We Are Stardust

billion-year-old carbon vs. the ill-fitting Florsheim

⬆︎⬆︎ This essay was originally recorded LIVE on the This Is Hell! radio show/podcast. Visit the website for long form interviews, Rotten History, hangover cures, and more.

Joni in space (still living as of this writing, don’t worry), singing about the devil’s bargain we’re caught in

It’s a well-worn bromide in circles that care to understand science: the atoms in our bodies were forged in cosmic crucibles billions of years ago.

I come not to reiterate this bromide, but to rephrase, reframe, elaborate, and build on it in a prose poem reaching for the metaphysical.

Bear in mind we are the only life we know about in the whole enormous universe. It’s us animals, plants, jellies, and fungi, alone in a vast, effectively endless, darkness. As far as we know, it’s just us, just all of us, scrambling, swimming, slithering, and sprouting in busy organic animation in the thin envelope of atmosphere on this tiny blue speck in vast, infinite space.

Get the picture? The big picture? Okay, so now here’s the small picture:

You are definitely inhaling atoms that have been in the lungs of Genghis Khan. Atoms in you have been part of Rurik of Novgorod, Qin Shi Huang, King Taharqa, Luzia Woman, Xerxes, the very first human beings to walk in Africa, the Ancient Beringians, the Spear Danes, Paleo-Eskimos, Dorothy Lamour.

And those are just particles. Subatomic particles are quantum fluctuations in energy fields. It’s all energy, when you get down to it. And energy is never created or destroyed, it only transforms. So whatever energy was there at the beginning of the universe has always been here and always will be, previous singularity and eventual, inevitable cosmic heat death notwithstanding. That heat death will just be energy so spread out and in such inanimate equilibrium that things will stop happening. But that theoretical day lies in the far distant future. Don’t worry your complex little heads about it.

We know that the elements on Earth, from iron on down in atomic simplicity to hydrogen or at least helium, are from simple main sequence stars like our sun and similar stellar formations. I’ve written about the cosmic birth and death cycle of my hero, calcium (Ca), in an earlier piece. Heavier elements like gold, mercury, lead, and on up to the heavy unstables come from larger, denser, brighter, often shorter-lived phenomena including neutron stars and supernovae. Beyond that, those elements above atomic number 92 are mostly made by people and often disappear mere moments after their creation.

All are arrangements and forms of energy. Capeesh? You are energy in a very complex arrangement. You and all that swims, crawls, blooms, burrows, and flies on the Earth are very complex arrangements of energy. How did you get that way? What am I, Carl DeGrasse Feynman? All I have is the middling consciousness of a Rube Goldberg organism with severe limits on my perceptions and education and even more severe debilitations of mental power.

Consciousness. What a concept. The crazy thing is that the jury is out on whether consciousness is an arrangement of energy in itself or a byproduct of the dance of energy rearranging itself in your brain. Like, they really can’t figure it out. And if anyone tells you they’re sure one way or the other, they’re either the Buddha, in which case you are instructed by Zen masters to kill them, or a liar, in which case you should consult an authority with more impressive credentials.

keep a circumspect tongue in your head, Mr. Smartypants

In no case are you to put up with the arrogance of decisiveness on one side or the other of what is known as “the hard problem” of consciousness. At the very least, slapping the smug snob in the face with a mackerel, genuine or ersatz, is in order.

Scientists and alchemists alike can measure reactions to consciousness. The mammalian pulse speeding up or a burst of electrical excitation in a houseplant, living things and even some non-living things, down to protein molecules and smaller, up to the macroscopic universe itself, evince forms of consciousness that are both detectable and slippery to define.

Do amino acids learn how to link to form proteins? Is it instinct? Is it mere accident? It’s been calculated that if all the proteins on Earth were the result of random chemical trial and error, there wouldn’t be enough room in four iterations of our known universe to contain all the non-functional failures. We would run out of not just space but matter and energy before life could even begin. But that’s a theoretical notion, and one has to go along with a whole slew of playful conceits to understand it, let alone agree with it.

Playfulness is shaping up in scientific observations, not just artistic or purely conceptual ones, to look like a cosmic principle. Playfulness is probably a metaphor in this sense. Or is it?

