18.

My Invisibilities Are Bigger
Than Your Invisibilities

After 5,000 years of recorded history, things are looking pretty good here in the old sand box. We’ve got Google, the Prius, and Diet Sprite.

Sure, there are problems—Microsoft, George W. Bush, and Heidi Klum (among others), but there’ll always be problems. It’s the way of the world, yes?

When it comes to manipulating matter, we’ve gotten pretty good and getting better so fast it’s hard to keep up unless you spend hours on the Internet every day with only an occasional break for a glance at the old TV (so 20th-century!).

Whence comes our increasingly clever mastery of stuff? Mostly it arises from our tippy-toe immersion in those aspects of the universe which lie beyond our sensory ken, what to generations of humans was invisible, and therefore non-existent.

Radio, TV, radar, etc. The whole electromagnetic spectrum which nobody 200 years ago could’ve guessed at is now our playground, a huge energy-matrix jungle-gym on which we perform all manner of entertaining and at times even somewhat enlightening tricks.

Of course, given our violent bent, some of the tricks turn out to be less than constructive (30,000 nuclear warheads, tons of biological and chemical weapons, gross depletion of natural resources, and a general assault on the eco-balance of the planet), but such is the way of the world, yes?

Hubris, another of our bents which except for dramatists, novelists, and artists we pretty much go out of our way to avoid thinking a lot about, continues to provide convenient cover for lesser minds. Once upon a time it was the religionists who held pride-filled sway. Now, alas, it is the scientists. For all the differences between the two groups, they both use the same mantra and motto: "Our way or the highway."

In other words, accept the orthodoxy or be branded a heretic.

Used to be that meant that meant, oh, say the strappado and possibly the rack, topped off by a toasty burning at the stake.

Now, a refusal to believe correctly just means loss of grants and relegation to the Outer Darkness of the blogosphere.

Still, if you for a good while carefully contemplate the world-picture that present orthodox science has painted for us (from quantum theory to string theory, from Darwin to DNA), and if you then try to keep that picture in mind while also contemplating the reality the world presents to us (still!) whenever we turn off our gadgets, you are eventually struck by the rather large gap between the two.

Examples? Oh, they do abound:
At this moment all of us are busy growing fingernails. How? Why?
Every night all of us calmly disappear (and experience strange worlds called "dreams") and then reappear the next morning. How? Why?
We like to fuck a lot and often, which frequently results in rough duplicates of the fucker and fuckee. How? Why?
Or how about the problem of scale? From nano (way down below the proton) to macro (way way beyond the solar system), no problem. Given that we are tiny ants on a tiny planet on the edge of a tiny galaxy, we can each of us in our own mind somehow manage to imagine that whole impossible range of scales. How? Why?
Most troubling of all, today I can remember imagining it yesterday. How? Why?

You get the point. The gap between the world as experienced and the world as described by every orthodoxy (religious, scientific, or philosophical, it doesn’t matter) is enormous.

We don’t live with daily, secondly awareness of the gap for two reasons. One, it’s hard to get on with life if you dwell too much on the gap. Two, those with a vested interest in the orthodoxy are very clever at papering over the gap (we understand ALMOST everything and it’s just a matter of time till we’ve got it all).

Those who deny the greater invisibilities do so, finally, out of fear. To admit the inadmissible would create such mental static their narrow and tightly bounded work in the world could no longer, they fear, go forward.

The truth of the matter is that we’ve, with a certain kindergarten cleverness, sort of mastered only one wee corner of the world’s invisibilities, where "wee" is the important word.

Wee we can give out Nobel Prizes from now till kingdom come, but the paradoxical fact remains: My invisibilities are always bigger than yours, and yours are always bigger than mine. And together? Alas, my rich, powerful, and lauded friend, together they are minuscule compared to That Which Is.

The Peaks of Otter continues >>

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