Thursday, August 27, 2009

Lily No.106, July 28, 2009


PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Life is fluid.
They tell us it comes from amino acids
in a process that began in a colossal,
super-nuclear,
big bang
furnace
that expanded outward from a center creating space as it went, where galaxies popped like firecrackers on strings hurling stars and planets corkscrewing through time and space.
Well, something like that.

Contemplate the protean thread
of life stretching backward
to that point.

Contemplate?
Where did we learn that trick of observation and reflection?
Where did we get the drive, the striving?
What force made it inevitable?
Did tenderness and compassion and a yearning for justice and beauty originate there as well?

Were they all there at the beginning in some concentrated "spirit"?

Or is that spirit self-made and tentative and ultimately uncertain, perhaps brewed from an predictable reaction of chemicals and passed
to slug
and toad
and a jackrabbit
and a student reading Pascal,
to a strap-hanger pausing on his morning commute,
and one day posed on a blog by a dude in an internet café and answered around the world.

Such question lie in a galaxy beyond reason and impervious to its probes, and regardless of the answer, what's precious is in that spirit.