The Other Side

     Don't worry, this is not going to be another salt-in-the-wound post about the blue wave that flowed over the country with the midterms.  By now, you've probably read or heard enough about people voting their dissatisfaction and hoping for some sort of change or relief (and the results were indeed a relief to many).  But no, this will be about something completely different.  And if it may seem that this post may occasionally be all over the place, swirling as randomly as a gust of wind, it probably is, mirroring the thoughts in my head.  Yesterday we put our cat to sleep.  He was the one who was such a snuggle-bug and a love-bug that we named him Bugsy (actually, he got his name because he was rescued from a dumping area behind an apartment, one which was filled with what we think were straw-itch bugs,* the worst sort of no-see-ums ever).  Bugsy's nose cancer had come back after six years of being relatively dormant and his breathing was now a steady wheeze that sounded as if it would eventually force him to struggle for air.  Still, most animal owners know that cats and dogs seem to hide pain far better that us humans who sort of moan at every little ache, so we knew that by the time our cat reached a point of struggling to breathe, we would have waited far too long.  It was still a difficult decision, our Bugsy still bright-eyed and eating like a horse, still sitting on my lap as we watched TV, and still sleeping nose-to-nose with my wife each night.  But it got to the point where I could hear the wheezing, even as he slept next to my wife.  Gut-wrenching, as many of you know when you go through with such a decision, always wondering if you did the right thing or if you did it too early, even if by only a week or so.  And no matter how much love and caring and time you've given (and often paid countless medical bills) you still harbor a tinge of guilt that you could've (should've) done more...spent more time with them, not ignored them so many times, played with them instead of watching some stupid TV show.  It's the same story, told by many and told throughout the world.  And it seems to always end with: that's it, no more cats/dogs, never again, can't go through this another time.  Yet somehow, an animal arrives unexpectedly and there you are, not really ready to forget, but slowly softening up enough to bring that same love and caring to another life, especially a rescue.  If only we could treat humans in the same manner...

      Anyway, somehow this timing with Bugsy coincided with a book list that came from Scottish writer Cal Flyn, her latest book (on order from my library) dealing with her visiting remote corners of the world and writing about how we have made wilderness, those truly remote and pristine areas, so difficult to find.  In her list, she recommended such books as Fathoms (by Rebecca Giggs), The Light Eaters (by Zoë Schlanger), Dart (of which she wrote, "I recommend this book to someone about once a week"), and others.  But her recommendations were captivating.  Here's what she wrote about Fathoms: Elegantly interweaving natural history, science writing, philosophy, and cultural criticism, this contemplaive book concerns the lives and impact of our cetacean cousins.  Factual, yet as haunting as any fiction, Giggs does what I'm looking for in a writer.  She makes me look at the world anew.  When she listed The Light Eaters, she wrote: A work of soulful science writing, The Light Eaters brings together many recent, confounding botanical findings that raise provocative questions about the sentience of the vegetable world.  Intelligent and responsibly reported, but still wonderous and full of possibility.  And another recommended book (also ordered from the library), The Animals In That Country (Laura Jean McKay): McKay's novel is a mind-expanding work of speculative fiction in which an epidemic of "zooflu" allows people to suddenly hear the voices of animals.  This is not the cutesy, singsong world of Disney, but a deafening chorus of demands and unsettling declarations.  Hilarious, surprising, and disconcerting.  Quick note, McKay's book is published by Scribe which lists itself as this: Scribe Publications U.S. is located on ancestral and contemporary Indigenous land, home to the Dakota and other Native tribes.  Taken through the Treaty with the Sioux, the land holds great historical, spiritual, and personal significance for its original stewards.  We acknowledge Indigenous peoples as the past, present, and future.

