On the awe of the Universe

Descending to human affairs:

An accurate report on the transforming shapes of my cognition as I leave the grace and levitation of celestial things and orient the axis of my mind back on societal matters. I’m that kid scuffing my dirty sneakers in Barnes and Noble and sifting through the books in the Science section, sampling Darwin, poring through Copernicus to Hawking, sympathizing for Tesla the underdog of electrical history… though I suppose immortalizing your name for the units of magnetic density flux somewhat compensates for the fact you have been commercially thwarted by Edison. An old man bespectacled with thick glasses once gave me a smile loaded with a sympathetic understanding when he saw what I held in my hands. These whorls of information contained in the seemingly innocuous text would undoubtedly form themselves into arrows of abstraction: the physics of a soap bubble to the physics of consciousness to theories on the shape and direction of Time. I always wonder how anyone can root their feet firmly back on the ground after such a perusal since I for one, have a difficult time completing this seemingly simple task of closing the book, returning it to its proper place on the shelf, and continuing on without feeling though my innards have transmogrified into some erratic fitful of lightning about to storm. I get stuck.

These endless hours, the paychecks I spend, this need to delegate someone with the duty of prying these books from me when I have fallen asleep with them – why? Is it for that Holy Grail men and women for centuries have aspired and died for — Truth? For sublime and magnificent thoughts? Frankly, I don’t know what it’s all for. For the past two weeks, I’ve had this sticky-note stuck to my wallet that blotchily reads “In awe of the universe, one develops a detachment to life” which was some muck of a thought that surfaced when I was on the brink of falling asleep one night, causing me to grope for a pen in the dark. It’s not at all as dramatic as it sounds, in fact, it’s the apathetic air about it that renders the gravity of the meaning. All life has evolved from the constraints of purely physical laws and given the right conditions, this phenomenon of life will proceed to occur — we, these entropy-facilitating mechanisms have no choice but stir to life.

And it’s fascinating. We’ve created such a wondrously crazy system here that has little to do, and even blatantly ignores the existence of the rest of the Universe — those sprawling fringes of infinity. Nobody told me when I was kid that I was just stardust or anything and that every carbon within me has suffered the cosmic violence of a supernova (picture an explosion in deep space; there’s something almost poetic about it). Instead, I obediently memorized the multiplication table.  We are decorous, and dutifully, we more or less pursue respectable jobs, marry, have kids and the whole shindig, which essentially boils down to a cycle of small rituals, predetermined by repetition, falling unspoken and uncontemplated into their places. Our manners are a history of civilization. It’s utterly irrelevant that the Andromeda galaxy is scheduled to collide with our own in 3 billion years. Down here in this enterprise on Earth, pragmatism triumphs and beautifully, it’s the source of our humanity. We are ballooning with desire and memory, are moved by the color of the pounding tides, a familiar scent…

So what exactly does this have anything to do with art?

Possibly — probably everything. The most compelling art forms allow us to come to terms with these fundamental spatial and temporal truths, looming overcast in the peripheries of thought. Shadow-like and operating at quiet plane of conscience, profound arts remind us of the fabric and texture of our humanity; it humbles us, as does the sheer, utterly magnificent magnitude of the universe.

Art allows us to begin to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Admittedly, there have been days when I just want to be an amoeba for the sake of simplicity.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.