The Narrative Image

Compare and contrast these two portraits. The first is an orangutan kept captive in a zoo. The second is me, a lab technician who has demonstrated a record of reliable attendance. Oh wait. One advantage I have over the orangutan is my relative freedom to get in my car and take a road-trip (whenever work and finances allow). We hominids have done some useful things with our brains. We’ve built shelters that protect our things, our work and even ourselves from the environment. But with our usual shortsightedness, we didn’t anticipate that the subliminal hum of ballasts and the flickering hellish green cast of fluorescent lamps would drive some of us bonkers. Every once in a while I miss the sky. Careful observation has revealed that in our universe, generally, everything is progressing from order to disorder. But there are lots of eddies - places were energy gets sucked into swirling vortexes - where, briefly, order can arise from disorder. Everyday, most of us make some small contr...

If ev'ry tongue was still the noise would still continue The rocks and stones themselves would start to sing: Tim Rice / Andrew Lloyd Webber These are a few of the pages of our genealogy. Some of the pages are sterile and blank with almost no writing. Some of the pages that had interesting stories are long lost or ruined. But even now, there are still some pages – almost miraculous fragments – that preserve remarkable portraits of our ancestors and relatives. The story is not always straight-forward. There are unexpected twists in the plot. If there is an over-riding theme in our genealogy it might be that life as a whole appears resilient, creative and enduring, but that life experienced more individually, say as an individual (or even a particular species) is finite and spans no more than a chapter or two – no exceptions. We still don’t really have any solid evidence that there is any other life anywhere else in the universe. For all we know, this is the only world where matter...