by Guy Murchie
Yet I find abstraction so importantly mysterious that it almost unavoidably falls into place as the first of the Seven Mysteries of Life this book is about. The usual definitions term it unreal, visionary, theoretical, intangible and abstruse despite its being the very stuff our world is made of, the ubiquitous mortar that keeps it together, the vital spark that makes it alive. The evidence is seemingly everywhere in the sky, in the sea, in the incredible numbers of our fellow creatures living unseen, unintroduced around us. Did you know that a shovelful of ordinary soil contains a microbe population greater than that of mankind? And that, if the Milky Way were reduced to the size of Earth, our planet would vanish into a mote of dust too small to see. It makes one wonder whether there is any inherent realness to anything. Whether seemingly dissimilar things like a flight of stairs, a flight of birds and a flight of fancy are basically much different.
Although the world must always have been abstract, it was probably impossible for its inhabitants to realize this until language had matured to the point of articulating abstract concepts. For this reason it seems unlikely that even such a gifted people as the ancient Egyptians could have really understood abstraction because their speech had not evolved beyond visual terms. This is shown by their writing which consists only of pictograms representing the material things they saw around them. But the Greeks, with their more subtle language, really broke through to the hidden profundities of existence. Have you read of the famous discourse between Leucippus and Democritos as they walked the beach of Abdera in Thrace in the fifth century B.C., debating the nature of matter? Logically, they concluded, there has to be a limit somewhere to the subdivision of grains of sand or drops of water, because, if any matter could be divided and divided forever, the various sizes would be so utterly relative that no particle would be distinguishable from a world. By that abstract reasoning, without ever seeing the microcosm, they conceived the "partless part": the atom.
Yet the questions about matter still go on. And on. Does any grain or atom really need to be distinguished from a world? From a universe? Whose voice in this earthly node of flesh can declare with authority that our universe is not an atom of some unknowably larger megaverse outside it? And what atom anywhere has been prohibited from having a microverse inside it? Furthermore is there any evidence that relativity does not pervade all dimensions, even transcending finitude so that ultimately space and time and self unravel into some sort of Infinitude ... for Ever... ?
WHAT'S IN AN EGG
"In the beginning was the Word." Something abstract. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." So said the apostle John as abstraction turned into matter and matter into life - as all three were one and of the essence of the world, and of its rocks and seas, its dreams and seeds and eggs.
If you've never thought of an egg as particularly abstract, may I say there are depths to the egg far beyond the nest, the brooder or the omelet? Would you believe that a common bird's egg contains a song neatly tucked away in chemical notation and packed into its genes? That it also has detailed instructions for nest building, a menu, a compass and a clock, a map of stars?
If such an egg cargo seems fanciful, please know that although long, painstaking, expensive research went into establishment of the facts, the list is far from complete. In the 1950s in Freiburg, Germany, for one example, a research ornithologist named E. G. F. Sauer took about a hundred warblers' eggs of several species that fly at night and are known to migrate in autumn from northern Europe to southern Africa and experimented to find out if the birds might be learning celestial navigation from their parents or other environmental sources. He hatched the eggs one spring in separate, soundproof boxes and raised the chicks in complete isolation so they never knew the existence of other birds, the sun, moon or the stars until fully grown. Then, when it came time for the fall migration, he noticed the birds grew restless and he initiated them to the outside world by putting them into cages through which they could see the clear night sky, the while observing them very closely. Although they could not escape, they obviously wanted to fly and Sauer was excited when he noticed that they consistently aligned their heads and bodies in the correct direction of their migration routes, neglecting to do so only when clouds or some other cover made the stars invisible.
Next he placed them, one by one, in a special planetarium so that each bird could see only artificial stars while being monitored by a trained observer from below who recorded the exact direction in which the bird headed while fluttering its wings and trying to fly. And Sauer was delighted to find that the birds responded to the planetarium's tiny lights exactly as if they were real stars, the garden warblers instinctively heading "southwest" toward "Spain, Morocco and West Africa" and the lesser whitethroats "southeast" toward "Greece, Egypt and East Africa" just as their respective ancestors had done for millions of years. He checked all his birds in this way and even gave them course problems to test their navigation senses. For example, he confronted some of them with a starry sky that looked exactly as it would have looked at that moment if they had been in Siberia, to which they reacted by heading westward to get back on course. Then he arranged the sky to look as if they were in America and again saw them turn to get back on course, this time eastward, both responses confirming the birds' extraordinary navigation instinct.
