Now We (Don't) Know Everything...

    The passing of my friend not long ago has thrown me off a bit; perhaps it was the timing of it, the expected-yet-unexpected date coming sooner than I thought.  Whatever.  I feel oddly alone and yet realize that this is probably how hundreds of thousands of people feel...their brother or uncle dying of Covid in a hospital room, their sister or friend being killed in a car accident or shooting, their baby or soon-to-be baby somehow not making it, their endless marriage now dissolved.  The world that was once so comfy is now splashing your face with a bucket of cold water.  This is reality.  This is how the world works.  Wake up because you have this moment and this moment only so enjoy it, enjoy being together, enjoy life itself.  

    I guess what happened to me is that I feel that a cog in my gear has broken off; things are still working but a bit off.  Ironically, before all of this happened,  I was breezily working away on a post of new discoveries, on how even things such as history can be shattered, or at least how we learned history.  Take Cleopatra who was apparently anything BUT the beautifully submissive woman portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor decades ago; said Discover:  She spoke many languages and was talented in all the ways expected of a male ruler.  According to the historian Sarah Pomeroy, she “rode horseback, hunted, and was at home on the battlefield.”  Plutarch attests to her cleverness and intellect, and William Shakespeare, in his play Antony and Cleopatra, followed that lead: “She is cunning past man’s thoughts,” the bard  writes.  We may never be sure of what Cleopatra looked like, but the basic facts of her life are clear...She wielded as much power as nearly anyone in the ancient Mediterranean and ruled over one of its greatest kingdoms.  When people ask whether Cleopatra was black, Hamer (cultural historian Mary Hamer) writes, “it seems understood that to answer in the affirmative might put the entire structure of Western civilization into question.”  It would mean that, at a pivotal moment in European (read: white and patriarchal) history, the political universe revolved around a black woman.  

   Hamer would later add:  “Why are we so obsessed with talking about whether she was attractive or not,” asks Egyptologist Sally-Ann Ashton, “when really we should be looking at her as a strong and influential ruler from 2,000 years ago?”  Indeed TJ Ellerbeck, one of the executives representing the Navajo Nation wrote:  A person isn’t solely defined by the candidate they cast a ballot for, and supporters of a diverse array of candidates –up and down the ballot– make up the rich fabric of this nation.  We cannot let the divide of this election further polarize us...we must include our neighbors that call rural and remote landscapes home.  We must include the Indigenous people that have called it home from time immemorial.  Going forward, we must find new language and new strategies to organize, start conversations, and build.    

    With all that happened at our Capitol and the FBI still capturing and charging new people that aided in the riot (yes, laptops and documents were taken from Congressional desks) --and the hopes of being pardoned gone as quickly as s former president-- our world somehow just, well, continues on for the rest of us.  Congress returns to deal with what they have to deal with, and my friend's wife and other close friends of hers will deal with what they have to deal with.  And for the rest of us, we need to gather our own feelings and thoughts about all that has happened.   So I'm going to throw in this story about a recent discovery of a new population of blue whales, one believed to have only now been "heard" after centuries of exploration, said Smithsonian.

    No big deal, you say?  Here's part of what the piece said: Stretching up to 110 feet and weighing up to 150 tons, blue whales swim through all of the world’s major oceans, with the exception of the Arctic.  These mammoth creatures produce intense, low frequency vocalizations that can travel more than 600 miles underwater, allowing them to communicate across vast distances.  And yet—in spite of their gargantuan size, wide distribution and loquaciousness—blue whales are elusive animals.  They spend little time at the surface of the water, for one, and their numbers have been severely depleted by past decades of whaling.  While blue whale songs have been “extensively studied,” only around a dozen distinct ditties have ever been documented, according to Katherine J. Wu of the New York Times.  The piece added that the blue what is "...the largest animal to ever live on the planet and one of the loudest."   

    So how can something so big and so loud escape our sensors, our "sophisticated" ultra-sensitive gauges of sound and heat and vision?  But then again, we are only now discovering vast civilizations buried directly beneath our feet, one example continuing to be from the penetrating LIDAR images of Angkor Wat.  It shouldn't surprise us, said assistant anthropology professor Allison Carter of the University of Oregon: ...Angkor was well-known across Asia and there’s quite a bit about it in the records...There are Portuguese and Spanish sources recording information on Cambodia and Angkor from the 16th century.  There is graffiti at Angkor Wat from visitors across Asia; a Japanese visitor to Angkor drew one of the first maps of Angkor Wat in the 17th century.  There was an Arabic stele found at the temple site of Phnom Bakheng also from the 17th century.  Angkor was not unknown.  Then there are the eels...

