You humans! When will you learn size doesn't matter? Just because something's important, doesn't mean it's not very small. - Frank the pug
This time around I’d like to examine a few unlikely things, starting with me.
I’m a bit unpredictable, at least in terms of the chain of circumstances that led to my birth. You could say that of yourself too, of course (if your father hadn’t gone to that dance the night he met your mother, or something of that sort). But I think my story can beat up your story.
In 1912 my grandfather prepared to leave Sweden for America. He was travelling with a friend who fell sick just before the departure from Southampton, England. My grandfather exchanged his ticket so he could take the next available sailing with his friend.
The missed ship was the Titanic.
I got thinking about the nature of chance and time after I crossed paths a while back in a Vancouver park with a man carrying a metal detector. “Ever find anything good?” I asked. “Not here,” he replied, “but last week I made the biggest find of my life at Comosun park.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“A Roman coin!” the man exclaimed. He took it to be appraised and discovered it was the real thing: a coin bearing the face of 2nd century emperor Antoninus Pius (see above).
Ancient Roman coins are as common in England as, well, dirt. They turn up in farmers fields there with surprising regularity. Not so much in British Columbia. What, I asked the man, was loose change from around the time of Christ doing in a Vancouver park, of all places? He replied there were Spanish explorers on the West Coast as early as the 17th century, and this might have been plain silver currency to one of them. Or it could have been lost by one of the pioneers working in the Vancouver area in the 19th century, in which case the coin would definitely have been a collectible. Or more recent possibilities.
But as far as archeological finds go, Chris Monk had nothing on Heinrich Schliemann.
Born in 1822 near the German city of Rostok, the young Heinrich heard fairy tales and legends from his clergyman father, including the heroic battles of Homer and the mighty city Troy, burned and leveled in a war with the Spartans.
One Christmas the father gave his son an illustrated history of the world. The book fired the boy’s imagination and Heinrich told his dad one day he would dig up Troy. Shchliemann explained in the preface to his book Ithaca:
When my father gave me a book on the main events of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus and Agamemnon - it was my Christmas present for the year 1832 - little did I think that thirty-six years later I would offer the public a book on the same subject. And do this, moreover, after actually seeing with my own eyes the scene of the war and the fatherland of the heroes immortalized by Homer.
Born into a poor family with six siblings, financial hardship limited Schliemann’s education. He started out as a tradesman, went on to learn five languages, and became wealthy in Moscow by selling ammunition to the tsar's army. He never forgot his passion for antiquity and the fabled city of his father’s tales.
Schliemann excavated the ruins of Troy in 1868, both proving it to be more than myth and shaping the young science of archeology in the process. His second wife, Sophia, posed for a photo while draped in gold jewelry Schliemann believed was the Treasure of Priam (see above).
Small enthusiasms, decisions, actions and objects can have titanic effects. This is a trivial truism in chaos theory - the so-called “butterfly effect” - but it’s worth remembering its magical aspect in our lives.
MacGuffins
The unexpected transformation of small to large, of mundane to magnificent, is a perennial theme in art, literature and film. The back of the wardrobe that opens to the land of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ children’s books, for example. Or the “crack in the tea-cup that opens/A lane to the land of the dead,” in W.H. Auden’s poem As I walked Out One Evening.
Then there’s director Alfred Hitchcock’s “MacGuffins”: the small and often misleading items around which his plots revolved: In Dial M for Murder, it’s a spare apartment key. In Vertigo, it’s a pearl necklace.
One of my favourite nonHitchcockian MacGuffins is the galaxy sought by two extraterrestrial bounty hunters in the 1997 film Men In Black. The pair learn from Frank, an alien disguised as a pug, that this island universe is actually very small and somewhere on earth (by the end of the film we learn its inside a marble on a cat’s collar).
The most memorable expression of the tiny/titanic dialectic is a fragment from the poet William Blake’s Auguries of innocence, of course:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(Some wit once appended this with, “And still make it to the office early Monday morning.”)
That small, 1900 year-old Roman coin likely sat in the ground not far from my place for a very long time before it was unearthed. A metal detector makes no distinction between such things and bottle caps, key chains or loose change of more modern vintage; it’s all part of the unitemized trash humans have littered the Earth with for ages. It’s the spark of recognition that turns random trash into magical talismans.
