This Fourth of July, celebrate the absurdity of human existence with a bang

However absurd life may seem at times, and certainly life and absurdity go hand in hand from our limitations as a human being to our precarious position in a universe that cares nothing for us, there’s always an excuse to party.

I’m certainly not the first one to comment on the absurdity of human existence.  Here I sit before a shining screen, translating my thoughts, which come from where I cannot say, into symbols whose origin is lost in the mist of history, hoping someone else finds, understands, and relates to them, somehow, in another process that is only vaguely understood.  The computer I type these posts on doesn’t know what these symbols are either.  Even the most advanced Artificial Intelligence has no idea what it’s saying.  Instead, everything is translated into a string of ones and zeros so long the human mind would consider it infinite for all practical purposes.  This endless string can then be broadcast onto the broader internet to join billions upon billions of other strings, some longer, some shorter, all out there in the the modern equivalent of the ether, ready to be pulled back to another computer (or other device) and translated into text, images, audio, video, whatever for human consumption.  Ironically for something so ephemeral, these strings can be made essentially immortal.  They exist across multiple copies on multiple servers, and can in principle be perfectly replicated until all the energy leaks from the universe.  The great works of all the artists of the past will crumble to dust.  Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks will fade and rot.  The Mona Lisa will peel and disintegrate.  The Sistine Chapel will be reduced to rubble.  This post might outlast them all.  While I write, another species sits on the opposite side of my desk, an aging coonhound named Lilly.  Elsewhere in the house, there’s another canine lounging somewhere, this one a greyhound.  There are other humans as well, going about their business as if there was nothing unusual going on.  The house itself seems solid, as if it will last a thousand years or more, and the ground and trees around us even more so, as if they were always here and always will be, but that is an illusion, a limitation of our ability to see time in action.  On a single day, we can see the wind through the grass, the sun through the sky, the stars in the night, and understand that we inhabit a world that moves around us.

The scope of this motion, however, is beyond our ability to either easily experience or understand.  Relativity prevents us from feeling any sense of motion at all because everything is moving at a constant velocity.  The planet is rotating on its axis, and revolving around the sun.  The sun is located on an arm of a nondescript spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, revolving around a central mass, possibly a black hole, as the galaxy itself moves through the cosmos, one of hundreds of billions of others drifting in the emptiness like snowflakes that never land.  There is nothing unique about our position, either individually or as a planet.  Indeed, I will be in a different position cosmologically speaking by the time I finish writing this sentence.  If I were to sit in this spot for a full day and do nothing, the Earth would have traveled some 1.6 million miles, whether or not I am aware of the extent of our journey together.  There would be other changes as well, though I would not likely notice them either.  The grass will have grown.  The wind would have torn off a few molecules from even the hardest rocks.  The stones in our patios, the artificial wood in our deck, the siding of our house, the roof, the chimney, all of it will have aged slightly, on its way to oblivion.  For the most part, however, we only notice the sudden changes, those where something is fundamentally different than the moment before.  Earlier this week, I was cooking dinner during a bad thunderstorm.  There was a flash of lightning outside the kitchen window, the boom of thunder far too close for comfort, then a sound like something exploded and a brief flash of orange and red overwhelming the blue-white of the electricity.  On the other side of the house, a tree had been struck by lightning, splitting the trunk where it first divided into branches.  The force of the strike blew out the inner portion of the tree, as though it had been intentionally cored, and the bark and bits of wood littered the yard for close to 50 yards around.  This is a change impossible to miss, but the tree itself was changing anyway, even if we couldn’t see it with our own eyes.

Thus, there is a limit to what the eyes can see.  We do not observe the outside world as it is, but rather as it is filtered through a complex network of lenses, receptors, and nerves.  We cannot even take in an object whole.  Instead, we have different receptors for color and motion, lines and angles, all of which are assembled on the fly by our brains in a process we do not fully understand.  The great thinker Leonardo da Vinci documented some of these limitations as early as the 15th century, noting that the representation of an object is not confined to a single point in our eyes, but is rather spread out across the entire retina.  “If all the images which come to the eye converged in a mathematical point, which is proved to be indivisible,” he wrote in one of his ubiquitous notebooks, “then all things in the universe would appear one and indivisible.” He continued, “The true outlines of opaque bodies are never seen with sharp precision.  This happens because the visual faculty does not occur in a point; it is diffused throughout the pupil [retina] of the eye.”  He also understood that much of what we see is based on shadows alone, writing “Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form.  The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.” It is a peculiarity of consciousness, one I have noted seems fundamental to its operation, that we perceive a coherent reality.  There are no pixels, gaps, or flaws, no objects that are incomplete unless obscured, no colors that are blank, no motion that is not smooth.  We cannot escape this cocoon of consciousness, and can only observe the limitations through careful experiment that pushes the boundaries of how our senses work.  Leonardo himself developed one such experiment using something as simple as a sewing needle.  “If you place a sewing needle in front of the pupil as near to the eye as possible, you will see that the perception of the object placed behind this needle at however great a distance will not be impeded.”  This may seem strange, but the explanation is simple:  The needle is thinner than receptors in our retina can detect when placed so close to the eye, so we see around it, as if it were not there.