Photo winner: Kelli Carter, NWF competition

     Throughout what was happening coupled with what I was reading, the commonality seemed to be that of energy, almost an energy we've yet to isolate or harness, or even understand.  Here's a quick excerpt from The Light Eaters: Azolla filiculoides, or just azolla for short, is one of the world's smallest ferns, and has grown in wet places for millennia...Roughly fifty million years ago, when the Earth was a much warmer place, azolla began growing over the Arctic Ocean in vast fern blankets.  For the next million years they absorbed so much CO2 that paleobotanists believe they played a crucial role in cooling the planet, and some researchers are looking into whether they could help do that again.  The azolla performs another miraculous trick still; some one hundred million years ago, it evolved a specialized pocket in its body to house a packet of cyanobacterium that fixes nitrogen.  The air around us is nearly 80 percent nitrogen, and every life form, including ours, needs it to manufacture nucleic acid, the building blocks of all life.  But in its atmospheric form, it's entirely out of our reach.  Nitrogen, nitrogen everywhere, and not a single molecule that we can use.  In a humbling twist, plants rely wholly upon bacteria that know how to recombine nitrogen into forms the plant --and all of us who get our nitrogen from plants-- can use.  And so azolla morphed itself into a hotel for this bacterium.  The tiny fern feeds the cyanobacteria the sugars it needs, and the cyanobacteria busy themselves with transforming nitrogen.  Farmers in China and Vietnam took note of this and have been grinding azolla into their rice paddies for centuries...ferns are much, much older evolutionarily than flowering plants.  They appeared on the scene even before evolution dreamed the concept of seeds...they reproduce using spores, not seeds.  But here's the kicker; they have swimming sperm...ferns compete with other ferns for resources by emitting a hormone that causes the sperm of neighboring fern species to slow down.  But scientists (and the author) have no idea how a fern knows that there are other ferns nearby, or how it times the hormonal release.  Then she added this about plants in general: A leaf, sensing that it has been nibbled, can produce a plume of airborne chemicals that tell a plant's more distant branches to activate their immune systems...Several species of plants have been found to identify a caterpillar's species by sensing the compounds in its saliva, and then synthesizing the exact compounds to summon its predator.

     I had read Fathoms some years ago, and wrote this about it (in an earlier post, one which ironically happened to be at a time when we had put down another of our cats): We come to whales to be drawn out into the world. and yet the un-peopled sea is also a state of mind -- and inner space.  Our smallness, set against this sublime sea, is connected to the notion that not all the thoughts within us are accessible, that there are thoughts, in some sense, exterior to the self.  Vast feelings that slide, beyond command, beneath the wakeful tending of our days.  The pleasure is that we are mysterious, even to ourselves.  The fabulist ocean, this inscrutable outer space whales return from, in a metaphorical sense, enchants us with our own inward enigmas.  Many throughout history have figured the sea analogous to the human consciousness...The question I am left with is: What will it mean for our inner lives --those of us who cannot disavow the ocean as a psychological motif-- if the twenty-first century sea turns out to be not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life?  How will we delight in a feeling of unboundedness, in the apparent limitlessness, the unknowable space of our unconscious, if the real ocean demolishes its symbolic history?  An emotional landscape, it turns out, can also begin to acidify.  Something hard to quantify, I suspect, disappears from the palette of human experience, from how we articulate our selfhood to one another, and from our relationship to our own private, inner depths, when we encounter evidence of the ocean's despoliation.

      Orion featured a reprint of a similarly reflective piece by Lidia Yuknavitch: We like to imagine --in our humanness-- waves as traveling water bodies.  But that isn’t quite accurate.  Waves are kinetic energy from vibrating water particles interacting through seawater.  The particles move perpendicularly back and forth to create energy, the water forms a circular motion in relation to the seafloor and wind, an orbital rotation is born.  The water itself doesn’t travel very far at all.  The wave is not a body of water.  Waves bear energy, not water, across the sea.  When we look out at waves coming toward us on the shore, we imagine they are coming to us.  We long for it, I think.  Sometimes I wonder if our longing is memory.  A desire to return to that breathable aquamarine past...When a wave crashes onto a shore, it is the outcome of the wave’s orbital motion being rearranged by the seafloor and sandbars.  When a wave moves through water, the surface water is not the only element that follows an orbital motion.  A column of water underneath it echoes the same motion.  You could say an imbalance occurs.  In shallows, near shore, the sand floor slows down and shortens the lower part of the wave.  The wave’s crest then reaches higher in your line of sight.  In that rolling motion, the imbalance in the wave --which is not water in motion, but energy-- comes to a breaking point.  The crest rises and falls, then crashes.  The energy is dissipated...Imagine a whale fall, a dead whale body sinking slowly to the ocean floor.  Now imagine an entire ecosystem forming around the carcass -- brilliant vesicomyid clams, polynoids, galatheid crabs, sea cucumbers, lobsters, giant isopods.  Or imagine a mighty Sitka spruce making its way from along a river to the sea, the sea carrying it over time, then bringing her body back to shore.  Sometimes the bodies of ancient dead Sitka spruce trees look to me like whale carcasses delivered to shore by water, their bleached gray-white branches reaching outward like giant ribs.  And in between the ribs, under the spine, salamanders and insects and arthropods thrive.  On their massive driftwood bodies, seagulls and snowy plovers, osprey and sandpipers, wood ducks and pelagic cormorants, eagles and turkey vultures rest, feast, leave feathers like stories we might tell if we could imagine our place in the story differently.  If we could imagine ourselves as small particle parts of a larger wave, instead of the center of the universe.

