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Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground, Kathe Kollwitz, 1942.21
Carmen's Cosmology
"I want to hear that story again. Please Carmen." Frank peered intently at the tiny pile of grey dust gathering on the table in front of him.
"But Frank, I've told it three times this week," Carmen looked up from her notes, her brow suddenly furrowing. "Frank, what are you doing?"
Frank was painstakingly scraping away with his penknife at two sticks of black and white chalk, which he held clamped between thumb and forefinger.
"Frank?"
"I found these near the drawings on the footpath," he said by way of simple explanation, "I thought the lost colours might be hidden inside."
Carmen let out a long sigh. Sometimes it was difficult to keep focussed with Frank around. Nevertheless she pondered this proposition. Obviously the thief had stolen the coloured chalks and left behind black and white ones. That had been her assumption. Why? What Frank seemed to be suggesting was that he (or she) had stolen the colour itself. A solution to the mystery so close at hand – nestled within the only material evidence located so far? She knew well enough by now not to ignore Frank's intuitions. On the other hand, there seemed to be forces at work in this case which went way beyond what might be uncovered in the crumbling sticks of chalk – a powerful sense of something that sent a shiver down her spine.
"I think we might have to go further afield on this one, Frank. Dig a little deeper."
Frank continued his scraping unperturbed. "Tell me the story Carmen." Carmen sighed again. What this story had to do with the case they were working on she couldn't fathom. But there was nothing for it. You couldn't argue with Frank.
" . . . In the beginning there was a bang, (or so it's said by some) and energy and matter began to spread, outwards from the source of this extraordinary explosion. And as that energy and matter spread, particles were attracted to one another in various ways and began to coalesce, began forming into bodies of various kinds which continued to expand outward in relation to one another. And these bodies were, in turn, attracted to – or repelled by – each other and coalesced in one way and another, forming alliances in this expanding universe. Gases and burning stars and planets and asteroids. And on these bodies other kinds of bodies formed. And on it went.
Eventually, as we know, one of these coalescings resulted in the forming of our ancestral selves. On we wandered for some hundreds of thousands of years, growing and developing in relation to everything we encountered as we traversed the landscape of our world. Many important changes happened during this time, many, many important changes. If we described even a few of them in a fashion that did them justice, this story would become way too long to tell.
To get to the nub of things we need to jump ahead a little to the time when human beings, our ancestral selves, developed what some now call extended consciousness.
(This was a point in Carmen's story where, in the past, many listeners had begun scowling at her and adjusting their posture to alleviate some mysterious discomfort. She glanced at Frank and was relieved to see that he seemed quite relaxed.)
What was it that we were doing, needing, moving towards, that we required that new faculty? What was happening in the world and in the cosmos? What, if anything, might the world have needed of us?
Setting all those questions aside for the moment, though they are important and we should think about them later, we have reached the crucial point in our story where human beings, the ancestors of you and me, have developed biologically and awakened. Awakened to a new way of experiencing the world. We are now differentiated within our social groupings, separated from our brethren and aware of self – our bodies in relation to the universe.
Along with this awareness of the self comes the knowledge of the enormity of the universe, our relation to it, our stature in it, our vulnerability and our mortality. Along with that burden of knowledge we have become conscious of our own consciousness, our own capacity for thought and our own capacity to observe our emotions and our thought processes in action. We know we are alive, we know we are awake; we know we think, we know there is the potential for pleasure and for pain, and we know that we will die. In all this we are alone. For the first time not part of an organic communal whole, but a separate entity. No other being can know about directly, or share what is happening within our bodies, within our minds. Experiences, thoughts, emotions, feelings, flooding through a body separated for all time from others.
How could we possibly live with that?
Well we couldn't, could we, without some help. Extended consciousness would have no purpose whatsoever, other than as an endless torture, if we simply had to live with that. Awake to ourselves but with, as yet, no means at our disposal to share that knowledge with each other. Something had to happen to make it possible, not only to live with this extra slice of knowing, but to use it to help us flourish. Let's go back, then, and look at what has happened to us, where we have come from and where we have to go, what resources we have had at our disposal and what resources we now need.