Any vessel – let’s posit one made of porcelain – is bound to shatter sooner or later. A ceramic bowl. Let’s make it a red one. A dish for sauce in which to dip a dumpling. However well-taken-care-of, that bowl is highly unlikely to outlive the civilization in which it was sculpted. The potter who threw it will one day die, the kiln in which she fired it will crumble, the table at which the friends who used it during certain meals, that table will decay in a landfill or by the side of the road while the friends themselves will have gone their separate ways and transformed into playful bacteria, clouds, worms, and fiber in a mycorrhizal web.

the dipping bowl

And one day that bowl will chip. Later a force or heavy object will crush it, leading to its eventual disintegration into powder. And that powder will be washed or blown away.

So, where is the skill the potter had developed over years honing her craft? It went into many bowls, and many bowls into dust, but that energy isn’t destroyed. Where is the playfulness of the friend group around their dinner table? Where is the learned and innate sensitivity of the tongue of the chef who made the sauce in the bowl or the nimbleness of the fingers that folded the dumplings and scalloped their lips with the pressure of a chopstick’s tip?

Think back to when that energy was merely the expanding progenitor of heat and light and time and space. Think back to the moment energies pinched off into protons, electrons, and positrons, collided and fell out of creation only to manifest again in the bubbling Planck-scale foam that was the microdimensional mat on which reality would eventually grow its quasi-crystal web of time, space, radiation, and direction.

Remember back to our own solar nebula – it was only four billion years ago – and its planetary eddies, the orb of atoms and debris scattered in gas coming together in that fashion so counter to the direction of greatest entropy. As they crowded together in gravity’s funnel the energies between them heaped and grew to one pressure, balancing the inward collapse into plasma with heat and other energy forcing and worming its way out in a choreography of convection and leaping from the sun’s photosphere in electromagnetic fountain bursts.

And the dust and gas around it for four or five trillion miles in every direction, dust and gas forged in previous generations of stellar furnaces exploding and recoalescing, preparing all fluid, vapor, magma and storms that would enshroud the planets, both gaseous and rocky, would sculpt themselves from gas and gravity, dust and plasticity.

Upon our little planet, clumped around its nickel and iron core, would accumulate strata of crystals, fluids, and mists. Asteroids bringing ices and sodas would penetrate our clouds, punching craters into our surface wherein to collect oceanic and ground water and give it the balance of salts and acids perfect for incubating life.

Life formed in lakes and around geothermal vents. Tiny trembling transparent membranes containing the simplest organelles, clustering in conclaves of communicating protoplasm. Energy of creation and recombination went on to construct organisms of increasing complexity, again laughing in the face of entropy, as the energy of the young sun sang and wove and spun its way along pathways and arteries of creativity for creativity’s own sake.

We complex sentient animals are ourselves colonies of organisms, environmental collectives energetically entangled, convinced of purposes we’ve hypnotized ourselves into accepting, urged on by urgencies negotiated or extorted by the demands of colonies within our bodies and without.

What, after all, is identity? It’s an agreement between the pockets of cells within us and the other organisms outside us, cellular accumulations of their own, seeking to understand the definitions and limits of themselves, in various balances of equanimity and good will on one hand, and hostility, seeking safety in domination or exile on the other.

And we’re all destined to come to the exact same end as the red ceramic dipping sauce bowl: shattered, pulverized and powdered. Whatever energy the particles that once were ours are disposed to relinquish, relinquish it they will, toward some future organization, another living or stellar or mechanical or chemical organism bucking the entropic trend for a time, or the Tao of surrender to the coldly symmetrical entropy of waning radiation.

In that latter future, out we will coast, smoothing, relaxed, cold and even. Into the endless darkness.

But we have a small window in which to act within our present groping identities. And what will we do with that window of learning and creating? From my perspective, it’s not the time to succumb to dictatorial, ill-intentioned demands from a corrupt organism deformed by its own fear and hunger and mutilated, squelched imagination.

the ill-fitting Florsheim

I am familiar with many organisms, both strong and weak, who feel the same way I do, and we are communicating, as has been our tradition at least since the primordial incubation lakes were formed and formed us. Not even urged on by our defiance to the ugly, evil fiat of the thing hungry to rule us, but by the simple inclination for curiosity, exploring beauty and truth. That’s just the way things are, the way things go. We will not be crushed under the ill-fitting Florsheims of those who’ve taken up positions on the enemy lines. We will win because – in a slapped-together set-up, contrived to divide the world into winners and losers – that’s just the way things are and go.

and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden