CHAPTER 26

Dear Grasshopper,

A debate exists in evolutionary biology between two camps that shows the limits of a non-metaphysical view of reality. On one side is Dawkins, the Darwinist, who says universal altruism makes no sense in the accidental realm of selfish genes, yet he cannot account for how it is such a concept should persist in an imagination born of blind and cutthroat chaos. On the other side is Lovelock, who, through his ‘Gaia Theory’, sees the harmonious balances in nature as being collectively self-directed while simultaneously leaving its respective participants to fend for themselves in an indifferent food chain. The problem is not that one view is true and the other is false, but that our world-ordering logic has created yet one more duality (selfishness versus altruism) to deny us objectivity.

In truth, Lovelock’s principle has merit, though as a “science” it has few facts on the ground to support it, much like the giant who is too large to get under a microscope but is nevertheless appreciated for providing shade at picnics. As for Dawkins, fifteen billion years of random evolution could never spell out all the works contained in the Library of Congress with dead leaves in a fast moving river current. Such blind faith in the happy accidents of irrationality, like the hopeful belief chimpanzees could type out the plays of Shakespeare if given enough time and good typewriters, hovers somewhere between willful delusion and religiosity by another more disingenuous name.

Biology is seductively self-consistent at face value, but scientists have been trying for decades to create life using some combination of simple chemicals and heat in a test tube; yet all they can cook up are amino acids. Something is missing in their “dreamt-of” philosophy. Something not accounted for in the afterthought we call “end-in-itself” experience.

Schopenhauer pointed out that science errs in failing to acknowledge the ‘in medias res’ nature of reality, and how all-possible explanations trail off into infinity. With its finitude-as-explanation mindset, science, as a one-stop shop, is the dog that endlessly chases its tail without ever owning the ethereal ground upon which it circles in vain. The profession as a whole lends itself to blinkeredness, with many scientists laboring under the bureaucrat’s faith that where one set of unanswerable questions leaves off in one field it is picked up without interruption in the next. Resultantly, the reduction to absurdity is never fully grasped.

More to the heart of the matter, scientific reductivists assume the inherent ontological state of things to simply “be” what they “are” and “do” what they “will” requires no suppositions before single cell organisms and no explanations after random adaptation. The whole world, then, can be reasonably deduced from blind energy and dumb luck. Buildings logically follow from bricks, and it is in tidying up the job site where we will discover not only how bricks became their own bricklayers but also why they should want to build anything at all. Reductivists, with the faith of the converted, write such difficulties off as being the domain of yet to be discovered scientific law. But this leads one to incredulously ask: Why should blind laws conveniently favor order over chaos, especially given Chaos Theory prides itself on providing theorems that show chaos is not only inevitable, but determined? Complexity Theory has tried to find method in the madness, but has only turned up artful fractals, which naturally exhaust at the level of infinity. “The ghost in the machine,” to borrow Ryle’s phrase, is nowhere touched in any equation.

Kant pointed out that though my mind has a phenomenal ground of operation, my conscious willing is not itself phenomenal, nor do the discernable laws of physics it sets in motion determine it. Science preordains the path of a rock in the moment of my throwing, but not my choosing to throw or not to throw it. To argue complex algorithms determine my free acts, and that they can be intellectually understood to do so, is to make useful science into a theology of desperation. It is easier to believe in magic than it is to believe in a number-crunching alchemy that leaves so much out of every equation, like extra car parts in the driveway.

Einstein and Schrödinger, to their credit, saw metaphysics as indispensable to an understanding of total reality, but unfortunately in this information age, things that cannot be shown or talked about do not rise to the level of “information.” ~Omar

INFINITY

The Peek-a-boo Motel would be ten minutes by the main highway, but seeing celebrating students were still thick on the bypass, the motorist opted to take the old state road, which effectively doubled the distance. He took this road twice before with the photographer, though remembered there being more road signs. A gas station blazed ahead over cornstalks, and as Michael turned onto its lot an old red and white Cady ambulance peeled off. A store employee chased after the vehicle, recklessly waving a pistol in the air. It was too late to reconsider the turn, so the traveler dodged toppled pumpkins from a stand to stop short of the pumps. He threw the station attendant a cautious smile, but it was doubtful he was seen for the headlights’ glare. Once the disgruntled fellow returned inside the station, Michael felt it safe to follow him in.

The young cashier rounded the counter, still huffing. He dropped his gun among scratch-off lotto tickets and sticky buns. “Damn college students!” he snarled. “The world’s going to hell and they’re out stealing pumpkins!” An AM radio blared next to the register, and he was quickly hunkered over it in rapt attention.

“What is it?” Michael inquired apprehensively.

The boy looked up in disbelief. “Haven’t you heard, mister? We’re under attack! Damn Martians have landed back east!”

“That’s Orson Welles,” the motorist explained. “This is a radio rebroadcast of his famous Halloween prank, the teleplay for The War of the Worlds.”

The attendant rolled his eyes. “I don’t know squat about pranks, but spaceships are dropping out of the sky like bird shit and I don’t get off work ‘til midnight!”

“Try another station.”

“There ain’t other stations.”

Michael realized the futility of his argument. “Am I on the right road to Eastfawn?”

“Follow the signs.”

But there were no signs, the driver thought to himself.

Returning to his idling car, he proceeded on his uncertain way.

