Is That All There Is?

On its web site, the BBC showed a picture of the “Oldest Human Ancestor.” It didn’t look like any of my relatives or my wife’s either. In a black and white photo taken through a microscope it resembled the central figure Edvard Munch’s painting: “The Scream” with what look like two eyes and a mouth that’s wide open. It’s tiny — only a millimeter, or .039 inches. Scientists claim it was “covered with a thin, relatively flexible skin and muscles, leading the researchers to conclude that it moved by contracting its muscles and got around by wriggling.”

Some of my relatives behave that way. Scientists also observed that, “It’s most striking feature is its large mouth, relative to the rest of its body.” That’s another feature sometimes pointed out in members of my family. The kicker, however, was this: “The researchers were unable to find any evidence that the animal had an anus, which suggests that it consumed food and excreted from the same orifice.” Almost everyone has relatives like that. Skeptical that such a tiny creature could be our common ancestor, that helped me consider it.

Artist's rendering of Saccorhytus

The creature is called Saccorhytus and it lived 540 million years ago in the Cambrian period, probably between two grains of sand on the sea floor in what is now China. It was a dull life. I would have had fun with this story if I were still teaching the “Beginnings” unit with which I used to start the school year every September. Students learned about the two prevailing concepts most Americans believed about our origins: creation and evolution.

We compared and contrasted them. They were similar in the order of events: Creation began with sea life, then other creatures, and lastly, humans -- which is what evolutionists contend. However, day four of creation is when stars and other heavenly bodies were made which is after life appeared, and that’s different from Big Bang/Darwinism. Time periods were vastly different too. Also, creation lent some meaning to it all, but not Big Bang/Darwinism. 

Ex Nihilo sculpture at the National Cathedral Washington DC

Sometimes, students debated formally. The creationist side always contended there was no explanation in the Big Bang theory about how the exploding object got there, whereas the Judeo/Christian/Muslim creation story claimed God created the universe “ex nihilo” or “out of nothing.” Neither did Darwin explain what was at the beginning of the march of evolution. In his recent book Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe describes a conversation had Darwin with students: 

The students had the sort of naive, unbridled, free-floating curiosity most youths unfortunately rein in far too early in life. They wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got underway and how exactly, physically, it started up — and from what?

That’s what I loved about teaching my eighth graders. They still had that, but back to Wolfe:

Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause… and finally, ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘probably from four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere.’ One student… wanted to know where the cells came from. Who or what put them in the pool? An exasperated Darwin said, in effect, “Well I don’t know. Isn’t it enough that I’ve brought you man and all the animals and plants in the world’

…Darwinism avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo. Darwin often thought about it, but it made his head hurt. The world was just… here. 

My students reviewed the Scopes Monkey Trial about banning lessons on evolution last century, and secular objections to  lessons on Intelligent Design more recently. Always, they asked my opinion, but I deferred until the end when I told them mine was a blend of both.

It was all controversial. Almost very time a new principal arrived, which was about every two to five years, he or she would approach me before classes started and ask that I stop teaching my Beginnings unit. Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t like that I taught about evolution, while secularists disdained lessons on creation. Both sides lobbied each new principal to get me to scrap it. I resisted, pointing out that I circled back to this dualistic understanding among Americans of how everything started and the way those beliefs influenced their views on other issues. 

They still do. In these contentious times, creationists tend to cluster in flyover country and Darwinists on the coasts. Creationists are red. Darwinists are blue. Creationists are generally pro-life, Darwinists pro-choice. Creationists anticipate an afterlife. Many Darwinists doubt there’s any such thing and their number grows. We and Saccorhytus live, die, and go back to earth. A refrain from a 1969 song by Peggy Lee went:

Is that all there is, is that all there is

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is

It might be the ethos of our age.

Creative Networking

Just as I write mostly for myself, my photographs are selfish too - but I don’t publish them, except the occasional few on my weblog. I give them away to whoever asks. Lately, I’m deriving more satisfaction from pictures than from words.

They’re related, though, words and images. Good novelists catalyze images which are, in turn, subjectively modified in readers’ minds. While reading a good story, there’s a movie playing on the back of my forehead that I view with my mind’s eye, so to speak. Conversely, “A picture,” goes the proverb, “is worth a thousand words,” but those words need not be spoken or written, necessarily. The picture might just speak for itself, as words are sometimes insufficient.Every day I expect to see beauty, so I take my camera wherever I go. If it’s not hanging off my shoulder, it’s not far away in my vehicle. Should my pictures capture some imperfect, but reasonable facsimile of a beautiful witness, some appreciation may then be kindled in others viewing it.Encounters with beauty quicken feeling. If nothing troubles me, the serenity helps me to see the beauty I might otherwise have missed if I were melancholic. When I expect beauty, it usually appears and when it does, it magnifies serenity, which helps me see still more beauty. “Beauty” defined is:

the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest).

As most of my pictures are attempts to capture beauty, there’s feeling associated with each. They begin with feeling, at least, but they don’t always render it. When my photographs fail to catch and arrest even a small portion of the beauty I perceive, I feel a loss. But when they do, it’s wonderful.My favorite poet, Robert Frost, wrote: “A poem begins as a lump in the throat . . .” and I get that. Frost went on: “ . . . a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” My pictures might contain some lovesickness - an immersion into feeling - but with more emphasis on love and less on sickness. I write about woe, but avoid photographing it. Frost went still further, saying: “. . . It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”Beauty, when I encounter it, is transitory. Either it diminishes as light wanes, or I must leave its proximity and see it no more. I can preserve it - though always in attenuated form - with my camera. I carry some of it away. Strawberry preserves don’t taste as good as strawberries, but are good nonetheless. Serenity enables notice of beauty, and the camera enables me to preserve some. It’s all “an effort to find fulfillment,” as Frost described poetic inspiration.

The picture is a medium captured with a camera created by man, but operated by a photographer created by God. Properly executed, the picture captures created beauty, which is then triggered in viewers who are also created. Without the divine, there would be neither beauty nor perception of it. With it, our perception and attempts to capture it bring the fulfillment both Frost and the photographer seek. If we plug into the process, what we capture will resonate in the reader or the viewer, as we are are all components in the network of our Creator.Van Gogh

The more I work with pictures, the more I appreciate good painting. Some painters capture beauty exquisitely. They’re plugged into the network, consciously or not, and their work reflects it. Others don’t - not to my eye at least. I see it in Van Gogh’s work, but not in Picasso’s for example. Much of his work is alien to me and I wondered why, so I researched him. A few of his quotes were enough to understand:

God is really another artist. . . . He has no real style.

I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting.

Picasso

But this confession of his sealed it:

The 'refined', the 'rich', the 'professional do nothing', the 'distiller of quintessence' desire only the peculiar, and sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. The less they understood, the more they have admired me! ...Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand meaning of the word. ...I am only a public clown, a mountebank. I have understood my time and exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries.

No wonder I was repulsed. His were hardly efforts to find fulfillment. I’ll continue trusting my instincts with poets and painters and other image-makers.