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We are overdue. Long overdue. For some sort of great breakthrough, some sort of unfathomable shift, a great cosmological ideagasm that rearranges our perspectives and b***h-slaps our dogma and makes the church wince and recoil and scream out its denial even as it slowly melts away, leaving only a black hat and a broom and a puddle of slimy green goo.
Yes, we are ripe. It's way past time for something to smack us out of our wicked human solipsism, out of our vicious infighting about religion and land and oil and which portion of hot barely habitable dust-choked earth God tossed aside for his most favoritest people and which he just shrugged off and let devolve into, you know, Orange County.
Do you feel it? Do you sense the overarching need, the spiritual craving, the pregnant sensation that something's gotta give and it's either going to be gorgeous and unexpected and something so profound that it causes everyone on the planet to suddenly stop in the middle of the street at the same moment and take a deep breath and go, Oh yeah, that's the real meaning of it all, or spin off into WWIII or a great global-warmed cataclysm that will send us back to the caves, bleeding and broken and yanking each other around by the hair and saying dammit dammit dammit, we were so close?
Just look. In the early days of science and human evolution, the major discoveries, the radical breakthroughs that changed our fundamental way of life seemed to come at us hot and thick. Fire. The wheel. The Gregorian calendar. The printing press. The Earth not being flat. The Earth not being at the center of the universe. Space not being made up of some sort of evil black liquid. Telescopes. Stars waving and saying hi. And then the church freaks out. People are all, like, whoa.
Then, rocketry. Relativity. Thermodynamics. Electromagnetism. Splitting the atom. Indoor plumbing. Modern medicine. Paper clips. Galaxies showing up much farther away than anything we can comprehend. Female nipples declared a national menace. Learning that we are hurling around the sun at roughly 67,000 miles per hour but because there is no air in space we do not feel like a tiny yapping dog with its head stuck out the window of a speeding SUV, even though we very much are. Also, thong underwear.
But now, we seem to be stuck. We seem to be at some sort of cosmological standstill, a weird and nervous holding pattern. Yes, discoveries are still coming at us all the time: quantum theory and string theory and dark matter, new planets and mineral deposits on Mars and cloning your dead cat. We've got Viagra and we've cured a few diseases even as we've created a few more. All well and good.
But it seems nothing has really hit us in the past millennia to really rattle our collective foundations, upheave all perceptions, shake us to the core and make us rethink everything. I don't mean the Internet. I don't mean fantastical ideas about colonizing Mars and I don't mean the slow, painful "discovery" of global warming and I don't mean finally figuring out that processed food will, in fact, kill you dead.
I mean a true revelation. I mean someone coming along and declaring the equivalent that the Earth is not flat, that the stars are not merely a few hundred miles away, that we are not alone. And then holding up proof. Pictures. A YouTube video. Here, check this out, it's a deep-space alien. She's waving, smiling, holding flowers. Except those aren't flowers. They're galaxies. Cool.
I do not know exactly what this revelation could be, but I do know it will have nothing to do with Jesus. Or rather, if it does, it's that we find Jesus' perfectly mummified body somewhere in Japan and he's wearing a sari and a Buddha necklace and has Egyptian hieroglyphs tattooed on his thighs, and there are no nail marks on his hands and by the way, he's a she, and she has a long tail and two hearts and three eyes made of diamonds and stardust and sex.
But you know what? Even that won't be enough.
Perhaps we will finally decipher dolphinspeak (or they will finally allow us to), and we'll discover that they've been waiting for us to evolve but can't wait any longer and must take their leave so, you know, so long, and thanks for all the fish.
Perhaps it will be the translation of whale song, which turns out to be the meaning of Pi, which in turn translates into irrefutable evidence that it was, in fact, the whales themselves who helped build the Great Pyramids. "Ahhh," we will finally say. "Of course."
Is it the discovery that giant deep-sea octopi control the light switches to the stars? That trees have consciousness? That we can levitate at will? That parallel universes exist and you can see them if you strip down and lube up and swallow just the right kind of mushrooms? Nah, too easy.
I have a friend who thinks it will be some sort of massive transformative global mind-meld, a moment when every human on the planet directs his/her thoughts toward the exact same hot transcendental notion, and the collective energy of this supercharged spiritual thought-bomb will instantly snap the thin membrane of this reality and we will suddenly be hurled to a new dimension, free of God and Coca-Cola and Motrin and Jessica Simpson. Could be, could be.
Maybe you disagree. Maybe you argue that, when it comes to great discoveries that shift our entire realities, we are now experiencing a law of diminishing returns. We have moved from macro (Galileo, Newton, Kepler, et al.) to micro (quantum physics, nanotech, artificial intelligence, etc.). Hence, while the great discoveries of today are powerful and profound, they simply cannot contain the shocking power and radical, society-exploding power of, say, the Enlightenment. Of the discovery of the basic laws of physics. It's the equivalent of saying there can never be another Beatles because the unique forces that came together to create that exhausting phenom will never line up the same way again.
Or you can easily argue that we are discovering shocking new wonders every day but we have merely lost the ability to be surprised, that given our media and our movies and our terrific level of sad jaded ennui, nothing short of giant amorphous aliens landing here in v****a-shaped spacecraft and declaring the disastrous experiment over and ushering everyone back into the jar would shake us from our intellectual and spiritual lethargy.
Hell, maybe the big revelation is upon us right now, softly licking our foreheads and just waiting to catch hold. Maybe some radical scientist is waving around her life-altering discovery and trying to get the world's attention and we're just too damn busy doing the laundry and shuffling our iPod playlists and counting bodies in Iraq to notice. Very possible.
But I am not quite convinced. I am sitting here, believing in something more. Bigger than a bread box, wider than God, funnier than Newton's apple, more deeply titillating than quantumstringthermoparallelology. The bad news: It might indeed be precipitated by WWIII, or global warming, or the complete failure of God. The good news: It does not have to be. (by Mark Morford)
 Lady Sickness · Mon Sep 11, 2006 @ 08:03pm · 0 Comments |
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