     Brian Wilson, in one of the few songs credited solely to him, seemed to ponder this missive,  the floating mystery of life, seeing life not as water flowing and moving like a river, but more like those eddies of energy that kept such forces where they were and simply moved us around, wooden pieces in a series of currents:  I'm a cork on the ocean, floating over the raging sea.  How deep is the ocean?  How deep is the ocean?  I lost my way, hey, hey, hey.  My wife and I have always believed in "something" after we --or anything, any life-- dies.  Call it a higher power, a consciousness, an energy form, a whatever.  And while we respect and honor any religious belief, even those mythological gods of old, we tend to feel that all of our beliefs are limited by our own understandings and limitations.  Indeed, we feel that a "force" that can hide enormous energy inside a tiny atom (think nuclear) or harbor life inside a tiny cell, is way, way, way beyond anything we can hope to comprehend.  But the key word is hope.  When we lose someone close to us --a parent or a sibling, a friend or heaven forbid, a child-- we hope that their life while here on this planet was a good one, and that selfishly we will perhaps reunite with them in another form.  We certainly wish that with our Bugsy.  And yet, perhaps we just return to energy and become part of that one-ness, a place where we reunite not with those we knew, but with everything, reforming and exploring new worlds and dimensions, an energy unable to be dampened or dissolved or destroyed.  

     Long ago I remember reading a book called The Mind's I, a series of stories trying to capture a few viewpoints, one of which had us born not with two eyes but with a single "eye" that allowed us to see all around us all the time...up, down, front, back.  The story asked how different our "view" of the world would be (the rest of our body, in the story, remained the same).  At the time, it added to my questioning of what came after life ended, or did it end, or did it even start?  We were here now, able to feel the heat of a burn or the poke of a splinter, to laugh and cry and love, to feel.  But were we?  Was all of this a grand illusion, a very temporary experiment when set against the time scale of the universe, with time and perhaps the universe itself just creations of our human minds?  It was similar to the Star Trek episode where the superbeing Q expresses to Captain Picard his odd experience of nearing the end of the day as a "trial human" and eventually closing his eyes and finding hours had passed, to which Picard rebuffs him like a child and told him simply, "you fell asleep."  But to energy or some form of it, how or why would you even understand the idea of sleep.  Energy doesn't "sleep" or dissipate, or lessen...it only reforms or returns.  It is something we cannot imagine.  It must.  It must.  It must.  Mustn't it?  And so here I sit, a human "being" also being rebuffed, not for not understanding sleep but for not being able to understand this concept of "reformation."  There may be no afterwards or afterlife, only a constant...but that, too, is beyond my understanding.

      I still don't understand how radio waves can "see" through fog (radar), or how sound waves can "see" through water (sonar).  But for those of you who do, you likely know that such waves have limitations, and limits.  So picture what Prya Darshni and her fellow engineers, Arthur Dogariu and Paul Franzon, have created: an "antenna" that looks a lot like a lightsaber, one which "occupies zero physical volume when inactive, completely eliminating mechanical deployment risks.”   As mentioned in Discover: What if it were possible to build a radio antenna that could be tuned to any length or angle you needed, without requiring extra space or tricky finagling to get an accurate reception?...It's at once highly technical and surprisingly straightforward: using a laser of a specific power and diameter, the team ionized a thin strip of air, turning it into a beam —or “filament”— of plasma.  Through this process, the electrons in the air are pushed out to the edge of the plasma, just a nudge away from producing electromagnetic radiation.  The final ingredient is a contactless antenna feed, which gets close enough to provide that last nudge without breaking the filament.  At that point, “the EM wave can be transported using these electrons,” the researchers explained in the study. “In other words, the LIPF is capable of radiating EM waves like a typical antenna.”  It's beyond me, just as is the discovery of a new "super" form of magnetism.  As most of us know (well, not me) there are those stick-to-metal ferromagnets, and their opposite antiferro-magnets (both are used in hard drives).  Now comes alter-magnets, wrote Scientific American, and their atoms not only spin 1000x faster than traditional magnets, but they lack a magnetic field (wait, what??).  The point of all of this was that even for scientists, just as we think we're close to knowing it "all," we find that we are actually right back at the beginning.  Imagine if you will, that Voyager 1, launched nearly 50 years ago, is only now nearing the completion of being a light DAY away from Earth...not a light YEAR, but a single day (our nearest star is over 4 light years away).  

