Prose

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
by Michael Jewell

"I am one of those
who have disturbed the sleep
of the world."

------Gladys LaFlamme
"Freud from a London Graveyard"

When Thomas Edison was attempting to perfect his first light bulb, he tried thousands of different kinds of filament before he found one that lasted long enough under electric current to be useful. His early successes gave light for a few moments at best, but with persistence Edison achieved better and better results, until today we can buy hundred-watt bulbs at our corner store which are guaranteed to shine for years. Because of Edison, and the many lesser-known inventors who came before and after him, the dark of night is not as absolute as it was in days gone by.

We think of this lone figure, the so-called wizard of Menlo Park, as changing the world, while in reality his work depends upon the efforts of a multitude. No Edison succeeds without a Franklin as his predecessor. No light bulb dispels the darkness without someone first gaining an understanding of the power behind illumination. At every step we confront the truism that innovation cannot happen outside of context, just as words have no meaning external to their language, which is an ongoing construction having its origins in the unexplored reaches of prehistory.

To us, the light bulb is a simple thing which we take for granted, without considering what went into its creation. In fact it is no less of a wonder than the Great Pyramid at Giza, or the remotely-controlled vehicle we have most recently landed on Mars. Perhaps, since the bulb is much more commonplace, we forget its extraordinary kinship with both of these obvious milestones of human endeavor. Nevertheless, the pyramid, the spacecraft, and the light bulb do share a similar eminence.

They belong to the same genus intrinsically, because of how we work as human beings in our world. Like the primordial man pictured in the first minutes of the classic science fiction movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," we throw a problematic bone into the air and it mutates into an elegant space station circling the earth. The fact that we are not faced with any alien monolith to inspire our evolution proves all the more mysterious. Mystery clings to whatever we touch, from our world-shaking inventions to our most customary artifacts, each of them exceedingly strange and frequently beautiful.

Benjamin Franklin sends a key skyward on the string of a kite and the camera shifts for a moment, until we walk into a room, nonchalantly flipping a light switch. Alexander Graham Bell tries to develop a device to aid deaf children, and we end up conversing long-distance on the phone. Louis Pasteur suspects unseen causes of disease, and a microscopic universe unfolds. The same principle holds true outside of science as well. Athenian thinkers of 500 B.C. experiment with a new kind of government, and even now the concept of democracy is being redefined. Leaders as culturally diverse as Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela carry the conversation forward, and in so doing disturb the sleep of the world.

When we are being swept downstream, our true advocates are those who ask difficult questions, attempting to rouse us from our apathy before we founder on the rocks. Each a Diogenes for his or her own age, they shine the lamp of Sophia into our faces, though generally we discount what they say as exaggeration. In the country of the blind, the man with one eye lives a solitary life. In the city of sleepwalkers, wakefulness is treated as a dream. Likewise, in modern times, rational people have defined progress almost primarily in materialistic terms, and by what passes for the scientific method, while in practice it often amounts to a kind of superstition, owing more to the vagaries of chance than to an actual grasp of cause and effect.

Unfortunately, history is not made entirely by rational people,nor does rationality penetrate to any more than to a superficial depth the human Psyche. The range of our best light bulb extends just so far into the night, and no further. However much we expand their efficiency and brilliance, vast darkness surrounds our brightest efforts, which improve but slightly on candles and campfires, compared to the scale of the universe. Our peril lies in releasing the element of fire beyond the point we have so far, while underestimating its hunger, its insatiable need to consume everything in its path.

We imagine planets orbiting other stars, and in turn find evidence of them with our radio telescopes. Still, the stars seem hopelessly aloof. We can conceive of perfect utopias existing beyond the immediate neighborhood of the earth, in galaxies so far away that by the time their light reaches us their stars have been extinguished. Sad to say, our efforts at making contact have yet to succeed, and finding no solid proof of intelligent life elsewhere, it comes down to us.

If we want to live in a utopia, we ourselves must create it. Because the dangers and benefits of civilization originate within us, we will have to take the responsibility of fulfilling our dreams. We can, of course, blame the gods for our failures, although however much they might wish to bless or condemn us, the gods are unable to reach us except upon human terms. Ironically, our limitations as a language-using race place restrictions upon how we can be approached. Another way of saying this is that we are shielded from the influence of unchecked power, or chaos, by the word. Word, which is somehow divine as well as human, gives us the opening into, as well as the protection we need in order to survive our dialogue with power, allowing an interchange in which invention becomes possible without annihilation.

On August 6th, 1945, when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the darkness moved a few ominous steps closer, at the same time unbearable incandescence was released. The question that continues to plague us is whether or not the human race as a whole has the maturity to endure this level of empowerment. If even an initiated priest touching the Ark of the Covenant accidentally can be struck down by a bolt of lightning from on high,how might we fare any better? Certainly, we pay faithful lip service to the idea that the same ancient struggle goes on today. We acknowledge that pride may be our undoing, meanwhile we have difficulty maintaining our sense that hereafter our likelihood of destruction increases exponentially.

The life-clock of the earth ticks steadily closer to midnight. The ozone layer has a gaping hole in it the size of Antarctica. Biotechnology companies want to sell genetically-modified seeds for plants which can produce no viable seeds for the following year. Cows have developed a life-threatening disease that they contract when they are fed the remains of other previously slaughtered animals mixed with their feed. The shores of our once pristine beaches are awash with the garbage which our cities have hauled out to sea and dumped from barges, and measurable traces of antibiotics and other discarded pharmaceuticals are found in our drinking water. Surprisingly enough, we wonder why our health is not improving, and we think that something should be done about it. But do we have the will power and the strength of character to act upon our sentiments?

