Words to Ink

These words are the beginning of the final sentence of Darwin's immortal On the Origin of Species. Darwin has had a lager impact on my life than any other scientist. Despite my first love of astronomy and physics, with Einstein and quantum mechanics overthrowing the classical world, Darwin's theory of evolution and its implications have directed more of the twists and turns of my life: everything from my first glimpse of religious fundamentalism, to my leaving the church, to my decision to go to grad school.

Evolution connects the present to the distant past in a single, unbroken chain of mothers, fathers, and children, a chain that runs through all the theological cracks I tried to cement over for years. No soul or anthropocentrism or supernatural explanation surviveswe are simply the stuff of the universe my friends, separated from the muck only by the subtle differences between mother and daughter multiplied across the ages. But this, this is grandeur. No snap of godly fingers or Word spoken into the void can compete with supernova remnants slowly becoming aware of the universe into which they exploded, then turning around and measuring the warmth of space left over from the Big Bang itself.

Darwin's words have been a rallying cry to me. The minutes that make up our lives have become more precious as the result of natural law than they were as a gift from a loving God. Making a difference in the here and now has become more important, not less, justice more urgent, the stars more beautiful. Grandeur indeed.

The sentence comes from Wendell Berry's poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and is already tattooed on my left shoulder in a typewriter font from Southside Tattoo in Austin. I left Christianity more than a decade ago, but I've often returned to Berry during the intervening years. His Christianity and his conservatism are among the few that I find myself still respecting. He strikes me as someone who takes his Truth and his poetry and faces head-on the messy storm of reality, but instead of blindly holding on to just this or that, he comes away humbled—changed but quietly so, not angered or deflated, just wiser, slyer.

You should read the whole poem, but plant sequoias means to do small things now for which you won't be around to reap the benefits. One small disappointment of growing up came when I realized writing a book won't change the world—especially any book I write. These days, I look for the actions whose interest will compound. Little differences add up. I used to want a place to stand and lever with which I could move the world (my first blog was called Fulcrum). But now, I realize the world doesn't need moving, or rather, the best each of us can do is nudge the freight train of history a little this way or that. We can plant seeds, inspire some minds, organize for local legislation, use data to uncover the hidden patterns and, perhaps, hidden solutions to social and economic inequities. But there are no answers to questions, only complicated problems with tricky solutions and cost-benefit trade offs that need to be considered carefully—less sexy but infinitely more practical. And so in all the things I am and do—fatherhood, data analysis, neighbor, husband—I hope that I am planting sequoias.

From both the short story and the film adaptation, the closing lines of A River Runs Through It have long been seared into my memory. The film, combined with two amazing AP teachers and a little Dead Poets, convinced me to start my undergrad years as an English major. I wanted to write and teach literature at a university, opening the minds of young people to the wonder of language. I was enamored with the power of words, how language can simultaneously be a confining cage and the means to break free, tools with which one can build all the knowledge in the universe or pen a verse to communicate the ineffable.

A River Runs Through It is mostly a quiet film—no dramatic inciting incident, no real climax except perhaps when Paul, as played by Brad Pitt, emerges from the cold Big Black Foot with his prize trout. The entire film is a celebration of the simple story: a family, a new love, the beauty of Montana, fly fishing, and the flow of poetry and narration. Paul is such a fascinating character to me. He's so full love and joy, he knows the people in his life through and through, down to guessing that the drunk, self-important future brother-in-law is going to show up with a red Hills Bros Coffee can filled with worms to a fly fishing trip. He never dreams of leaving Montana, not needing the highbrow poetry education of Dartmouth that his brother seeks out, content to be a newspaper man in a nearby town. Even as he's troubled by a gambling problem and its associated debt, Paul never ceases to be the light in the room. To quote Paul's father toward the end, I really do just find him, and the entire film, beautiful.

