We thought a lot of the garden at the end of summer. It buzzed with activity just as much as it had in June, but now, with grumblings of how autumnal it had suddenly got, the din was different. It comes down to anthropomorphism - how can the bees sense that they need to work harder to get ready for the cold weather? The seasons have been around for millions of years, plenty of time for the slow workings of evolution to drum ideas into the tiny heads of any insect. We are just as susceptible to the suggestions of the environment, the gradual, unconscious awareness of the gently curving waves that mark the climate and the weather (for they are different things whatever anyone says).
I thought this morning, of making a continuous graph of the temperature and realised that such a thing would almost always be smooth, sinuous and without discontinuities. The temperature rarely changes at a speed that is noticeable to us. It climbs or falls slowly until suddenly someone wonders out loud how it got so hot or cold and the cusp of catastrophe throws everyone into the same thought. The seasons flow like this, like the hands of a clock which when watched seem not to move but always do, moving at the same angular velocity regardless of the observer effect or other more esoteric theories of time. The bees, living so much less time than we do, may have some mechanism that shows them the motion of time in a much more obvious manner. Maybe they 'see' everything, each individual moment as they bumble and blunder from flower to flower, through the slow march of the seasons, sped up in their vision depending on which setting they choose, to the endless variation of climate bringing sense and division to the entire existence of this planet.
We do not have this same intensity in our connections with the world. Many of us don't seem to have it at all. One minute we are racing around the playground, arms outstretched like the heroes we think we are and the next we are slumped in a chair wondering where everything went, the events in between invisible and forgotten. We must commit every moment to memory, be able to recall every second as if we were making internal maps of the three dimensional world to allow us to pretend that we live in four. Apply this trick of space to time and you will step outside of the linear flow, into the hyper-time that links the beginning and the end of the universe, the curve of time analogous to the curve of space. Imagine your house in space, not just the bits you can see at any one time, but the whole thing, hanging in front of you, semi-transparent and able to be rotated with just a thought. You are living now in the next dimension, existing like a four-dimensional god, able to see everything that exists without having to look round corners.
And now, think of how to do this with time, imagine you life to now, possibly like a line with marker posts for significant events. What do you see where it crosses the millennium? Is it any different for that year when compared to the others? Next imagine it compressed like a line turns into a circle and circle turns into a sphere. You have all the time you have experienced in your vision. You can recall any event just by spinning this globe of your life in front of you. I think this is how the bees see time, possibly passing it from generation to generation in junk DNA. The greater part of our identity as defined by our genes, is apparently meaningless; just long lists of seemingly random codes, holding no information that we can decipher, the ultimate in security by obscurity or possible by absurdity. Sometimes I wonder if the secrets to everything about life are encoded in these strands and then I realise that this is a truism, because of course, all life is descended from a single common ancestor. Our DNA is just a version of that original string, with each life experience adding more to the code. There are the pieces we can see and manipulate but mixed in are the mysterious extra links, the pieces we strive to understand.
Is the secret of consciousness held in there? It must be. We are conscious beings and all the construction of the machines which are our bodies is defined in the DNA. All secrets of life are in there - the entire blueprint and history of life on this planet, encoded in each and every tiny cell. The skin cells which fall of my fingers as I type this each contain more information than has entered my brain since I first cast eyes on the dim lights of the hospital where I was born. All the things I have done and all the dreams of things I want to do are nothing compared to those sequences of letters that define the jelly that is us. Each bacterium, washed away at the sink, has information that remains inside us now despite the millions or perhaps billions of years which have passed since the existence of our common ancestor. The earth cannot be young; it needs to be old for all this wondrous mechanism to have developed from nothing, to have been brought about by the random mixing of chemicals, that one day created an accidental self-replicating machine that in its fuzziness has produced all the hatred, joy and delight at existence which humans possess today. The ultimate free lunch. All that you enjoy is the result of random accident and I know that that is true no matter how much you argue with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment