For the Music

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Believe me, I’ve tried.  I took a year of piano lessons but just couldn’t get it.  I married a musician.  I tried to learn guitar.  (I would still play with it, but I broke a string last time I tried to tune it and who has time to get to a music store where it can be restrung?)  I can’t sing—I’ve never been trained and I just don’t seem to have the voice for it.  (In fact, since I no longer teach those close to me say I speak so softly that it’s a strain to hear me.)  But the fact is I love music.  That’s why I don’t listen to it as background.  If there’s music playing, that I like, I find it difficult to concentrate on anything else.  It goes directly to my brain, it seems.

My memory is such that if a piece of music is too familiar I sometimes just don’t want to hear it.  I’m also out of touch with contemporary music.  I have strong tastes, and not too much appeals to me.  When something does, it’s transcendent.  It’s like I’ve fused with the performers.  It’s mystical and amazing.  Growing up, we couldn’t afford much in the way of records.  (I’m sure I need not say anything about cassette or 8-track tapes.)  I listened to the radio with my brothers from time to time, and enjoyed what we heard.  I secretly enjoyed what I heard coming from my older brother’s room.  Left to my own devices, however, I tend to pick up a book and I can’t listen to music and read at the same time.  I know that this is my own neurological issue, but I’m letting you in because anything transcendent is worth sharing.  

Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

Although the quality isn’t as good, services such as Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited have slowly introduced me to music of the nineties and later.  Why the nineties?  That’s when I began teaching and my spare time was spent researching (reading) and I had little time for other diversions.  You see, music may just be what it’s all about.  It’s being absorbed and enjoying every second of it.  Humans are visually oriented, but when we focus on sounds something happens to us.  I can be in a crowded store and stop dead right in the middle of the aisle if one of my special songs comes on in the background.  I have to stand and listen, shopping forgotten.  Transcendent moments are few.  If we were in transport all the time I fear it would become ordinary.  And such things are worth pondering on Groundhog Day.

Not Tomorrow

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Two of the sweetest words I know are, in the context of a vacation, “not tomorrow.”  They’re especially sweet after you’ve had a couple days off and you start feeling anxious that time is running out, only to realize that although work will start again soon it’s “not tomorrow.”  You have another day when you can stay in your pajamas, read, watch movies, or, if you’re a certain personality type, write.  Or play games, put a puzzle together, visit friends.  Whatever it is you do to find meaning in life outside work.  Outside academia I’ve never worked for a company that gave more than one day itself for the Christmas holiday.  (Two, if you count New Year’s Day, but that’s technically on next year’s meager holiday tally sheet.)

Each year I cash in vacation days so that I can feel “not tomorrow” more than a day or two in a row.  One of the more depressing recollections I remember is climbing onto an empty bus well before sunrise to commute to an otherwise empty office my first December working for Routledge since I hadn’t accrued enough vacation to take the week off.  I’ve worked for two British companies and it doesn’t help knowing our colleagues in the UK automatically have that week off.  Colonials, however, have far fewer holidays, and if that means trooping to the office for form’s sake, so be it.  Very few people answer their emails between Christmas and New Year’s.  Her majesty’s realm thrived for my presence, I’m sure.

The pandemic has taught us that many, if not most, workers are self-motivated when not confined to an office.  We also know that the United States has the lowest life span among developed nations, and my guess is that one contributing factor is that we don’t have enough “not tomorrows” until it becomes literally true.  Life is a gift, and spending it doing the things we value is something we tend to deny ourselves in the hopes that someday we might retire.  Many companies have begun to cap the number of vacation days you can accrue at numbers so low that the year looks like a desert from January through late November.  It’s that stretch of “tomorrow is a work day” punctuated by weekends so vapid that they vanish by the time errands you can’t do during the week are done.  Why have we done this to ourselves?  For me personally, I only have two more regular work days off.  I’m beginning to feel anxious about it.  Then I tell myself that, for today at least, although I have to start work again soon, it’s not tomorrow.

First Images

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I awoke to an image from the James Webb Space Telescope.  Looking at the universe at it was 4.6 billion years ago is a humble and terrifying experience.  Our universe is so incredibly vast and we are tiny.  As we on this planet bicker and kill and destroy, out there something truly wondrous looms.  Those tiny pinpricks of galaxies.  Our own galaxy so massive that we can’t comprehend it.  Our own midsize star large enough to hold more than a million earths.  Our own planet big enough that no human being can see it all in a lifetime.  What in the world are we fighting for?  This image is just a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.  How many grains of sand would it take to fill the visible sky?

Many people argue that such things are a waste of money.  Yes, there are very real, human-created problems right here on earth.  The siren call of space, however, has the potential to save us.  If we look into that immense universe just out there and realize that we are part of something larger than ourselves, we can stop fighting and hating and electioneering.  Keep looking up instead.  Costs, after all, are relative.  Our entire economic system is arbitrary.  We decide what’s valuable and what’s not.  We make rules that allow individual human beings to control the lives of countless others based on nothing more than agreed-upon principles.  Food could be freely distributed.  Medicine could be given to the sick.  What’s required is perspective.  If looking at the universe doesn’t provide perspective, what can?

