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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781546218364 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 150 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
PHILOSOPHY OF MOUNTAINS
"For two and a half years, my only view was an old fence and a mountain of white rock. There was no uncertainty there, not even close. It was a concrete mountain, bare, no vegetation, and a cold wind blew off it during the winter. You understand? A wind that shook the fence with a sound I have in my head and can't blot out. The sound of a frozen, unyielding landscape ..."
Arturo Perez-Reverte, 2009, The Painter of Battles
Te most shameless displays of naked rock occur on the haunches of mountains. In outright defiance of gravity, these stony rumps are squeezed tightly and lifted skyward by colliding continents, raising crustal 'tsunamis' with crest lines that crisscross Earth. Fearing these stone waves, we baptize them with names – the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, the Rockies. These upsweeps of bruised stone are wild places that excite the two-dimensional drabness of our maps and the flatness of our imagination.
Appearances, however, deceive. Despite their rock-hard shoulders, mountains are ephemeral when viewed against the slow creep of deep time. Under the incessant blur of wind, rain, and ice, rock slabs crumble bit by bit until high peaks are denuded of their elevation. This recognition propels the mind's eye to see beyond itself, which may be the reason why so many people are drawn to the wildness of mountains.
But why risk life and limb climbing icy rock walls, you might wonder? It's because they are mysterious, bewildering, and perilous. Although their vertical exaggerations provoke foreboding and horror, large mountains are dangerous more so for their weather than for their height. Sky-scraping mountains are about the deep secrets of winter, the punishing logic of cold air, avalanches, and glaciers. The serrated rock ridges that step up to the peaks of tall mountains are chiseled into statuary by icy whorls of violent wind, the freeze-and-thaw cycles of night and day, the avalanching of heavy snow pack, and the downward glide of glacial ice, all of these mere afterthoughts of severe and unremitting alpine weather. Strong winds and sub-zero temperatures at altitude are particularly punishing for mountaineers, able to freeze skin and render ice impenetrable to the blow of an axe and the bite of crampons.
Long ago in the remote Dry Valleys of Antarctica something special happened to me. It was mid December, the apogee of summer when temperatures hover between cold and very cold. There is no night at that time of year. Two of us were camped high in a misfit boulder valley that had melted out from under the ice cap, now several kilometers away. We were geologists at the bottom of the world, a peculiar place where south is squeezed down to a point and north is everywhere else.
This frozen place is desert where old snow is perpetually blown about. The month before on the messy rubble of a till plain not far from here, the two of us had traipsed up and down tall desert dunes, exquisite bedforms shaped like crescent moons resting on their sides. Incredibly, gravel, not grains of sand, held up their steep angles of repose. Near our tent, the tops of stones protruding above the frozen ground were shaped into irregular polygons by the searing power of wind-blown sand.
As we feared, the narrow valley where we were encamped turned out to be a luckless place. There, we endured a windstorm for two days, pinned down shoulder to shoulder in down sleeping bags, hardly moving as if mummified in death. Torrents of heavy air coursed off the ice sheet and slammed against the canvas walls of our green tent. The cold and desperate conditions alternately sharpened and dulled my uneasy mind.
At one point, my weathered thoughts conjured an aerial view. Wind packed with cold and snow swirled about in billowing eddies, moving over the ground so fast it seemed as if the daydream was caught in fast-forward mode. Every so often a lonely pinprick of green flickered through the whiteout of the ground. I tried to see myself down there in that canvas tent but couldn't. I opened my eyes and could.
Somehow, each blast of wind was rebuffed, thousands of them. How? I cannot say other than we did nothing special to deserve that outcome. What was it like? W. H. Hudson described a madhouse of a windstorm in Idle Days in Patagonia. "And the winds are hissing, whimpering, whistling, muttering and murmuring, whining, wailing, howling, shrieking – all the inarticulate sounds uttered by man and beast in states of intense excitement, grief, terror, rage, and what not."
After the maelstrom, I wanted fresh air, lots of it, and space to breathe it in. My feelings needed sorting out. We both had to cry, but not together.
I shouldered my rucksack and left, trudging upslope on lonely wind-packed snow. My destination some two kilometers away was a minor ridge in sharp shadow. I needed quiet time watching the polar icecap.
In no time at all, I reached a scree band at the foot of a sandstone ridge. The true and easy feel of my body's weight in motion exhilarated me. The air was dreadfully cold and dry. Scrambling awkwardly over piles of tottering boulders, I felt uneasy and at risk. Once on firm bedrock, however, the act of climbing relaxed me. Several hours later, a roof pendant in the cliff wall – an overhanging sill of rust-iron basalt – stopped me cold. Traversing carefully to my right along a narrow ledge jutting out into air, I soon encountered smooth ice filling a slash in the basalt sill.