The gods won't do it for us, we are nearly convinced. Even if we believe in them from the depths of devotion, the Divine powers depend upon us to be their hands in the human sphere. God's chosen ones are chosen because they are other than God. A Moses is wanted, to bear the tablets down, out of clouds and thunder. A Buddha is required, to sit beneath the Bodhi tree until a deeper wisdom can be realized. Of course the dharma, or the true doctrine, has existed always, is deathless, but we are trapped here in samsara, in illusion. We persist inside of history, like fledgling birds misunderstanding the process of flight.

Socrates comes first, then philosophy. Yet before that, some convenient mutual friend has to introduce the future parents of Socrates to each other, one night when the moon is full and roses are in bloom. Although the Wisdom, the Philosophy, and the Commandments for a life of spirit are wonderful gifts, they cannot be given unless recipients--such as ourselves--come forward, seeing that no exchange of gifts can take place without an environment, or a complete culture of give and take. The appearance of the miraculous depends upon our imperfect community. "Love at first sight" implies a person seeing and another being seen, the trading of glances charged with meaning, the quintessential "Eureka, I found it!" Except for what every broken-down romantic poet claims to know, that the search has lasted for years, and is never really over.

In love as in language, imperfection might itself be indispensable for the human equation. Because it is dynamic, incompletion is fertile. It has virtue--meaning potency--in that through its quality of spaciousness, or receptive emptiness, it provides an opportunity for Divine intervention. This is why Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, depicting God reaching down to give life to Adam, is so suggestive. More Power abides in proximity than in actual contact, more movement in separation, because with distance consummation is still possible. Where this dynamic does not prevail, there can be no invention. A light bulb has no purpose when the power lines are down. A tree will most certainly make a sound if it falls and no one is on hand to hear it. What it will lack, however, will be significance.

If no thinking being survives to give the tree a name, insects will scuttle quickly away from the increased light caused by the new opening overhead, but they will not remember for more than a few moments the difference made by the loss of a tree. They live too much on the fringes of sentience to care, and if we differ in any salient way from them, it is in our perhaps overrated ability to choose--which we derive from our capacity to interpret--and in our corresponding aptitude for creation. The artist puts colors to canvas and the ground shifts beneath our feet. We hear a moving piece of music and feel ourselves being drawn to the verge of an intangible space.

In the end, the only utopias that matter to us are located neither in distant galaxies, nor in mythical realms under the sea. It is ours to create or destroy them, from the cornucopia of the mind's eye, as we continuously attempt to approximate the real utopia behind our eyes. At heart, the world we inhabit is already perfect, though we have yet to appreciate its perfection. Until we do, dark worlds will also have substance, since we grant them power, giving in to our worst fears by accepting the daily news without question.

If we read it in black and white it must be true. What can one person do to change the world? Whenever we repeat these cliches we accept defeat before we have begun the struggle, and the defeat proves all the more ignominious since it takes place in broad daylight. Like the proverbial frog, we never notice that the pot of water in which we swim is growing incrementally closer to its boiling point, and who can blame a frog in a pot of water?

On the other hand, in each of us lives an Edison. In our unique and seemingly unremarkable ways we can push back the darkness. With Gautama, we sit beneath the tree to meditate, every time we pause for a moment of reflection. The Socratic dialogue continues perpetually, in our interior conversations, if we pursue them. Or, to paraphrase St. Paul's "It is not I, but Christ who lives in me," when we take up our metaphorical crosses daily, we invite a Major Mystery to merge with our minor mysteries, and the incarnation of timelessness enters into time.

The archetype of the savior, the latest avatar of perennial truth arising among us, thus has substance. The universal clothes itself in the particular. Or else it has no power. The hero waits to be reinvented within us, provided we choose the hero's path, as opposed to an unquestioning approval of whatever heroes society proposes, the politicians and the celebrities as cultural icons desperate to lengthen the moments they spend in the spotlight. History waits to be changed forever, and we alone can bring about its transformation, if we trust our own deepest voices when they speak.

Just as Edison's discoveries were the culmination of untold Scenturies of work, we too have inherited the essentials for discovery. As a people, we provide the chemistry leading to critical mass. As individuals, we possess the exact ingredients needed for crystallization to begin. Faith is essential, no doubt. But an active faith, one which believes that the Divine does indeed enter the mundane, because we take steps to embrace it as well as to give it shape.

The next step in evolution comes about when we accept the consequences of making new choices. If, in our complaisance, we believe that we will never change the world, we will be condemned to live out that self-fulfilling prophecy. We will keep watching the same old script with slightly different actors, accepting what the newscaster tells us every night at six, how the senseless war drags on, and how starving children in other countries continue to perish without relief or solace. Satisfied with the status quo, we will stay as close as possible to our carefully-maintained comfort zones, all the while the most dire predictions come true.

Conversely, a genuine optimism works to bring about a better world because, in thinking this way, not only do we expect improvement, we persist until the vision becomes real. A thousand previous failures are transformed into success when at last we arrive at the correct formula. The strange thing is that the two alternatives, affirmative and negative, live together in the same house, and the house remains standing. One half of the building has no windows, merely a couple of blank walls. The other side features windows and a door. Through the glass a breathtaking landscape can be seen. Better yet, the door presents a way through which we might pass into the landscape.

Outside, white-throated sparrows perch in the maple trees and greet the sun with their song. The water in the river runs fast and cold from newly-melting snow. Colt's foot, trout lily, bloodroot, and trillium, the early wild-flowers of spring bloom profusely from the awakening earth. All is forgiven in this moment of grace. The door swings open and nature gives consolation and hope to the anxious heart. The Great Experiment has begun.