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THE INVISIBLE PYRAMID -- A NATURALIST ANALYSES THE ROCKET CENTURY |
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TWO: THE COSMIC PRISON Not till we are lost ... do we begin to understand ourselves. -- HENRY DAVID THOREAU "A name is a prison, God is free," once observed the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis. He meant, I think, that valuable though language is to man, it is by very necessity limiting, and creates for man an invisible prison. Language implies boundaries. A word spoken creates a dog, a rabbit, a man. It fixes their nature before our eyes; henceforth their shapes are, in a sense, our own creation. They are no longer part of the unnamed shifting architecture of the universe. They have been transfixed as if by sorcery, frozen into a concept, a word. Powerful though the spell of human language has proven itself to be, it has laid boundaries upon the cosmos. No matter how far-ranging some of the mental probes that man has philosophically devised, by his own created nature he is forced to hold the specious and emerging present and transform it into words. The words are startling in their immediate effectiveness, but at the same time they are always finally imprisoning because man has constituted himself a prison keeper. He does so out of no conscious intention, but because for immediate purposes he has created an unnatural world of his own, which he calls the cultural world, and in which he feels at home. It defines his needs and allows him to lay a small immobilizing spell upon the nearer portions of his universe. Nevertheless, it transforms that universe into a cosmic prison house which is no sooner mapped than man feels its inadequacy and his own. He seeks then to escape, and the theory of escape involves bodily flight. Scarcely had the first moon landing been achieved before one U.S. senator boldly announced: "We are the masters of the universe. We can go anywhere we choose." This statement was widely and editorially acclaimed. It is a striking example of the comfort of words, also of the covert substitutions and mental projections to which they are subject. The cosmic prison is not made less so by a successful journey of some two hundred and forty thousand miles in a cramped and primitive vehicle. To escape the cosmic prison man is poorly equipped. He has to drag portions of his environment with him, and his life span is that of a mayfly in terms of the distances he seeks to penetrate. There is no possible way to master such a universe by flight alone. Indeed such a dream is a dangerous illusion. This may seem a heretical statement, but its truth is self-evident if we try seriously to comprehend the nature of time and space that I sought to grasp when held up to view the fiery messenger that flared across the zenith in 1910. "Seventy-five years," my father had whispered in my ear, "seventy-five years and it will be racing homeward. Perhaps you will live to see it again. Try to remember." And so I remembered. I had gained a faint glimpse of the size of our prison house. Somewhere out there beyond a billion miles in space, an entity known as a comet had rounded on its track in the black darkness of the void. It was surging homeward toward the sun because it was an eccentric satellite of this solar system. If I lived to see it, it would be but barely, and with the dimmed eyes of age. Yet it, too, in its long traverse, was but a flitting mayfly in terms of the universe the night sky revealed. So relative is the cosmos we inhabit that, as we gaze upon the outer galaxies available to the reach of our telescopes, we are placed in about the position that a single white blood cell in our bodies would occupy, if it were intelligently capable of seeking to understand the nature of its own universe, the body it inhabits. The cell would encounter rivers ramifying into miles of distance seemingly leading nowhere. It would pass through gigantic structures whose meaning it could never grasp -- the brain, for example. It could never know there was an outside, a vast being on a scale it could not conceive of and of which it formed an infinitesimal part. It would know only the pouring tumult of the creation it inhabited, but of the nature of that great beast, or even indeed that it was a beast, it could have no conception whatever. It might examine the liquid in which it floated and decide, as in the case of the fall of Lucretius's atoms, that the pouring of obscure torrents had created its world. It might discover that creatures other than itself swam in the torrent. But that its universe was alive, had been born and was destined to perish, its own ephemeral existence would never allow it to perceive. It would never know the sun; it would explore only through dim tactile sensations and react to chemical stimuli that were borne to it along the mysterious conduits of the arteries and veins. Its universe would be centered upon a great arborescent tree of spouting blood. This, at best, generations of white blood cells by enormous labor and continuity might succeed, like astronomers, in charting. They could never, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, be aware that their so-called universe was, in actuality, the prowling body of a cat or the more time-enduring body of a philosopher, himself engaged upon the same quest in a more gigantic world and perhaps deceived proportionately by greater vistas. What if, for example, the far galaxies man observes make up, across void spaces of which even we are atomically composed, some kind of enormous creature or cosmic snowflake whose exterior we will never see? We will know more than the phagocyte in our bodies, but no more than that limited creature can we climb out of our universe, or successfully enhance our size or longevity sufficiently to thrust our heads through the confines of the universe that terminates our vision. Some further "outside" will hover elusively in our thought, but upon its nature, or even its reality, we can do no more than speculate. The phagocyte might observe the salty turbulence of an eternal river system, Lucretius the fall of atoms creating momentary living shapes. We suspiciously sense, in the concept of the expanding universe derived from the primordial atom -- the monobloc -- some kind of oscillating universal heart. At the instant of its contraction we will vanish. It is not given us, nor can our science recapture, the state beyond the monobloc, nor whether we exist in the diastole of some inconceivable being. We know only a little more extended reality than the hypothetical creature below us. Above us may lie realms it is beyond our power to grasp. II This, then, is the secret nature of the Universe over which the ebullient senator so recklessly proclaimed our absolute mastery. Time in that universe is in excess of ten billion years. It recedes backward into a narrowing funnel where, at some inconceivable point of concentration, the monobloc containing all the matter that composes the galaxies exploded in the one gigantic instant of creation. Along with that explosion space itself is rushing outward. Stars and the great island galaxies in which they cluster are more numerous than the blades of grass upon a plain. To speak of man as "mastering" such a cosmos is about the equivalent of installing a grasshopper as Secretary General of the United Nations. Worse, in fact, for no matter what system of propulsion man may invent in the future, the galaxies on the outer rim of visibility are fleeing faster than he can approach them. Moreover, the light that he is receiving from them left its source in the early history of the planet earth. There is no possible way of even establishing their present existence. As the British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell has so appropriately remarked, "At the limit of present-day observations our information is a few billion years out of date." Light travels at a little over one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, far beyond the conceivable speed of any spaceship devised by man, yet it takes light something like one hundred thousand years just to travel across the star field of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It has been estimated that to reach the nearest star to our own, four light-years away, would require, at the present speed of our spaceships, a time equivalent to more than the whole of written history, indeed one hundred thousand earthly years would be a closer estimate -- a time as long, perhaps, as the whole existence of Homo sapiens upon earth. And the return, needless to state, would consume just as long a period. Even if our present rocket speeds were stepped up by a factor of one hundred, human generations would pass on the voyage. An unmanned probe into the nearer galactic realms would be gone so long that its intended mission, in fact the country which sent it forth, might both have vanished into the mists of history before its messages began to be received. All this, be it noted, does not begin to involve us in those intergalactic distances across which a radio message from a cruising spaceship might take hundreds of thousands of years to be received and a wait of other hundreds of thousands before a reply would filter back. We are, in other words, truly in the position of the blood cell exploring our body. We are limited in time, by analogy a miniature replica of the cosmos, since we too individually ascend from a primordial atom, exist, and grow in space, only to fall back in dissolution. We cannot, in terms of the time dimension as we presently know it, either travel or survive the interstellar distances. Two years ago I chanced to wander with a group of visiting scholars into a small planetarium in a nearby city. In the dark in a remote back seat, I grew tired and fell asleep while a lecture was progressing. My eyes had closed upon a present-day starry night as represented in the northern latitudes. After what seemed in my uneasy slumber the passage of a long period of time, I started awake in the dark, my eyes fixed in amazement upon the star vault overhead. All was quiet in the neighboring high-backed seats. I could see no one. Suddenly I seemed adrift under a vast and unfamiliar