This was the crux. With my shoulders tensed, I started up relying on my ice axe and crampons for purchase and "pied a plat" for balance, flat-footing my way up the slope. The ice was cold and brittle. Thousands of ice shards fell away, clinking like broken glass with each placement of my crampons. Panting hard from the exertion, I cut steps into two slabs of high-angled ice. Eventually, I reached a long vertical chimney of fractured rock running straight up to the top of the ridgeline. Relieved, I opened my parka and placed my frozen fingers on the hot, sweaty skin beneath my woolen shirt. Shivering slightly, I remember thinking how peculiar to inhabit a body simultaneously freezing and roasting. I laughed quietly, releasing my tension.
Once safely on the ridge crest, I looked south to the pole. No human had ever been here before. In front of me, an endless apron of frozen water, wider than ocean-wide was drowned in muted light. Honey-colored clouds front lit by the low sun were weakening. I stared into vastness, not memorizing, but clumsily folding the gripping view into my head. Not a breath of air anywhere, the measured hush absolutely still, containing nothing whatsoever to overhear.
Unnerved by the deadness of the moment, I turned away. Over my shoulder, I saw the crooked ridgeline and an endless spread of messy rocks and crusty snowfields. Everything, absolutely everything, was locked away in the graveyard of deep time. No smudges of lichen or moss, no blades of grass, only the carbonized impressions of Permian ferns splayed out on the bedding planes of thin shales. Nothing anywhere about was alive but me. Absolutely nothing. Somehow, I had not approached, but had passed through a portal where everything caused ache.
Not much later, the clouds drained the radiant light out of the polar ice and slowly fused the sky and ice into an immense expanse, a seamless wholeness, a world devoid of parts. The familiar sweep of space disappeared. My eyes forgot my mind. No horizon, no up or down, no inside or outside, no color, no sound, no smell, no time, no life, no memory, simply wide-openness filled with silence. The infinite underbelly of the cosmos had engulfed me, my solid body waned to no thing at all. Somehow, I was free falling into a vastness, the infinite, an unearthly void, a faceless enormity well beyond the clutch of words and rationality. I had unintentionally come upon my authentic self. I cried.
Gifts of darkness, solitude, and pain underscored by senseless mountains of stone and ice scraped me raw on that notable day of my life. I stood stripped of memory, dreams, and intellect. I encountered the unblemished clarity of raging nonexistence. The space separating mentalscapes from mountainscapes vanished. I was unmapped. There are Earth's stones and there are our concepts of stones. I've learned that deep non-presence is not story to tell, nor topographies to memorize. Its primal undershadow is beyond comprehension by Earth-bound minds preoccupied with yes and no, taking and giving, good and evil, living and dying.
Over a lifetime, that special involvement with the pervasive nothingness of mountains has hovered inside of me everywhere I have climbed. Whenever I have had shadowy thoughts of vanished seaways and colliding continents, the strangeness of these penetrating moments has settled agreeably, quieting my insides. The all-embracing intimacy of impermanence is the vital essence of all that was, is, and ever will be. Yes, great, upright rocks in mountains fall apart without regret. The deep simplicity and completeness of that unvarying poetry, whereby everything matters and so nothing matters, infused my being. From mountains, I learned that I am simultaneously so much more, and so much less, than the human I appear to be.
CHAPTER 2
".... should the truth about the world exist, it's bound to be nonhuman."
Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays, 1995
Existence, since its beginning, has been deeply steeped in the poetic interplay of physics and chemistry. Together, physical-chemical processes vibrantly exfoliated into the geology and biology of our small planet. Named Earth, though mostly flooded by an ocean of water and wholly submerged in an ocean of air, our planet exudes the essence of deep time.
How can Homo sapiens ever claim to have access to the base revelations that have fired up the universe, including the peculiar life-giving mysteries of Earth? Being mere mortals, this human drive to understand absolutely is set against an impossibly steep and deep impasse, beyond which lies a domain not simply obscure, but utterly opaque and impenetrable. Yet, such mind-numbing hopelessness does not sit well with natural scientists, who proclaim that their methods of inquiry, based on observation, reason, and mathematics, can access the grave reality of the cosmos to some degree, perchance to a significant degree. But the critics of science point out that existence – all of it – is broadly and deeply complex, meaning that scientists, being all too human, will mistakenly misjudge the simplicity of their conclusions about the deep-rooted reality of Earth.
Most scientists, however, disagree with this pessimistic outlook. They counter that such pitfalls are ultimately avoidable in the long run, because the results of scientific work are only trusted if, at the end of the day, they have stood the rigor of critical judgment. By this I mean that all scientific claims, whether they are observational, experimental, or theoretical, are tested incessantly by direct attempts to disprove them.
Yes, the mettle of the scientific procedure is strapping skepticism, not the crippling sort espoused by die-hard cynics, but the disbelieving insights of open-eyed, clear-headed interrogators. "Is that what your claim is based on? I'm not impressed. Convince me that your findings are worth believing." Another might say: "If what you allege is correct, then this also has to be true. Let's see if it is." If the result of such challenges conflict with the proffered hypothesis, then the claim is judged to be lacking and duly modified or is considered to be bogus and thereby refuted and discarded.
