A Thin Microbial Sheen

There is a recurrent organizing idea that helps me sort out my understanding of my world, and that is that there is a deep underlying consistency to the ‘whole.’ Call it Buddhist, new biology or physics or whatever, I tend to work through my day with the premise that everything not only has a reason, but that it fits together nicely.

Seamless. There is no separation except by appearances.

Sure, things may look separate, though this is because of benign ignorance, or a consequence of seeing the surface structure only, or possibly the all-too-human application of a tautological conceptual template that purports to demonstrate separation, by defining it as such.

Nature has a subtle language. It is passing on information and storing memory in its own complex-yet-simple holistic fashion. I have languages also. One, that I feel confident in, and a couple others that I can communicate to others with only a little. I am doing something similar to what nature does.

The vision of this similarity is hard to express. However, imagine if you would, that the words you are reading were chemicals, exuded from busy fingers on a computer keyboard as a sort of molecular secretion. These pass through the biosphere to you, the reader, or to a listener if I was speaking aloud, where they would, (or would not, after all, the listener might just roll up their eyes and yawn) link up with other molecules, perhaps triggering their alignment. They even might turn out to be self-replicating.

This sounds quite biological: something that you might encounter in a book about cell physiology, morphogenesis and division.

However, these words that were typed, are not just living in some world separated from the rest. Certainly, if left in a book or archived (never to be seen again) on a computer disk, they are mere arrangements of atomic particles. Dare we even call them ‘words’ if no one is there to understand them as such? These arrangements of ‘stuff’ of will do nothing (I suppose) but sit there. It is when the disk is inserted into a computer or the reader picks up a piece of paper upon which this ‘stuff’ is decoded into cipherable ‘words,’ only then do the lines of ink on the page or the computer-generated lines and curves catalyze a biological process in a brain, and we read.

This vision of words-as-biochemistry keeps haunting me. Words have letters, which in English, include the childhood litany of ‘a’ to ‘z.’ String them together and they create word forms. Words strung together trigger a quadrillion-fold more mental forms. Watch them catalyze changes. Watch them ‘line up,’ in other human beings, resonate, and become the urge that creates change in the world.

At the molecular level, computer data, words scribbled on a piece of paper and organisms in nature are all, simply molecules. Humans generally maintain a rather presumptuous but common assumption their molecules are more important, or of a ‘higher order’ than those of say bacteria, or those on a computer data.

Our Earth’s biosphere extends about six miles down, and seven miles up, with a particularly dense portion spanning the thin surface ‘width’ of a just a few meters. A thin biological sheen. From space, our biosphere could look remarkably similar to something that you or I might see, as we stand at the edge of a still pond: the microbial patina of tiny cells richly populating the surface, disturbed only by the occasional scamper of a water-spider, with hungry pollywogs moving silently below.

A friend recently sent me a series of pictures of earth as seen in comparison to the solar system’s surrounding planets, and then in a number of progressive tiers outward into the universe through telescopes. We are really very, very small. Nearly negligible. A spec, not even that, each person on the planet a seeming electron in size when compared to the whole.