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Across the world, near the cradle of civilization, we are bombing our enemies
back to the Stone Age, creating a season of rubble.
But the ground in this Northern California region is confettied with red and yellow leaves. The dusk burns with trees. Bach plays on the radio—"Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring." Having passed through generations, our wish for transcendence floats on the air.
Humans have always been awed by the magnificence around us and paid homage through the arts. Music like Bach's proves that we are capable, at times, of feeling our connection to all that is.
Ironically, scientists and philosophers suggest that it is a tension between being and nothingness that holds atoms and solar systems together; enables storms and birdsong; allows the ocean and the leaf and the human to bear witness. All of creation asks Hamlet's question, and, as creatures, we answer with unique patterns of existence. Within the abiding whole is the requirement to separate from it, to form a singular identity. It is natural law and a dilemma.
Obeying the rule of identity, our cells are armed and barricaded, ready to destroy anything on the other side of the bunker. The rule reverberates in our lives and cultures. We define our differences in detail, drawing boundaries everywhere and defending them.
I worry that we are trapped inside this structure, stunted and doomed; we’ve surrendered again to an art form practiced since the first caveman raised a club against another, seeing him as separate.
Some humans were moved to dance by the arc of the jetliner mirrored in the World
Trade Center's wall. There were cheers in parts of the globe at the spray of
color and debris as it hit. Now, the patterns dust and fire create on night's
black canvas enthrall newsmen and bombardiers, grandmothers and school children.
And somewhere, a Golom-minded biochemist smiles at red spirals of bacteria swirling
in his petri dish like galaxies, like paints on a palette.
I've heard that there are artists who paint images on the bombs we are dropping in Afghanistan. I see them in my mind's eye applying color. Someone told me that after the bombs explode, bits of shell casings remain for the enlightenment of survivors, as they clear away their dead.
While we perfect the craft of destruction, what will happen to our capacity for transformation?
In his recent book, Genome, Matt Ridley discusses a gene technically named TP53. It is also called the "Guardian Angel of the Genome" because, without it, cells multiply endlessly, disregarding their effect on the rest of the body and finally causing its demise. TP53 seems to "...encode for the greater good..." by inducing cells to stop before they go too far. The process is called apoptosis, a word from the Greek expression for the fall of autumn leaves. We all carry its wisdom within us.
On these November streets, the trees are the color of flame, of agent orange, of napalm. Their leaves fly like embers, fall to asphalt. Walnuts and acorns lie among them, shell casings open, waiting. Instead of death, they hold the coding for a new generation, and the lessons learned by all those preceding it.
I want to believe in the potential these represent, in a genome with a guardian angel. I want to believe that Bach's music echoes a code we are learning to follow; that bomb art is nowhere near the best my species can do.
back to: Literary Arts
Home Literary Arts Visual Arts About Zephyr Contact Graphic Version
Mendocino College Online Journal of the Arts - Spring 2002 Text Version
Mendocino College
1000 Hensley Creek Road
Ukiah, California 95482