After several miles of dark rural road, Michael encountered no further traffic, and was beginning to feel like he was on the Moon. The little used highway continued to narrow, and when the shoulders all but disappeared the driver feared the pavement would turn to gravel at any moment. Trees on the passenger side of the car became steadily uniformed in density and height, and after a couple of miles of the monotony it became downright creepy. The tree trunks formed an impregnable wall, with no roads cutting across them. It was possibly a cultivated boundary marking off private property, or a military facility. The traveler soon detected a defect ahead, and on reaching a conspicuous breach in the trees he had a place to pull off the road. He turned on his emergency blinkers and got out to investigate. A wedge of light just then broke through black cloud cover to the west, where a low red Sun (long thought to have set) illuminated a cornfield with portent. Hewed in the eerie glow, an ethereal grouping of cut trees was north and opposite the breach. They were stripped of their foliage and inexplicably heaped up in a skyscraping latticework, as though for a monumental bonfire. It was hard to gauge their distance on the horizon, whether they were sitting on it or, allowing for the curvature of the Earth, originating below it. The structure might have been new building construction going up in Chicago some forty miles away, but to see such a tower so high in the sky would require it being mind-bogglingly huge. The form was instantly twisting up to pierce clouds, with seeming struts distorting in the manner of a corkscrew Eiffel Tower or mechanical bird wing. The sky above it was insufficient to contain it, or even allow for it to be properly understood. The building (if this is what it was) was hardly connected to anything, like a dirigible floating by in snapshot increments. The sensation of seeing it reminded Michael of the first time he saw the Andromeda Galaxy in a pair of binoculars and realized the photons of light striking his corneas were many millions of years old. Was he witnessing some transpired cataclysmic event? The tip of the contraption gradually attenuated to become an imperceptible point, and appeared aimed, in holographic manner, to within inches of the man’s nose. When he moved sideways to evade the vertigo induced by it, the point moved with him. Queasy, and frightened, Michael circled his car to the cutaway; a clatter broke out overhead. Tree branches, black with squawking crows, rose up in the blood-tinged dusk to greet him; the hesitant explorer passed under their cursed portico.

Twilit in shadow, and lying a short distance in front of him, was his elusive train track. He approached it with more disorientation, thinking he was upon the tracks seconds before he actually was. The enormous rails came almost to his chin, and the ties were the size of split sequoias. The track was perfectly straight, though more to the point so was his depth of vision. It was a strange phenomenon, and, given the topography of the surrounding area, impossible. Dead leaves drifted down from above; the restless crows blew free in a shroud to let through more ebbing light. Michael watched the flock draw up into the funneling structure across the field.

“Are those birds?” he muttered.

Despite the crows’ departure, leaves continued to rustle; no wind was on hand to explain the disturbance. A tingly feeling began pushing up through the soles of Michael’s shoes. Alarmed, he placed his hand on the rail; it was warm, and getting warmer by the second, probably from friction down the line. A low rumble worked its way into his abdomen when the leaves commenced raining down in greater number. The terrified man saw nothing coming from either side, but something was definitely coming. A sound arose from the countryside, although the bellow was closer to a Baskerville hound than the wail of a train whistle. He turned eastward and traced out a form hugging the tracks, but it was like peering into a shimmering deep blue bottle, one whose tornadic movement resembled a crease working its way out of a rug. A backdraft tugged at his pants legs, even sucking air from his lungs. Time slipped too—film catching in a projector and then speeding up. Michael had no idea how long he had been standing there. He raised a foot—the ground now pounded against the bottom of it. Panicking, he pushed forward, or at least willed himself in that direction. The earth was rapidly losing solidity underneath him, and the vibrations were becoming so strong so fast he feared the molecules in his body would fly apart. Inconceivably he was back at the car and grabbing around its fender to reach the driver’s side. A bluish-black shadow fast approached over the treetops, although the man could have easily been glimpsing the interior of his skull given the violent tremors. He turned to the darkening north sky in time to see the building-like structure sharply etched in the last gleam of Sun. In an instance it resembled a scythe poised over rustling corn. With no time left, the driver fought to open the car door and slid as deliberately as he could into the front seat. For a moment he thought he was still outside the vehicle when he was inside. A blurred key was raised to the ignition; another time shift occurred. The Saturn was already heading down the highway, but proceeding sluggishly. As the inevitable encounter drew closer, it was impossible to tell whether or not the car was moving. Then, like a row of wobbly bowling pins, trees bowed outward along the black highway in front of him. Whatever was on the track displaced a massive amount of air. Snapped-off branches were spewed onto the pavement to catch in the car’s dimming headlights; it would be only by the grace of God if a tree did not topple to crush his small car. Instantly, a gentle, nearly imperceptible puff of air passed through Michael’s bones. A deaf-like silence preceded it, whereupon hushed scratching rushed in to fill the void. Thousands of leaves, and for as far as his feeble lights could reach, whirled high into the night sky to resemble a Ferris wheel. The motorist looked back over his shoulder to see the massive blue-black shadow hurling down the road. It reminded him of eyewitness accounts relating the experience of a solar eclipse in the mountains, where the blanketing shadow of the Moon was seen moving thousands of miles per hour across vast expanses of land. Tapping leaves, competing for his attention, scurried up his hood and windshield.

A large tree now blocked the road ahead, and beyond it—nothing.

He was at most a mile from his intended destination, but there were no lights of any kind on the horizon. A mile marker, pelted by mud and all but uprooted, swayed against the corn. The numb man climbed out of his car to better see it:

Stonesthrow 1 mile

Was the sign turned around in the wind?

Michael looked back at the car, and with a sense something just wandered off into the high grass and out of reach of his high beams. Lost to his shadow on the asphalt, he returned to the vehicle. The steering wheel was warm from hands—no doubt from his hands. He maneuvered the Saturn on the shoulder amid more blowing leaves. A white line emerged pointing the way back, and the only direction known to him.