sky. Constellations with which I was familiar had shifted, grown minute, or vanished. I rubbed my eyes. This was not the universe in which I had fallen asleep. It seemed more still, more remote, more enormous, and inconceivably more solitary. A queer sense of panic struck me, as though I had been transported out of time. Only after some attempt to orient myself by a diminished pole star did the answer come to me by murmurs from without. I was not the last man on the planet, far in the dying future. My companions had arisen and left, while the lecturer had terminated his address by setting the planetarium lights forward to show the conformation of the heavens as they might exist in the remote future of the expanding universe. Distances had lengthened. All was poised, chill, and alone. I sat for a moment experiencing the sensation all the more intensely because of the slumber which left me feeling as though ages had elapsed. The sky gave little sign of movement. It seemed drifting in a slow indeterminate swirl, as though the forces of expansion were equaled at last by some monstrous tug of gravity at the heart of things. In this remote night sky of the far future I felt myself waiting upon the inevitable, the great drama and surrender of the inward fall, the heart contraction of the cosmos. I was still sitting when, like the slightest leaf movement on a flooding stream, I saw the first faint galaxy of a billion suns race like a silverfish across the night and vanish. It was enough: the fall was equal to the flash of creation. I had sensed it waiting there under the star vault of the planetarium. Now it was cascading like a torrent through the ages in my head. I had experienced, by chance, the farthest reach of the star prison. I had similarly lived to see the beginning descent into the maelstrom. III There are other confinements, however, than that imposed by the enormous distances of the cosmos. One could almost list them. There is, for example, the prison of smells. I happen to know a big black hunting poodle named Beau. Beau loves to go for walks in the woods, and at such times as I visit his owners this task of seeing Beau safely through his morning adventures is happily turned over to me. Beau has eyes, of course, and I do not doubt that he uses them when he greets his human friends by proffering a little gift such as his food dish. After this formality, which dates to his puppyhood, is completed, Beau immediately reverts to the world of snuffles. As a long-time trusted friend, I have frequently tried to get Beau to thrust his head out of the world of smells and actually to see the universe. I have led him before the mirror in my bedroom and tried to persuade him to see himself, his own visible identity. The results, it turns out, are totally unsatisfactory if not ludicrous. Beau peers out from his black ringlets as suspiciously as an ape hiding in a bush. He drops his head immediately and pretends to examine the floor. It is evident that he detests this apparition and has no intention of being cajoled into some dangerous and undoggy wisdom by my voice. He promptly brings his collar and makes appropriate throaty conversation. To appease his wounded feelings, I set out for a walk in the woods. It is necessary to do this with a long chain and a very tight grasp upon it. Beau is a big, powerful animal, and ringlets or no he has come from an active and carnivorous past. Once in the woods all this past suddenly emerges. One is dragged willy-nilly through leaf, thorn, and thicket on intangible trails that Beau's swinging muzzle senses upon the wind. His deep, wet nose has entered a world denied to me -- a mad world whose contours and direction change with every gust of air. I leap and bound with a chafed wrist through a smell universe I cannot even sense. Occasionally something squawks or bounds from under our feet and I am flung against trees or wrapped around by a flying chain. Finally, on one memorable occasion, after a rain, Beau paused, sniffing suspiciously between two rocks on a hillside. Another rabbit? I groaned mentally, taking a tighter hold on the chain. Beau then began some careful digging, curving and patting the soil aside in a way I had never before witnessed. A small basin shaped by Beau's forepaws presently appeared, and up from the bottom of it welled a spring-fed pool in which Beau promptly buried his snout and lapped long and lustily of water that I am sure carried the living tastes and delicate nuances disseminated from an unseen watershed. Beau had had a proper drink of tap water before we started from home, but this drink was different. I could tell from the varied, eager, slurping sounds that emanated from Beau. He was intoxicated by living water which dim primordial memories had instructed him how to secure. I looked on, interested and sympathetic, but aware that the big black animal lived in a smell prison as I, in my way, lived in a sight prison. Our universes intersected sufficiently for us to recognize each other in a friendly fashion, but Beau would never admit the mirror image of himself into his mind, and, try as I would, the passing breeze