Of course it was an instinct almost certainly inherited through some sort of species memory of the patterns of the "fixed" stars imprinted in the cells of the visual areas of the birds' brains and handed down for millions of generations through the genes in the egg. You may wonder, since the stars are not really fixed but rather drifting continuously about on their remote and inscrutable orbits, how the birds' genes could keep up with their motions. But just remember that the stars are so remote their apparent motions are extremely slow and that genes, like other body parts, metabolize and change, and they would only need to adjust slightly in a thousand generations to enable their host birds to recognize the star constellations, even as men today still see the belt and sword of Orion essentially as did Aristarchos in the third century B.C. Thus when the migrating warbler sees Cassiopeia's
Chair overhead of a September evening, he feels not only reassured by the familiar pattern but impelled to head southward toward the beckoning Square of Pegasus. And his happens to be a dynamic memory, incorporating and compensating for the clocklike rotation of the sky (relative to the turning earth) as he feels the instinctive urge to veer more and more to the left of Pegasus (at the rate of 15° every hour) as the night wears on - an inner genetic drive that somehow pervades his mind and body straight out of the egg, a drive geared to the rolling planet of which he is in very truth a part.
Eggs also talk to each other and to their mother (page 143), hatching plans to hatch and, if you consider the question "Which came first: the hen or the egg?" as classic and unanswerable, you should be interested in the egg's answer, proclaiming itself the winner by half a billion years! Yes, the egg has existed on Earth at least several hundred million years while the hen has been here only fifty million. And the difference between them is also the difference between mortality and immortality, as we will see (page 510) in our chapter on transcendence.
As the egg's single cell divides, multiplies and grows into a multicelledorganism, consciousness is presumed to develop along with it.
Consciousness implies an appreciable awareness (and control) of matter, an interaction involving both the developing body and the emerging mind that is at once abstract and close to the quick of life. Indeed the fact that you can move your legs and walk, or your tongue and talk, makes you alive. And so does the fact that you can control the engine and wings and tail of your airplane when you fly. You may object that the airplane is not really alive because it is not a natural organism but only man-made and artificial. But I reply that so is a bird's nest artificial for it is bird-made and not strictly a part of the bird's body (although the know-how of its making is inherited through the genes in the egg). And so
too is coral artificial in the sense that it is made (or excreted) by the coral polyps. And so is the oyster's shell built of, calcareous substances out of the sea. And so also are the shells of birds' eggs and a bird's feathers made of things the bird eats. And so are even your teeth and bones and your fingernails and hair, in fact your whole body. There is no definite line, you see, where artificiality begins. And there is no absolute boundary between life and the world. Your shoes are about as much a part of you as a horse's hoofs are of a horse, even though you can change them easier. After all, hoofs are trimmed and changed too when the horse is reshod, just as hair can be cut or dyed and nearly any organ in your body replaced with either an organic or inorganic substitute. So your consciousness makes the automobile alive in essence when you drive it and thus extends your will and senses out into its steering system, engine, instruments and devices. Just as your house is your shell and your coat your pelt, in effect, so does your consciousness form your aura of personal life, and whether your mind expresses itself through natural or artificial muscles and limbs doesn't make much difference. Even a robot would be alive if it had some sort of consciousness in the computer that controlled it. Of course that hardly seems possible in this early stage of earthly culture when we do not yet have any real understanding of the nature of consciousness.
THE ABSTRACT BODY
When it comes to the nature of the physical body, on the other hand, it appears the very opposite of abstract at first. But I think anyone would find ample reason to change his mind when he had had time to ponder the deeper significance of the very common elements that are there.
I remember reading half a century ago about some chemist who added up the chemical value of the material in an average man to a sum total of 98 cents. In 1963, probably due to research and inflation, the value had risen to $34.54 and today, I suppose, it would be well over $100. Still the ingredients seem ordinary enough when listed (as one investigator did) in the form of an inventory for a country store: water sufficient to fill a ten-gallon keg, enough fat for seven bars of soap, carbon for 9000 "lead" pencils, phosphorus-for 220 matches, magnesium for one dose of salts, iron enough to forge a nail, lime to whitewash a chicken coop, sulfur to purge a dog of fleas.
The reason a living body can be made of such everyday stuff of course is that it is complex and flowing and the stuff is not really the body but only what passes through it, borrowed in the same sense that an ocean wave borrows the water it sweeps over. If one could ignore the dimension of time, a body or a wave would naturally be much more material than it is, less abstract and more concrete, for at any instant it is obviously made of the atoms and molecules that then compose it. But as time takes effect and the wave moves on, leaving bubbles, foam and water behind it, it proves itself less and less material. In fact science knows a wave to be made not of matter at all but purely of energy, which is an abstraction. That is why a wave (made of moving air and wheat) will move at the speed of the wind across a wheat field without carrying with it a single blade of wheat. That is why a church bell will appear unchanged in the belfry after centuries of ringing out waves of music. And that is also why a living body will remain about the same in weight as waves of metabolism flow through it year in and year out.