Things have changed. We have changed somehow from being merely conscious animals – that is, animals aware of our surroundings, our spatiality, and our belongingness within a species. Before 'the change', we organically recognised 'our own' as indivisible, our bodies part of a collective whole, feeling the hunger in our bellies, the drive for sex, the need for warmth and comfort (probably the need for love, relief from primal fear and physical pain) and responded to satisfy those feelings as they rose within us, experienced them as they were – as corporeal necessities, as paramount objectives, we nevertheless recognised this within the context of the pack, the herd, the tribe, as though we were its nose, its rump, its foot, its skin, and it was ours. Not only that, what was without also was within. The universe itself, the earth, the sky, the sea, the air we breathed. We felt it, smelt it, were "it" – slept and ate and worked and ran and mated within that collective space of our belonging. And then, for some inexplicable reason, something happened in our being and we 'woke up'. We turned around and we were 'other' than the rest. No longer joined, one unto the other and so to all. We had undergone the terrible mental severing from 'our-selves'.
Poor us. How awful. Now what are we to do? We are feeling all these feelings in an unfamiliar way. Hunger is no longer simply hunger, but is added to our memory of 'the severing' and magnified by the knowledge of what it means to lack, that the absence of food and shelter and sex and comfort equals death. And death now, is a frightening thing. The severing eternal. Therefore, hunger equals pain. Pain and loss and insecurity. We can still go out and search for food to still our hunger pangs or satisfy our thirst, or find a mate and die the little death, but we search aware, aware that we might fail and that our failure might mean the end for us.
Here we are then wandering in the wilderness of selfhood.
What comes to us as we are wandering in this wilderness of thoughts and feelings? As we work away at the business of surviving feeling lonely and uncertain for the first time in our existence? What happens as we go about our business casting sidelong glances at our fellows, wondering what is happening inside their bodies and in their heads, wondering what feelings plague them and if their feelings and anxieties and fears bear any resemblance whatsoever to our own. What happens is that we begin to want to share these troubling thoughts and feelings that are plaguing us. We could point to where the pain is, to where the 'feelings' are and moan a little – or a lot – press a fist into our stomachs or put our head into our hands and weep. Not enough though, is it, to share the feeling of how terrible it is to know? Which is not to say that the 'others' haven't noticed, because they have. They are staring at us curiously and wrinkling up their brows. They are sharing in the 'expression' of our anguish right enough, as confused and anxious about the way we look as we are about how we feel – but no closer to an understanding of what's behind it all.
If only there was something out here in the world that was 'like' enough to show, to let another see what was happening inside.
Let the 'show' go on we say. What show is this? The showing of the 'like enough', the 'as if it were', that will help us understand each other. We are thinking in whatever way we can, with whatever images that we have within us, "This is the only way", and we are heartened by that thought, all of a sudden the burden feels a little lighter. We are comforted, excited even, by the idea that the 'like enoughs' and the 'as if it weres' can really help us to explain all this that we have carried on our own. How energising, how uplifting! So we set about with all our might to search them out, these things that symbolise, these communicable images, to search them out and pin them down, to bed them in, to bring them into being. And then to make them 'work' for us, to have them universalised amongst us, recognised. The sounds, the movement, the images that bring out amongst us all those things that could, otherwise, not be shared.
But hold on! What was it that allowed us to pull all these symbols together to make meanings to be shared, to put one mark beside another, or one movement of our bodies with another, to make pictures of ideas – a visual language – or combine one sound with another in an endlessly evolving patterning of spoken language . . ."
"The chalks," Frank answers emphatically, "all the coloured chalks!" He pauses, smudging a streak of grey across his upper lip, "Carmen ... do you think ... could the universe just be God thinking?" Carmen knew she was not expected to answer.
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