would never inform me about the shadowy creatures that passed unglimpsed in the forest. IV Other prisons exist besides those dominated by the senses of smell or sight or temperature. Some involve the length of a creature's lifetime, as in the case of five-year-old Beau, who gambols happily about his master, knowing him to be one of the everlasting immortals of his universe. It is my belief that there has never been a culture that represented man any more than there has been a man who represented men. Our prisons, both societal and cultural, are far too complex for this. In one age religion drives the scientist-philosopher into hiding in narrow corners or castigates him as a public enemy. Such was the fate of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and others of equal importance. The pharaohs, by contrast, dreamed of traversing the sky after death in solar boats which they prepared after the fashion of Mediterranean sea craft. The Old Kingdom pharaohs, however, were entranced by a pole-star conception of their final voyage. Only later did the solar journey take precedence. I mention these cultural prisons only to indicate that man's cosmic yearnings are very old but subjected to the vicissitudes of history. The dream of men elsewhere in the universe alleviating the final prison of loneliness dies very hard. Nevertheless a wise remark of George Santayana's made many years ago should discourage facile and optimistic thinking upon this very point. "An infinite number of solar systems," the philosopher meditated, "must have begun as ours began, but each of them must have deviated at one point from ours in its evolution, all the previous incidents being followed in each case by a different sequel." In voicing this view Santayana betrays a clearer concept of the chance-filled course of genetics and its unreturning pathways than some astronomers. The Mendelian pathways are prisons of no return. Advances are made but always a door swings shut behind the evolving organism. It can no longer mate with its one-time progenitors. It can only press forward along roads that increasingly will fix its irrevocable destiny. Ours is a man-centered age. Not long ago I was perusing a work on space when I came across this statement by a professional astronomer: "Other stars, other planets, other life, and other races of men are evolving all along, so that the net effect is changeless." Implied in this remark was an utter confidence that the evolutionary process was everywhere the same, ran through the same succession of forms, and emerged always with men at the helm of life, men presumably so close to ourselves that they might interbreed -- a supposition fostered by our comic strips. In the light of this naive concept, for such it is, let us consider just two worlds we know about, not worlds in space, but continents on our own planet. These continents exist under the same sun and are surrounded by the same waters as our own; their life bears a distant relationship to ours but has long been isolated. Man never arose in the remote regions of South America and Australia. He only reached them by migration from outside. They are laboratories of age-long evolution which tell us much about the unique quality of the human experience. The southern continents of our earth do not maintain the intimacy of faunal exchange that marks the land masses encircling the basin of the polar sea. Instead, they are lost in the southern latitudes of the oceans and for long intervals their faunas have evolved in isolation. These lands have been in truth "other worlds." The most isolated of these worlds is Australia, and it is a marsupial world. With the insignificant exception of a few late drifters from outside, ground life, originally represented by a few marsupial forms, has, since the Mesozoic, evolved untroubled by invading placental mammals from without. Every possible ecological niche from forest tree to that of underground burrower has been occupied by the evolutionary radiation of a slower-brained mammal whose young are born in a far more embryonic condition than are those of the true Placentalia. This world remained unknown to Western science until the great exploratory voyages. Somewhere in the past, life had taken another turn. Chance mutation, "total contingency" in the words of the paleontologist William King Gregory, had led to another universe. The "world" of Australia contained no primates at all, nor any hint of their emergence. Upon that "planet" lost in the great waters, they were one of an infinite number of random potentialities that had remained as unrealized as the whole group of placental mammals, of which the Primate order is a minor part. If we now turn to South America, we encounter still another isolated evolutionary center -- but one not totally unrelated to that of Eurasia. Here, so the biogeographers inform us, an attenuated land bridge, at intervals completely severed, has both stimulated local evolutionary development and at times interrupted it by migrations from North America. Our concern is with just one group of animals, the South American monkeys. They are anatomically distinct