What then, I ask, is a body made of? At any given moment it is made of the world, for there is no fixed borderline between you and your surround - yet, reflecting on it at length and in the full context of time, the body progressively becomes as abstract as a melody - a melody one may with reason call the melody of life. Does such an answer surprise you? A surprise it certainly was to me when the idea first entered my head. For, although I had intuitively assumed life itself abstract, the physical body had always seemed simply material and I did not see how it could be otherwise. Then I tried to define the physical boundaries of the body and began to realize they are virtually indefinable, for the air around any air-breathing creature from a weed to a whale is obviously a vital part of it even while it is also part of other creatures. The atmosphere in fact binds together all life on Earth, including life in the deep sea, which "breathes" oxygen (and some air) constantly. And the water of the sea is another of life's common denominators noticeable in the salty flavor of our blood, sweat and tears, as are the solid Earth and its molecules present in our protoplasm compounded of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a dozen lesser elements.
Yes, life as a whole breathes and owns the common sky and drinks the mutual rain and we are all embodied in the sea and the clouds and in fire and forest and earth alike. As the God of Egypt was quoted as saying about the year 2000 B.C., "I made the four winds that every man might breathe thereof like his fellow in his time ... ." And thus, He might have added, I made sure that all life mingles and shares the most vital elements. Indeed oxygen (then unknowable to man) is the leading substance of life as it is presently known, making up some 60 percent of the weight of the human body, surging and blowing through it in the rhythmic torrent that Sir Charles Sherrington called "a draft of something invisible" to fuel life's flame. It is plain to see that we all breathe the same sky and we are becoming aware that it pours through our lungs and blood in a few minutes, then out again to mix and refresh itself in the world. But it is still easy to overlook the completeness of airy suffusion throughout the planet, so easy in fact that I would like to offer a few quantitative statistics to point up some of the significances.
Did you know the average breath you breathe contains about 10 sextillion atoms, a number which, as you may remember, can be written in modern notation as 1022? And, since the entire atmosphere of Earth is voluminous enough to hold about the same number of breaths, each breath turns out, like man himself, to be about midway in size between an atom and the world - mathematically speaking, 1022 atoms in each of 1022 breaths multiplying to a total of I044 atoms of air blowing around the planet. This means of course that each time you inhale you are drawing into yourself an average of about one atom from each of the breaths contained in the whole sky. Also every time you exhale you are sending back the same average of an atom to each of these breaths, as is every other living person, and this exchange, repeated twenty thousand times a day by some four billion people, has the surprising consequence that each breath you breathe must contain a quadrillion (1015) atoms breathed by the rest of mankind within the past few weeks and more than a million atoms breathed personally sometime by each and any person on Earth.
The rate of molecular mixing and diffusion in the sky is an obvious factor in such a calculation and so is the net speed of the wind under normal atmospheric turbulence, which is dramatically revealed by the accompanying world map plotting the tracks of six random parcels of air followed by free-floating radio balloons in 1964, the air circulating
around the earth in from about a week to a month, the period no doubt varying with latitude, altitude, season and other factors. With such information you can more easily accept the fact that your next breath will include a million odd atoms of oxygen and nitrogen once breathed by Pythagoras, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, Columbus, Einstein or anyone you can think of, including a lot from the Chinese in China within a fortnight, from bushmen in South Africa, Eskimos in Greenland ... And, going on to animals, you may add a few million molecules from the mighty blowings of the whale that swallowed Jonah, from the snorts of Muhammad's white mare, from the restive raven that Noah sent forth from the ark. Then to the vegetable kingdom, including exhalations from the bo tree under which Buddha heard the Word of God, from the ancient cycads bent by wallowing dinosaurs in 150 million B.C. And don't forget the swamps themselves and the ancient seas where atoms are liquid and more numerous, and the solid Earth where they are more numerous still, the gases, liquids and solids in these mediums all circulating their atoms and molecules at their natural rates, interchanging, evaporating, condensing and diffusing them in a complex global metabolism.
While the sky thus breezes through our bodies in a few minutes and the rain filters through us in a day or two, our sol
id parts, such as bones, change more slowly, taking a couple of months to renew themselves, as I noticed a few years ago when recuperating from a broken leg. Nerve cells are slower still to metabolize, certainly a lot slower than bone. Yet practically all of our material selves is replaced within a year - actually excreted, barbered, manicured or just washed, evaporated and sloughed off while new living protoplasm unobtrusively replaces it.
To back up such a statement, I will mention that Dr. Paul C. Aebersold of the Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center has reported that his radioisotope tracings of the numerous chemicals continuously entering and leaving the body have convinced him that about 98 percent of all the 1028 atoms in the average human are replaced annually. "Bones are quite dynamic," he declared, their crystals continually dissolving and reforming. The stomach's lining replaces itself every five days, skin wear and tear is completely retreaded in about a month, and you get a new liver every six weeks. As for how long it takes to replace every last neuron, the toughest sinew of collagen and the most stubborn atom of iron in hemoglobin, all of which are notoriously reluctant to yield their places to substitutes, it may well take years. But there ought to be some limit to this stalling of the final few holdouts and my late friend, Donald Hatch Andrews, professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, who seems to have given the matter long consideration, put it at about five years, after which one can presumably consider one's physical body completely new down to the very last atom.
