Personal

Science blog is here.

Still breathing

The other day I was accused of excess concision. How odd.

Walk to coffee

2011.05.11

Morning, six o’clock, down to coffee, French Press, rambling conversation, rambling walk, the alley down from Islay, Laguna to Garden, through the gardens and park, talking about randomness, R.’s belief that nothing has greater influence on one’s life than the spouse we bind to; and yet the randomness of the people with whom we interact, who we meet, talk to, what the spark is, and why, and always as though why is knowable. Ascribable. We create explanations, compelling and thorough, but the underlying source remains out of reach of words, and will always be so, its nature impenetrable, unknowable, becoming visible as lived, one’s life the canvas and the painting.

I am reminded of cellular automata whose repeating patterns or stasis is most rapidly calculated by the automata itself, the full working out of all the parts and all the interactions the most economical expression. DNA, too, 98.5% or 99% is not genes, does not code for proteins, but regulates and regulates regulation. For ourselves, full expression in the life we lead, what we see and let in, the spaces we perceive, or enter, or walk from, or see only looking back, the parts of ourselves we see, or not. Small decisions, adaptations, that lead to ends that aren’t, couldn’t be visible from the start.
 
 
 
 
 

Wind, night

2011.04.29

The wind is blowing outside, the tops of the palms waving, the Canary Island pines across the street blowing tips. This afternoon I walked in the Botanical Garden. It was strange to me, after the fire, head-high yellow flowers crowding the path, a different path than I’d run hundreds of times, transfigured by fire and then a long, strong rainy season. When I emerged into the redwoods, order was restored, as redwoods are fire-adapted and in fact respond well to fire. At the end of the path there had been a sawn trunk, with the years marked off, dating back to the Norman Conquest, even before. It is gone now, turned fuel when the fire came into the canyon. Walking back, I stopped and took a couple pictures, two women, a couple, stylish for vacation, then another couple, a man and a woman, nestled under a great boulder, next to the natural stone slide that was invariably a provider of dirt for the kids’ clothes as they were growing up. For a while, I sat on a stone, being careful of my back, and listened to the stream. Some of the Chumash, who as slaves built the mission dam and aqueduct, had as distinct and idiosyncratic personalities as any historian’s favorite; but they were invisible men, at least to any who could have saved some scrap of them for us to, DNA-like, reconstruct. The women, too, are ghosts.

The stone of the aqueduct remains in places, but it’s only been a couple of hundred years, only one local earthquake serious enough to rearrange things. Drystone masons appreciate earthquakes, as they help settle the stones. In some part of the world good drystone lasts hundreds, or even thousands of years. The beautiful Inca drystone walls and buildings stand still. A now-submerged drystone wall system in Ireland carbon-dates to 3800 BC. The mission dam has been rebuilt, or so it appears, or perhaps merely repaired and adapted. My own work with stone is unskilled enough that lasting even my own lifetime seems unlikely.

It makes me think of the narrow and the broad pipes through which our genes cross generations. In the line of my parents, I’m the single reproducing offspring; yet fecund in children and already in grandchildren, the germ-line continues, that would have stopped. While the walls built centuries or even millennia ago remain though their makers’ names and hopes have long since disappeared, their seed may continue to this day. With mixing and crossing, I may have some tiny spark of the long-gone masons in me. I’d like to think that.
 
 
 
 
 

Nuages

4011.04.28

I did not know I was good with words when I was young. I still don’t know. Words seem like clouds, seen from above, indistinct, obscuring the landscape below. Words as smudged signposts, decayed, uncertain whether the earth has softened, or that the sign points the way it did when it was planted, or whether it pointed the right way when it was new.

Of course those are tired metaphors. I’d like to come up with something new, startling, fresh — partly to foolishly show off, just like a human, but more because of the elegance of an elegant metaphor that at the same time both illuminates and disguises its own content.

Words are starlings, abrupt shifts of direction, individual birds vanishing into the flock in the moment of being seen.
 
 
 
 
 

Exchange

Me: “I’m going to a tuba recital this afternoon.”
Friend: “I’m sure there must be a good reason.”