from the catarrhine forms of the Old World and constitute an apparent parallel emergence from the prosimians of the early Tertiary. Once more, however, even though the same basic Primate stock is involved, things have gone differently. There are no great apes in the New World, no evidence of ground-dwelling experiments of any kind. Though fewer carnivores are to be found on the South American grasslands than in Africa, the rain-forest monkeys, effectively equipped with prehensile tails, still cling to their archaic pathways. One can only observe that South America's vast rivers flow through frequently flooded lowlands, and that by contrast much of Africa is high, with open savannah and parkland. The South American primates appear confined to areas where descent to the ground proved less inviting. Here ended another experiment which did not lead to man, even though it originated within the same order from which he sprang. Another world has gone astray from the human direction. If, as some thinkers occasionally extrapolate, man was so ubiquitous, so easy to produce, why had two great continental laboratories, Australia and South America -- "worlds," indeed -- failed to produce him? They had failed, we may assume, simply because the great movements of life are irreversible, the same mutations do not occur, circumstances differ in infinite particulars, opportunities fail to be grasped, and so what once happened is no more. The random element is always present, but it is selected on the basis of what has preceded its appearance. There is no trend demanding man's constant reappearance, either on the separate "worlds" of this earth or elsewhere. There can be no more random duplication of man than there is a random duplication of such a complex genetic phenomenon as fingerprints. The situation is not one that is comparable to a single identical cast of dice, but rather it is an endless addition of new genes building on what has previously been incorporated into a living creature through long ages. Nature gambles but she gambles with constantly new and altering dice. It is this well-established fact which enables us to call long-range evolution irreversible. *** Finally, there are even meteorological prisons. The constant circulation of moisture in our atmosphere has actually played an important role in creating the first vertebrates and, indirectly, man. If early rivers had not poured from the continents into the sea, the first sea vertebrates to penetrate streams above sea level would not have evolved a rigid muscular support, the spine, to enable them to wriggle against down-rushing currents. And, if man, in his early history, had not become a tree climber in tropical rain forests, he would never have further tilted that same spine upright or replaced the smell prison of the horizontal mammal with the stereoscopic, far-ranging "eye brain" of the higher primates, including man. Such final dice throws, in which leaf and grass, wave and water, are inextricably commingled with the chemistry of the body, could be multiplied. The cosmic prison is subdivided into an infinite number of unduplicable smaller prisons, the prisons of form. V We are now in a position to grasp, after an examination of the many prisons which encompass life, that the cosmic prison which many men, in the excitement of the first moon landing, believed we had escaped still extends immeasurably beyond us. The present lack of any conceivable means of star travel and the shortness of our individual lives appear to prevent the crossing of such distances. Even if we confined ourselves to unmanned space probes of far greater sophistication than any we now possess, their homing messages through the void could be expected to descend upon the ruined radio scanners of a civilization long vanished, or upon a world whose scholars would have long since forgotten what naive dreams had been programmed into such instruments. We have, in other words, detected that we exist in a prison of numbers, otherwise known as light-years. We are also locked in a body which responds to biological rather than sidereal time. That body, in turn, sees the universe through its own senses and no others. At every turn of thought a lock snaps shut upon us. As societal men we bow to a given frame of culture -- a world view we have received from the past. Biologically each of us is unique, and the tight spiral of the DNA molecules conspires to doom us to mediocrity or grandeur. We dream vast dreams of Utopias and live to learn the meaning of the two-thousand-year-old judgment of a Greek philosopher: "The flaw is in the vessel itself " -- the flaw that defeats all governments. By what means, then, can we seek escape from groveling in mean corners of despair? Not, certainly, by the rush to depart upon the night's black pathways, nor by attention to the swerving wind vane of the senses. We are men, and despite all our follies there have been great ones among us who have counseled us in wisdom, men who have also sought keys to our prison. Strangely, these men have never spoken of space; they have spoken, instead, as though the farthest spaces lay within the