Moon over Northern Lights...Photo: Frank Forward

    It turns out that despite our best efforts, eels also continue to elude us.  For the most part, we don't even know where they breed (scientists have tried, even attaching sophisticated sensors to eels' bodies, but to date no data has ever been recorded).  They appear to dive to tremendous depths, and swim thousands of miles, often for 30 hours at a stretch; but a mating pair or even an eel giving birth has never been seen or recorded.  So where are the millions of eels, which appear each year, coming from?  In his Book of Eels, author Patrick Svensson wrote about the reproductive urge that comes at different times* in this manner (it may happen when the eel is 7 years old or when it is 30 years old): ...the eel's body adapts to the conditions of the journey.  Only now do its reproductive organs develop; its fins grow longer and more powerful to help propel it; its eyes grow larger and turn blue to help it see better in the depths of the ocean; its digestive system shuts down; its stomach dissolves -- from now on, all the energy it needs will be taken from existing fat reserves -- its body fills with roe or milt...(it) can live for up to four years without any nourishment at all.

    The mystery of eels is just one of many coming to light.  There are giant sand worms (polychaete worms, to be more precise), three-foot long worms straight out of Dune that reside in the ocean and shoot out of their burrows to capture unsuspecting fish; and they've been here far longer than we have, said National Geographic, fossilized evidence of them only now being discovered.  Or another story from Nat Geo was the recent analysis of one of the oldest rocks on Earth, and from Earth, only this rock was retrieved from the moon (the link will take you to a cool video of how our Earth was formed and how lucky we all are to simply be alive in this basically uninhabitable universe).  That rock is geologically recent --ancient to us-- but a youngster in the geologic age of the universe (if you need a reminder of HOW recent, here again is the "calendar" segment from National Geographic's remake of Cosmos).

    Writes author Svensson: To humans, the experience of time is inevitably tied to the process of aging, and aging follows a farily predictable chronological trajectory.  Humans don't undergo metamorphoses in the technical sense; we change but remain the same.  Overall, health can, of course, vary among individuals; we can suffer illness or injury, but generally speaking, we know roughly when to expect a new phase; our biological clock is now particularly flexible; we know when we are younger and when we grow older.  The eel, by contrast, becomes something else each time it transforms, and each stage of its life cycle can be drawn out or condensed depending on where it is and what the circumstances are.  Its aging seems tied to something other than time.  Does a creature like the eel even experience time as a process, or more like a state?  Does it, simply put, have a different way of measuring time?

    He goes on: Eels may not be immortal, but they almost are, and if we allow ourselves to anthropomorphize them slightly, we must inevitably ask ourselves how they handle having so much time.  Most people would say there's nothing worse than boredom,  Ennui and waiting are fiendishly hard to endure, and time is never as present and persistent as when we're bored.  One shudders at the mere thought of a hundred and fifty years at the bottom of a dark well, alone and practically in sensory deprivation.  When there are no events or experiences to distract us from time, it becomes a monster, something unbearable.  I imagine a hundred and fifty years alone in the dark as an endless, sleepless night.  The kind of night when you can feel each second being added to the one before...To the eel, things are, it would seem, different.  An animal probably doesn't experience tedium the same way humans do...Perhaps boredom doesn't make eels impatient.  But there's a different kind of impatience, which may be relevant.  It's the one we feel when we are forced to endure lack of fulfillment.  The impatience at being stopped from doing what you set out to do.

    I'll never know what thoughts went on in my friend's head, if he was bored to frustrated or depressed or just fed up with what his life had turned into.  Like the Covid cough that days later finds you on a ventilator, unable to express your thoughts and likely wondering if you will ever return to the life you had.  At those moments, and especially when death takes you or your mind convinces you that you'd be better off just "checking out," with or without a note...at those times, what thoughts are there?  For me, I won't ever grasp those thoughts of others and especially not my friend, that is I won't grasp them until those thoughts are mine, a time I'll likely look back and just wonder if I had spent my life wisely, if I had done more for others than for myself, if I had learned anything at all.

    Author Svensson must have had similar thoughts as he studied and wrote about eels: ...no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye: we are born with a home and a heritage and we do everything we can to free ourselves from this fate, and maybe we even succeed, but soon enough, we realize we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from, and if we can't get there, we're never really finished, and there we are, in the light of our sudden epiphany, feeling like we've lived our whole lives at the bottom of a dark well, with no idea who we really are, and then suddenly, one day, it's too late.

    To my good friend, wherever you are and however you are, may you have finally found yourself and found the peace that we mortals are all still searching for...

*His words tell of a few reproductive eels caught in the 1980s: ...varied significantly.  The youngest was only eight and the oldest fifty-seven.  They were all in the same developmental phase, the same relative age, if you will, and yet the oldest was seven times older than the youngest.  You have to ask yourself: How does a creature like that perceive time?