Here's the quote in full:

As the Voyager I spacecraft approached the edge of our solar system in 1989, it opened its lens back towards home and took a picture of earth across the emptiness. The resulting image was named Pale Blue Dot. You can see the earth as a small blue-white pixel in the middle of the brightest beam. This is the farthest picture we have of us, the most perspective, the widest angle, 3.7 billion miles away. The quote is from Carl Sagan, who was the impetus behind the picture being taken and wrote a book by the same name. Seeing the earth from above has a documented effect on those few souls fortunate enough to have flown so high. Dubbed the overview effect, astronauts have experienced a “cognitive shift” from seeing the finitude and fragility of the earth suspended in the vast nothingness of space. Until Elon calls me up and offers me a lift, Sagan's reflection is probably as close as I'll get to experiencing it.

I find this passage often produces a tension in me between the infinite and infinitesimal, between the feeling that every single conflict is a waste of time—a petty, shortsighted distraction from what should be the ultimate hope and aim and glory of humanity—and the feeling that, since this little mote is all we have, it is everything—every struggle for justice and peace is worth fighting, every life saved a priceless investment in the stock of the world. This earth, this life, is, at least for now, the entirety of our existence, the only thing that could possibly matter. And yet, in the grand scheme of the universe, we are the faintest and most fleeting of blips.

Mostly though, I come away with a sense of community, of oneness, of eagerness to make a damn difference. There's no where for us to go, no cosmic justice or savior coming to set the world right. This little, tumbling blue ball is our one shot.

Ed Mitchell was an Apollo 14 astronaut who walked on the surface of the moon. He describes what it was like to look at the earth rising over the lunar landscape:

These are the closing lines of the film American History X. The words are adapted from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address given on the eve of the Civil War.

The film is heavy, incredibly violent, tragic, and gut-wrenching. It tells two stories in parallel: the first is the fall and reformation of a white supremacist named Derek; the second is Derek's attempt to rescue his younger brother Danny from that world of hate after Derek is released from the prison term that changed him. Derek is played by Edward Norton, and his performance is masterful. I watched it for the first time during my freshman year at Texas and walked around in a daze for the whole week after. It stays with you, burned on your heart and your eyelids. I haven't watched it in years, and I still feel those same feelings as I write these words and remember certain scenes.

I grew up in an almost completely white part of southwest Austin. There were never any underhanded comments about black people in our house, just an overall absence of black people in my neighborhood and in my school. I also didn't really know any overt racists. I knew there were genuinely prejudiced and hateful people out there, but the family and the Catholicism in which I was raised emphasized our shared bonds of humanity and belonging and our duty to love one another. This is all to say that, as a young man, I was largely separated from both the lived experience of black people in this country and from the rhetoric and hate of white supremacists. To see them clash on the screen for the first time was startling.

So much as happened since then, from Treyvon Martin to George Floyd and all the black lives that matter in between. I've learned about how systems can create and calcify asymmetric binaries, how the categories we use to carve up our world are never wholly innocent, knowledge never completely divorced from the knowers and the means of production which produced them. I've read James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Cotes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Michelle Alexander. My heart is heavy with the knowledge of all that I do not know, but I am more conscious now of the ways in which I participate in the systems which produced and continuously reproduce the inequalities in our society, and I'm troubled and often disheartened by the amount of work that still needs to be done.

But I still must hope for peace, for transcendence. I don't know what that looks like exactly, but it must be there, somewhere in the future of the human, somewhere above us from where we will gaze down on the smallness surrounding us now and be able to trace all the little differences that added up to revealing, finally, the better angels of our nature.

In aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche introduces his notion of the eternal return. This often gets misconstrued as an actual ontological claim, but Nietzsche isn't positing a theory about how the afterlife works; he's giving us some perspective:

Imagine you are going about your normal drudge of a day when you are suddenly confronted by a terrible demon. This demon condemns you to live your life over again, eternally repeated, exactly as it happened, with every mistake left unfixed and every joy and pain relived, over and over again. How would you respond, Nietzsche asks,

This moment is the most precious that exists for the simple reason that it is the _only_ moment that exists, and for it be just as it is, all the moments before must have unfolded just so. _That_ is an affirmation of life, of now, of this. The current moment might not be a pleasant one—it could be filled with sorrow, or regret, or suffering—but it is all there is, and I mean that not in a melancholic sense but in a magestic sense. Sam Harris has a line he uses in some of his daily guided meditations once he brings you to a similar realization, that this moment is everything there is, "How can everything, not be enough?"