As Robin Williams’ mad homeless character Perry observed in the 1991 film, The Fisher King, “you can find some wonderful things in the trash.”
WEIRDness
We are the WEIRDest people in the world - Western, Educated, Industrialized and Democratic (look it up). We, the WEIRD, pride ourselves on our tough-minded skepticism. Most of us aren’t big on ghosts, poltergeists, ESP or life after death. We believe such ideas are mostly for the superstitous, the mad, the uneducated or the primitive - notions safely dismissed as anything from folkcultural curios to subcultural trash.
This is a pretty WEIRD belief system, actually. It’s only in the past 500 years that human beings have managed to thoroughly disenchant the world, ridding it of spooks and fairies and the like.
Science hasn’t completely exorcised primitive magic from the world however. It simply banished it to places where it can cause less trouble. First of all, to the land of the very small, where subatomic particles behave like ghosts - they can tunnel through solid barriers and be two places at once. So-called “virtual particles” can pop out of and vanish back into the vacuum, their existence inferred from their effects on other particles. The second place of banishment is the land of the very large, where vast entities behave like gods - stars that brew the heavier elements necessary for life before exploding as supernovae; immense black holes at the heart of galaxies that gobble up stars like Tic Tacs; pulsars that spin hundreds of times a second and so dense a teaspoon of their mass would weigh a billion tons, etc.
Magic, shmagic. For the hard-core WEIRD, we only exist for only a geological eyeblink in an indifferent, purposeless cosmos. One of the first full expressions of this idea was from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, a very WEIRD guy, in his 1903 work A Free Man’s Worship:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
Certainly the wreckage of Troy, and the city-states that followed, along with disappearance of vast numbers of human beings who lived, loved, struggled and died, makes for sobering thoughts. You might despondently conclude with Russell that we are incredibly tiny and insignificant in space and time, with the cosmic trash heap our ultimate destiny both as meaningless individuals and an accidental species.
Thinking this might be a useful exercise every once and and while for cultivating humility. Yet there‘s another angle of perception, like the opposite side of a coin. Russell’s morose estimate preceded the discoveries of relativity theory and quantum physics, which inspired astronomer Sir James Jeans’ famous pronouncement three decades later that “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”
In any case, we can’t be alien to the cosmos because we’re not just embedded in it, we’re expressions of it. This goes beyond Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan’s dictum that we are “star stuff” (the result of supernovae mentioned earlier, seeding space with the life-mediating elements that accreted into our solar system).
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies,” wrote the Zen philosopher Alan Watts. “We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.” His conclusion: “The universe is the game of the self which plays hide and seek for ever and ever.”
So perhaps what’s missing from the world is not so much magic as our ability to recognize it, whether it’s endorsed by contemporary science or not. Partway between the Planck scale and the cosmic scale, living beings are comminglings of the very large and very small, with billions upon billions of eyes co-creating the fantastic show they’re grokking.
A million million spermatazoa
“We think that most important clues are large, but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.” - UBC forestry professor Susan Simard on the first seedling that sparked her curiousity.
Years ago someone performed a calculation of the number of physically differing human beings that could exist on the basis of the human genome. The answer exceeded 10 to the 82nd power, the estimated number of subatomic particles in the universe. Such is the power of the genetic reshuffling that occurs every time chromosomes do their cellular square dance of conception.
Whether the calculated figure above is reliable or not, it’s apparent that the number of potential human beings vastly outnumbers those who have ever existed or ever will. This idea takes on peculiar force for someone who’s grandfather narrowly missed a trip on the Titanic.
You and I are expressions of universal cosmic processes with incredibly improbable results - in terms of anyone predicting our existence prior to birth. This was most most lyrically expressed in author Aldous Huxley’s 1920 poem, Fifth Philosopher’s Song, in which an invisibly tiny something kickstarts a transformation that ends with the unlikely author himself:
A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.
Lovely. Like the poem at the end. "One poor Noah." You wonder how much is chance and how much is pre-ordained. Maybe chance and the preordained are like ballroom dance partners, who require each other to dance life into being, while occasionally breaking away from each other, on the cosmic dance floor, to swirl specific events into existence.
I love this one because you manage to combine such a vast array of topics in a great narrative. One of your best!