The logical process of falsification as a means of revealing truth is slow and arduous, as well as inefficient. But it seems to be the only legitimate means we have devised so far to access the workings of the natural world as they are, rather than as we imagine them to be. Don't get me wrong. The human imagination is a precious human faculty, but it tends to conceptualize a fanciful world of personal sentiment, a reverie that has little to do with the hard-nosed reality that created the universe and birthed sundry life on a singular, solitary planet adrift in the vastness of space. Paradoxically, scientists seek truth obliquely by exposing untruth, in actual fact searching for a speck of gold in a riverbed by mining out thousands of tons of sand and gravel.
The scientific manner of investigating natural processes is tantamount to trying to complete a complicated jigsaw puzzle of the universe that has an infinite number of interlocking pieces. The puzzle solvers try to fit each piece, one by one, against the irregular edges of the parts of the jigsaw already put together. If it doesn't fit anywhere, the piece is set aside and others are tested in the very same way.
With dogged persistence, this step-by-step, trial-and-error procedure eventually yields a piece that dovetails smartly with a part of the assembled puzzle. No matter how snug the fit, however, the piece may not belong there, because it does not match up with the pictorial representation of the cosmos that is emerging as more of the puzzle is put together. If the piece does fit and does conform logically to the puzzle's image of the universe, then presumably it belongs there, in much the same way that the inability to falsify a scientific hypothesis despite repeated attempts at disproof indicates that the notion likely is an approximation of some aspect of absolute reality. In this way, nonhuman truths about the natural world, such as entropy, Boyle's law, evolution by natural selection, and global plate tectonics, are uncovered, intellectualized, and synthesized ever so carefully so that with time they glow forthrightly with simplicity, grace, and beauty.
What follows are explications of two general, yet focused, nonhuman truths revealed by scientific inquiry. As concepts go, their individual surfaces are quite austere, though beneath their patina they are deeply entwined and darkly shadowed. At depth, they transform, strangely enough, into nonhuman truth. The profundity of their complexity is what makes them especially germane to the 21st century.
Truth: The Universe Is Vast
Few will doubt the sensibility of the declaration that the cosmos is expansive beyond reason. After all, any person who gazes at the vaulted darkness of the night's sky will agonize over the never-ending obscurity that is up there. Yes, bits of starlight, the resplendent nuclear emissions of trillions of suns, burn fiery pinpricks into the inky nothingness of space. But despite this wondrous "candlelight of the gods," what is out there is mostly cold, empty, dark, and lifeless. It is desperately inhuman and it is terrifying. What can we make of this eternal, consuming darkness, looking at it from Earth, where life, thriving for billions of years under the warmth of its sun, has diversified into the opulence of today's biota, including you and me?
For obvious reasons, the sky has always fascinated humans. The mind's eye of early Homo sapiens must have recognized star patterns adrift in the heavens. Amazingly, familiar groupings of stars reappeared in the same section of the sky in a rhythmic pattern. These astronomical recurrences – the apparent birth, death, and rebirth of some constellations – enabled people to devise elaborate calendars that tracked reliably the passage of the seasons.
The endless repeatability of star clusters through time reassured people that the sky gods and spirit beings were reliable and trustworthy. Also, Earth appeared to be solid and unmoving, and so must be located at the center of the cosmos. Influenced by the aesthetic credo of Aristotle, Greek natural philosophers transposed the flawless geometric curve of the circle to the orbital motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the five known planets around an unmoving Earth. Ptolemy tirelessly incorporated "wheels within wheels within wheels" to account for the many new, detailed observations of the irregular trajectories of the planets. Regardless of such intricacies, everything essentially was as it should be in this geocentric depiction of the universe. Later, the Catholic Church stridently endorsed the worldview that Earth and its people were the focal point of existence, and this mistaken conviction endured as a dogmatic human truth for a few thousand years.
Serious misgivings about the efficacy of the geocentric model emerged in the sixteenth century. Relying on the logical truth of numbers and the latest astronomical observations, Nicholas Copernicus in his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium proposed that Earth was not riveted to the center of anything, but spun around its axis once each day and moved around the Sun once each year. In fact, all the known planets did likewise, but at different rotational and orbital rates. Furthermore, Copernicus insisted that the stars are much farther away from Earth than is the Sun. To put it bluntly, the nonhuman truth of reality discerned by mathematical logic indicated that Earth is located nowhere in particular.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Shadowed By Deep Time"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Paul R. Pinet.
Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PART I: Textures of Deep Time,
Philosophy Of Mountains, 3,
Unsparing Truth, 8,
Creation Story, 16,
Desert Dreamscape, 22,
Vitality Of Stone, 29,
Catastrophism, 38,
PART II: The Nature of Deep Time,
Deep Time's Stonework, 57,
Deep Time's Transformations, 69,
PART III: Reverberations of Deep Time,
Mountains And The Mind, 77,
What Am I?, 82,
Of Dying And Becoming, 91,
The Tree Of Life, 100,
Edge Effects, 104,
The Randomness Of True Harmony110,
Memory, 122,
A Natural History Of The Soul, 134,