mind itself -- as though we still carried a memory of some light of long ago and the way we had come. Perhaps for this reason alone we have scanned the skies and the waters with what Henry Vaughan so well labeled the "Ecclips'd Eye," that eye incapable of quite assembling the true meaning of the universe but striving to do so "with Hyeroglyphicks quite dismembered." These are the words of a seventeenth-century mystic who has mentally dispatched inward vision through all the creatures until he comes to man who "shines a little" and whose depths he finds it impossible to plumb. Thomas Traherne, another man of that century of the Ecclips'd Eye, when religion was groping amidst the revelations of science, stated well the matter of the keys to the prison. "Infinite love," he ventured, "cannot be expressed in finite room. Yet it must be infinitely expressed in the smallest moment, ... Only so is it in both ways infinite." Can this insight be seen to justify itself in modern evolutionary terms? I think it can. Close to a hundred years ago the great French medical scientist Claude Bernard observed that the stability of the inside environment of complex organisms must be maintained before an outer freedom can be achieved from their immediate surroundings. What Bernard meant was profound but simple to illustrate. He meant that for life to obtain relative security from its fickle and dangerous outside surroundings the animal must be able to sustain stable, unchanging conditions within the body. Warm-blooded mammals and birds can continue to move about in winter; insects cannot. Warm-blooded animals such as man, with his stable body temperature, can continue to think and reason in outside temperatures that would put a frog to sleep in a muddy pond or roll a snake into a ball in a crevice. In winter latitudes many of the lower creatures are forced to sleep part of their lives away. Many millions of years of evolutionary effort were required before life was successful in defending its internal world from the intrusion of the heat or cold of the outside world of nature. Yet only so can life avoid running down like a clock in winter or perishing from exposure in the midday sun. Even the desert rattlesnake is forced to coil in the shade of a bush at midday. Of course our tolerance is limited to a few degrees of temperature when measured against the great thermometer of the stars, but this hard-won victory is what creates the ever-active brain of the mammal as against the retarded sluggishness of the reptile. A steady metabolism has enabled the mammals and also the birds to experience life more fully and rapidly than cold-blooded creatures. One of the great feats of evolution, perhaps the greatest, has been this triumph of the interior environment over exterior nature. Inside, we might say, has fought invading outside, and inside, since the beginning of life, by slow degrees has won the battle of life. If it had not, man, frail man with his even more fragile brain, would not exist. Unless fever or some other disorder disrupts this internal island of safety, we rarely think of it. Body controls are normally automatic, but let them once go wrong and outside destroys inside. This is the simplest expression of the war of nature -- the endless conflict that engages the microcosm against the macrocosm. Since the first cell created a film about itself and elected to carry on the carefully insulated processes known as life, the creative spark has not been generalized. Whatever its principle may be it hides magically within individual skins. To the day of our deaths we exist in an inner solitude that is linked to the nature of life itself. Even as we project love and affection upon others we endure a loneliness which is the price of all individual consciousness -- the price of living. It is, though overlooked, the discontinuity beyond all others: the separation both of the living creature from the inanimate and of the individual from his kind. These are star distances. In man, moreover, consciousness looks out isolated from its own body. The body is the true cosmic prison, yet it contains, in the creative individual, a magnificent if sometimes helpless giant. John Donne, speaking for that giant in each of us, said: "Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are borne Gyants.... My thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their Creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, anywhere, and any one of my Creatures, my thoughts, is with the Sunne and beyond the Sunne, overtakes the Sunne, and overgoes the Sunne in one pace, one steppe, everywhere." This thought, expressed so movingly by Donne, represents the final triumph of Claude Bernard's interior microcosm in its war with the macrocosm. Inside has conquered outside. The giant confined in the body's prison roams at will among the stars. More rarely and more beautifully, perhaps, the profound mind in the close prison projects infinite love in a finite room. This is a crossing beside which light-years are meaningless. It is the solitary key to the prison that is man.
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