Nietzsche's work is so often occluded by his Nazi sister. To me, this one aphorism encapsulates his thought better than any other. Throw off the moralism and guilt of original sin, grasp this moment with both hands and see that is good. This full accounting and acceptance of ourselves and the power of self-creation and actualization that this acceptance brings, this is the true hope and aspiration of humanity. The Übermensch resides in each of us, in this tremendous moment, waiting to be realized, to be released!

I think I first heard these words from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran at a friend's wedding in Tallahassee. It was at a Unitarian Universalist church, and I remember that it was the first time I agreed with an entire sermon in years. The pastor laughed when I told her.

This one is difficult to summarize in a short little post like this since it basically encompasses my entire marriage. Growing up in the Catholic church, the togetherness, the "two made one" aspect of marriage was always the most emphasized. I imagine this is true in more conservative circles as well, with the roles of each person in the new family unit more defined and prescribed. The passage on marriage from The Prophet, however, emphasizes the separateness, the individuality of each partner. Just following the quote above, the passage continues,

This feels so human, so real, to me. When Agata and I were dating, we read a memoir called _A Severe Mercy_ about a young non-religious couple, Sheldon and Davy, who become Christian together, but then she dies of cancer and he must put the pieces of his life and faith back together. I didn't identify much with the book except for the second chapter, "The Shining Barrier." The Sheldon and Davy decide to erect a "shining barrier" between them and what they called "creeping separateness", a barrier made to protect their love through a kind of radical sharing. They feared losing their "inloveness", ceasing to do things together, and finding separate interests. Each must learn to like the things the other likes, "in the name of sharing."

Even writing those words now seems strange to me, but at the time when we were young and in love, this all resonated with us. Perhaps due to my turn to atheism, or our marriage now having been aged for 10 years, or even due to a slow self-actualization that simmered in the background all these years, the Shining Barrier feels like it was meant to confine rather than protect.

The paradox of marriage is beautiful, a trinitarian duality, one equals two which equal one, but the two are as necessary as the one. My marriage with Agata has grown into something truly extraordinary, and (not "but") we are each our own. The solution to creeping separateness isn't an erasure of all space between, but a celebration of each other's alterity, the very separateness that makes us other. As the passage concludes,

When I was young, my father had a certain discipline tool he would use when us kids would get in fights: the peace bench. The offending children would have to sit together on the porch swing, quietly, for a certain amount of time. Then, when he'd come to talk to us, each one was only allowed to say what he or she had done to contribute to the argument. This was probably difficult for my siblings, since I'm sure I started most tiffs those days, but they weren't allowed to say that the whole problem was just me being a jerk.

Both my parents read the work of a Jesuit priest from India named Anthony de Mello. De Mello brought much from the Buddhist tradition to his Catholicism. He collected stories, parables, and witticisms from all over the world, and wove them together in wonderful books that tried to get at God somewhat sideways, through hints and glimpses caught out of the corner of your eye. As I got older and began to read him too, de Mello grew to be one of my primary spiritual teachers. As I write about elsewhere, de Mello was where I found a way to articulate the life and morality to which I aspired, which the above quote begins to articulate.

The nature of rain is the same. It falls where, when, and how it may, with no thought spared for what's beneath it. We can't change the world as it rushes to meet us in the ever-shifting present: sounds will impress themselves upon our eardrums, light will enter our eyes, and thoughts will bubble up from...somewhere. But perhaps we still have some say over our little plot of earth. Like soil teeming and rich with the stuff of life, we can soak up the downpour and turn it into something flowering, healthy, and beautiful. But if our little garden is dry, cracked, left untended, the water may erode away, running off with nothing to hold it down, flooding the land around us, leaving only weeds and thorns tough enough to latch on to what's left behind.

The quote can be found in Awareness: Conversations with the Masters. De Mello died suddenly in 1987. Not long before, he gave a retreat which was fortunately recorded, and Awareness is a reworked transcript of this retreat. Regardless of your level of religiosity, I promise you'll find something enlightening in his words. You can find more information about and recordings of de Mello here.