     So our understanding, our comprehension, our imagination.  We can drift away and ponder and discover all we want, but none of this lessens the pain or tears or memory of losing people and pets you love.  Just as with our cat, we have watched their lives as if there would be no ending.  And yes, what were once 3-dimensional beings with hearts beating are now trapped in a 2-dimensional screen or a paper photo, that and a live-animation memory in our minds.  We are aware that they existed, just as we are aware that our own lives will soon cease as well.  But not really.  For despite age and aches & pains, none of us feel that our end-time is today or tomorrow.  Perhaps is it only as Melissa Kirsch expressed, that we brumate.  Here's what she expressed in her column in the NY Times about the season of fall quickly shifting over to winter, and with it our bodies demanding not salads and tropical drinks, but casseroles and soups and hot teas: If we want to indulge in the pleasure of indoor coziness without totally going to sleep, we might take inspiration from the wintertime behavior of coldblooded animals.  Where woodchucks and bats hibernate, reptiles and amphibians brumate.  Brumation also involves bodily functions’ slowing down to conserve energy.  But brumating animals don’t go totally unconscious:  A lizard might emerge on warm days to bask in the sun.  A snake might have a drink of water.  “The most important distinction between brumation and hibernation is awareness,” is how a website that sells enclosures for reptiles explains it.  “A hibernating animal is in a deep, continuous sleep and generally doesn’t wake until the season changes.  A brumating reptile remains somewhat aware and responsive to their surroundings.”  What does it look like to remain aware and responsive as fall seeps into winter?  It’s questioning the cues:  Do I feel like staying in because it’s restorative, or am I shutting down early just because the sun did?  It’s continuing to participate in the splendor of the world even if it’s icy outside.  If you have a tendency to go dark in the colder months, might I suggest acting a little more reptilian this year?  We might slow down when winter comes, we might feel most comfortable in our own tree hollows, but we remain aware — aware of the way our energy and appetites shift as the light does; aware of the world inside and outside our hibernacula; aware that this winter, like all winters, is still a season of our lives that we don’t want to miss.

     "Observation has its own traps," said Professor Phil Starks at Tufts University.  As he told The Conversation:. Sometimes you can miss behavior because it blends into the background.  Other times you see something perfectly but stop asking questions because somebody has already told you what it means...The opposite mistake is just as easy: seeing something interesting and immediately deciding you understand it.  And if all of "this" is real, what about our digital lives?  What happens to that life when we die, asked The Conversation, a life we "created" and made a part of us?  So I end not with understanding but with not knowing.  I trust that my cat, and those others who have passed, have been here for a reason, whether it was to learn or to teach...or both.  But at this point, I find only an empty feeling that my cat has passed.  Perhaps he is only hibernating in a different form.  But I hope that he had had a wonderful journey and time while here, exactly how I would feel if I passed away this instant.  Not everyone or everything has been, or will be, so fortunate; but again, that is not something for me to understand.  Life's differences and inequalities are there and have existed and perhaps will always exist, even if it may only be my mind imagining that.  We are misfits in the universe, as author Lidia Yuknavich said in her Ted Talk, all of us.  And it's a wonderful thing...but perhaps something that only each of us can understand.

                      

*Here's how South Dakota State University described those dang, almost invisible bugs (slightly edited on my part): Straw itch mites, also known as hay mites or grain mites (Pyemotes tritici) are approximately 0.2 mm long and are recognized as being nearly microscopic.  They show up in hay or grain when a pest infestation is present, and when we enter infested areas, the mites attempt to feed on us...Bites from straw itch mites are most common on the abdomen, back and forearms but can appear on any part of the body that was exposed.  Typically, there are numerous bites that will develop welts on the skin that itch intensely.  For individuals who are sensitized, or are extensively bitten, headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and asthma may develop.  In severe instances, chills, fever, malaise and anorexia may also develop.  Infection may develop if the bites are scratched open.  If you experience any of these symptoms after exposure to straw itch mites, seek medical attention.  If you've never dealt with these bugs, count your blessings.  My wife and I would bundle up in heavy winter clothes, inner layer, heavy zipped-up jacket, jeans, and a cap (in summer!) and still the bugs would penetrate.  Our shoulders or back or whatever area was "covered" would have welts that would itch like crazy for days on end.  And those mites are not alone.  Here's a quick list of a few other tiny biters, the ones that you never see but find yourself suddenly slapping at something and yelling, "oww, something just bit me."