a lot of things'
Not long since i read a book in which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten billion years of future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the things that man might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought again, birds in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. No wonder my explorer friend had had a momentary qualm when he met the mudskippers with their mental reservations and lack of promises. There is something wrong with out world view. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun is no longer believed to revolve around the earth...
We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go out with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and fell, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and grown more intricate.
To deny this, a man once told me, is to deny God. This puzzled me. I went...not in the past, not by the bones of dead things, not down the lost roadway of the Snout. I went back along the pathway to the marsh. I went...in daylight, in the Now, to see if the door was still there, and to see what things passed through it. I found the same experiments were brewing, that up out of that ancient well, fins were still scrambling toward the sunlight. They were small things, and which of them presaged the future I could not say. I saw only that they were many and that they had solved the oxygen death in many marvelous ways, not always ours...The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air...We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."
"I have long been an admirer of the octopus. The cephalopods are very old, and they have slipped, protean, through many shapes. They are the wisest of the mollusks, and I have always felt it to be just as well for us that they never came ashore, but-there are other things that have.There is no need to be frightened. It is true some of the creatures are odd, but I find the situation rather heartening than otherwise. It gives one the feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part of it.
There are things down there still coming ashore. Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity. It gets into your head- the certainty, I mean- the human certainty, adn then you miss it all: the things on the tide flats adn what they mean and why, as my wife says, 'they ought to be watched.' The trouble is we don't know what to watch for. I have a friend...who drops in now and then between trips to tell me about the size of crodile jaws in Uganda, or what happened on some beach back in Arnhem Land.
'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat...We were pushing a dubout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when SMACKO we jam this mangrove bush and the things come tumbling down.
What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody ought to keep an eye on them.'
'Why?' I asked
'I don't know why,' he said impatiently...'A fish belongs in water. It ought to stay there- just as we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping and contracts. See what I mean?'
'I see what you mean,' i said gravely. 'They ought to be watched. My wife thinks so too. About a lot of things'
Not long since i read a book in which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten billion years of future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the things that man might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought again, birds in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. No wonder my explorer friend had had a momentary qualm when he met the mudskippers with their mental reservations and lack of promises. There is something wrong with out world view. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun is no longer believed to revolve around the earth...
We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go out with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and fell, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and grown more intricate.
To deny this, a man once told me, is to deny God. This puzzled me. I went...not in the past, not by the bones of dead things, not down the lost roadway of the Snout. I went back along the pathway to the marsh. I went...in daylight, in the Now, to see if the door was still there, and to see what things passed through it. I found the same experiments were brewing, that up out of that ancient well, fins were still scrambling toward the sunlight. They were small things, and which of them presaged the future I could not say. I saw only that they were many and that they had solved the oxygen death in many marvelous ways, not always ours...The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air...We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."
Labels: nature and science
posted by Anonymous at
23:06
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