Eyes of the World

We’re near Madison, Wisconsin, in this weird state of being in limbo and in high activity, in a world of tangled to-do lists and waiting.

This world looks nothing like the linear one we just leapt from, where we would go to a place, do a set of prescribed things, go to the next place and do those things again. Literally linear, and it felt that way, too.  Now, I’ve got lists in an app for short-term apartment options, I’ve got lists of possible houses to look at to buy, lists of how to follow up on both those lists. My most complicated lists (I’ll go out on a limb and call those chaotic) involve wedging my way into the local healthcare system, with my medical records spread all over hell’s half acre. Indeed, in the hazy gaze of someone sleep-deprived (that would be me), all these lists need equal attention at all times.  

One compulsion that has stuck with me is to continue to write here: an easy-to-reach-for habit when the lists are too much. But in what form? My blogging mentor, Midwest Mark, joked that I should change the blog’s name from Going Down the Road to Going Down the Hallway. Dude, funny not funny! Actually, funny as hell. But not the direction I’m taking. Which leads me to a convoluted story, if you’re game.  

The Gaia Theory

I took some oddball classes in the humanities department at a big technical university (Va Tech) as an undergraduate, and one was called something like The Future of Technology and Our Role in It. This was back in 1987, mind you. Plus, we were a small class of tech undergrads trying to fill humanities credits (and one humanities undergrad trying to fill science credits). So, weird class. 

One idea we tackled was James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. Now, I remember reading about that in the form of an epic poem, but the Internet tells me the epic poem I read was by a different James (for the same class), a science-fiction writer named James Turner and the poem is about the terraforming of Mars. But, in my mind, the Gaia theory was first presented as poetry, which I think is a cool concept. So imagine with me.  

The Gaia principle is a (complex and highly disputed) science theory that the Earth is a living organism, with all her systems working together. Every ecosystem interacts, not just with each other but with inorganic matter (layers of the earth, let’s say simply), all to preserve the life of the one organism, Gaia. 

There’s a lot to say about this idea, and I’m skipping all the science on all sides of the debate and going with my memory of that class. I popped my hand up amid these intellectually curious and skeptical tech enthusiasts (all young men).

“There’s a Grateful Dead song about this!” I squeaked.

”Of course, there is,” the professor sighed.

That’s my own short poem, in reference to an imaginary epic poem from a long-ago class about a scientific theory that is probably wrong but helped spawn the environmental movement and should have been an epic poem. End of that story.

Eyes of the World

Lovelock’s theory postulates that mankind is the sensory organ of this one big organism, looking both out at the universe and inward as its conscience. The timing may be coincidental (the theory and the song both became public in the early 1970s), but the Dead song is called Eyes of the World, and the chorus goes:

Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.

The heart has its beaches, its homeland, and thoughts of its own.

Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings.

But the heart has its seasons, its evenings, and songs of its own.

It might sound trite, but there’s a lot packed into that chorus. I won’t unpack it fully, but I will say that I love thinking of myself as the eyes of the world, the living world that Lovelock called Gaia.  And, I love the Buddhist connotations here of waking up and realizing suddenly that you see for the whole planet, that you are the planet. And that you speak for the planet, that you sing its song.

What about those other lines? The heart is its own small world inside the greater one, and that changes, too. I’m imagining my own small orbit, my small interconnected systems, inside the great ball of the Earth, which orbits as part of our solar system. All connected, yes. How much of it is sentient, I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder about my own sentience. But it’s a wonderful way to think of one’s place.  

I like to think about both slow and spontaneous enlightenment, personal discovery, our place on the planet. My place on the planet has certainly changed, from being a moving sensor and conscience to now being a stationary one. Like in the lyrics, my heart has its own seasons, its own songs. But I’m still the eyes of the world. What will I see now? 

I’m now (unofficially) calling this blog Eyes of the World. I won’t change the URL, and I’ll probably end up shortening it to Eyes, but there you go. 

Now, back to those lists!