I often wonder about life in those distant galaxies.  Given the sheer numbers it’s practically impossible that life evolved only here.  We’re told that teleological thinking is wishful and naive, but looking at the way life behaves I have to wonder if that’s true.  Life may be seeking goals.  If it is, than intelligence may be among them.  We’ve got billions of years and billions of lightyears to work with.  And when I look at the headlines I find those of the James Webb Space Telescope to be the most hopeful of all.  Galaxies are all about possibilities.  Stars being born where the outcomes may be better than one gender assuming it’s better than another.  Or that the “right to bear arms” means  stockpiling assault rifles to kill others in a fit of pique.  No, this money’s not wasted if only people might listen and pay attention to the stars.

Mother of Life

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Homeostasis is, if I recall correctly, the state of equilibrium that entities and systems seek.  When we’re too warm we seek someplace cooler and when we’re hungry we look for something to eat.  It’s a great process of evening things out because we live in a world of extremes.  Well, relative extremes for a planet that suited to life.  Autumn came in with a chill this year, at least around here.  We had a couple of nights with frost before apple-picking season even began.  Over in Denver they went from a heat wave to inches of snow overnight.  I often wonder, if our species manages to survive long enough, what life will be like once everything evens out.  Until then, because of human climate degradation, we’ll be facing more extremes.  That’s the way the GOP likes it.

Meanwhile, there may be evidence that life exists on Venus.  Or at least in the atmosphere of the hottest planet in the solar system.  Up through my college years I toyed with the idea of being an astronomer.  I’d learned in high school (for we were a Sputnik-era school in rural Pennsylvania that had a working planetarium) that it was mostly about math.  I’m afraid I have no head for such things.  Still, I remain fascinated by other planets and their potential.  I’m in the market, you might say.  Venus had captured my young imagination not only because Ray Bradbury and C. S. Lewis wrote stories about living there, but because of the images from the Russian Venera (blush, giggle) probe program.  I knew in high school (planetarium, remember?) that Russia had landed probes on the rocky surface of Venus that had only functioned for a couple of hours at most before breaking down in the extreme conditions.  Extremes, again.

Venus could, it was thought, never have supported life.  The new evidence, however, stands to show us just how little we understand life.  It exists in the most inhospitable environments on our planet.  When life was found near black smokers on the ocean floor it was considered a fluke.  Maybe life is the norm instead of the rarity our exaggerated sense of self-importance suggests.  Venus, after the sun and moon, is the brightest natural object regularly visible in our skies.  Both the morning and evening star, it beckons to us.  Although not definitive, we’ve found evidence of life on both Venus and Mars.  And yet many of us prefer science deniers to lead our nation.  So I think of homeostasis as I look at Venus out my early morning window.

Exobiology

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Are we alone in the universe? The answer is every day growing more and more certain that we are not. Humanity may experience shortages of many things, however, pride is not among them. For millennia we’ve been convinced of our own superiority and, of late, we’ve become convinced that we must be as good as it gets. We’ve mastered logic and our material world. We’ve sent probes to land on Venus and Mars, and flying by just about every other planetary body close enough to reach. We sure are smart. So it stands to reason that we are the brightest beings in a universe that we tell ourselves is infinite. A recent article on Exobiology that my wife pointed out to me on The Conversation, traces the history of the idea of life outside the earth. Not surprisingly, the idea has its origins in religious thought.

Giordano Bruno was an early modern Dominican who was burned at the stake for his heresies. Like his near contemporary Galileo, he was fascinated by the sky and postulated that the world up there could be full of life. A church increasingly under pressure from the pesky Protestant movement had no time for flights of fancy among the faithful. No, religion at the time wanted its feet planted on solid ground. The only life up there was angels and God. Still, the idea had been broached. Since the world’s major religions have been geocentric, as a rule, they’ve had a bit of difficulty adjusting to the idea of the other other. God as other is one thing, other creatures as other is quite another. How do earth-bound religions account for the possibility of life in space? This is not merely academic fancy at play. We will almost certainly discover life elsewhere—whether it comes to us (or already may have), or we go to it (which might take a little longer), we will discover that a universe that is infinite has infinite possibilities. Will religion keep us grounded?

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Ironically, one of the areas where science and religion have broadly agreed is in the superiority of humankind. Both remain staunchly geocentric. Religions and tend to say we’re sinful, but other than that, pretty much the best the earth has to offer. Although biologists say evolution is non-teleological, they still have a hard time imagining something more advanced than us. We are pretty self-absorbed. Meanwhile, we are discovering water is likely not unique to earth. Rocky planets seem to be the rule rather than the exception. And there are billions and billions of stars in our own galaxy alone, among billions of others. What are the chances we’re alone? Virtually none. Here is one place that both religion and science might learn a lesson based on early spiritual teachings. In the face of the unknown, humility is the most logical response. I’m impressed in how far we’ve come in the last several millennia of civilization. I think, however, that we’d better be prepared to meet exobiology with a realization that Genesis 1 was only the beginning.