The mechanism may be different, but the same limitation applies to all of our observations and perceptions.  We see the show as it is broadcast in our mind, but are far removed from the substance, even if we frequently refuse to admit the truth.  To some extent, holidays and other annual observations can be seen as another manifestation of this refusal.  A means to rebel against the temporary absurdity of being trapped in our own minds on a rock in the middle of nowhere, that no one cares about except ourselves.  In the modern world it’s become fashionable to pretend that all of this is here for nature, for the plants and animals, but they don’t care either, knowing less about where they are and why than we do.  If the entire Earth were to disappear tomorrow, it would make no difference to the future of the universe, have no measurable impact on anything, whether it ends with a whimper or a bang.  Still, we honor the passing of another year, even if our conventions are arbitrary and a year is meaningless in the grand context of the universe as a whole.  Events occur on a specific day only because we have labeled the days that way; we could switch the months with thirty and thirty one days, change the names, start the clock from a different point, and all of our celebrations would shift accordingly.  The ancients had calendars and clocks too, only in a different format and the end result was more or less the same.  Perhaps the Mayan Calendar is most famous, identifying 2012 as the end of the world.  Their calendar was composed of multiple cycles with counts of different length.  There was a 260 day count known as the Tzolkin.  This was combined with a 365 day solar year called the Haab’.  The two formed a synchronized cycle known as the Calendar Round, which included 52 Haab’s.  Realizing the world lasted more than 52 years, they also had a Long Count, which supposedly counted days since the dawn of time.  In other words, they combined three different mechanisms to measure the passing of the years, nor was that the only difference.  Mayan days were labeled one to thirteen rather than limited to seven, and they did not count in tens at all like we do, preferring twenties in most cases.

While their calendar wasn’t quite as accurate as ours, especially because they had no knowledge of Leap Year, it worked well enough for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  They had feasts and holidays as well.  They too tracked the way the Earth travels around the sun, even if they were unaware the entire system and galaxy had moved right under their feet, meaning a year commemorates only an arbitrary position whether you are ancient Mayan or American.  The planet is not where it was 365 days ago.  It’s moved millions up on millions of miles through space, though we only know that through complex measurements of the stars and galaxies around us.  Holidays may be arbitrary milestones, but that doesn’t mean they have no meaningful purpose either.  It’s yet another absurdity of our existence that they are essential to it, even as celebrations change over time along with anything else.  They are a chance to partake in a shared experience, to renew our bonds with family, friends, and country, to celebrate the passage of time, the beast that will devour all of us and everything in the universe, and to take a sort of stock of where we are in life, where we’ve been, and perhaps even consider where we’re going.  Throughout history, holidays have taken many forms, some far more brutal than others.  At the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning, Montana, they have a depiction of a festival where men would pierce the flesh of their chest and weigh down the piercings enough for the skin to peel off.  Teddy Roosevelt was one of the few Americans of his day to have the honor of attending a Native American Snake Dance in the Southwest.  Each dancer would scoop up a snake and place it in their mouths, the heads of the snakes free to bite the dancers in the face.  “At last all the snakes…were thrown at the foot of the natural stone pillar, and immediately, with a  yell, the dancers leaped in, seized each of them, several snakes, and rushed away, east, west, north, and south, dashing over the edge of a cliff and jumping like goats down the precipitous trails.  At the foot of the cliff, or on the plain, they dropped the snakes, and then returned to purify themselves by drinking and washing from pails of dark sacred water – medicine water – brought by the women.”

By those standards, we should be thankful we celebrate the Fourth of July with barbecue, beer, and fireworks.  However absurd life may seem at times, there’s always an excuse to party.