lines

i wonder what it is that we find so attractive about the straight and narrow, the black and white. is it comfortable for some reason to deny that there is not more than varying shades of gray and infinitely curved and twisted shapes? why on earth must we fight the very nature that spawned us?

one need only look out the window to see the flaw in our design. man plans; god laughs. we tame and whip natural form, attempting to straighten and simplify things, codifying the complex and lyrical shapes of nature into ever-simpler volumes of boxes and spheres and triangles, every surface smooth, every edge razor sharp and perfectly defined. and for how long does it work? not very, when the grand scheme is seen.

a tree has no lines, a river no planes. there is no smoothness to a field, no mathematically simple perfection to a flower's petals. the world that was given to us cannot be tamed, but must be live with in accord. we section off pieces of the land with attempts at straight line fences to guard our boxes; mother nature blows them down and tears off our roofs. certainly, she tears down her own trees as well, but this is all part of how it works for her. she builds, she destroys. we build, she destroys. and yet we fight her and try to tell her that mean paternal rationality and logical progression are her masters. she has yet to lose.

i believe we are killing ourselves, evolving ourselves into irrelevance with our need for straight. nature abhors an absolute, and yet we attempt them. we build religions of absolutes, laws without subtlety, societies of relentless 'progress' and consumption. we manufacture new imaginary boundaries to define 'us' and 'them', more lines that exist nowhere but on sheets of paper just so we are able to say 'this is mine' keep out'. there is no wisdom in tilting at windmills - though romantic, it will eventually lead to ruin.

why can we not allow nature to take her courses? why must we always seek to understand? what is it within us that causes us to be unable simply to allow something to be what it is without the need to reshape it or somehow attempt to improve upon its form so that it becomes more useful to us? there is beauty in the bohemian, the poetic and swirling and curving and notched and twisted and decaying and fuzzy and gray.

i find comfort in the black and white, but it is a comfort that has never sat well with me. i blanch at the yoke of rationality that i put on myself. i see the pattern in my numbers, recognize the theoretical beauty of a straight line and a right angle. but they feel wrong somehow. when i let myself stop thinking, my inner landscape swirls and twirls, it odes not follow linear progressions of logical step and logical step.

there is wisdom in the stream of consciousness. there is beauty in allowing what is to be. the twists and turns that life throws at us are nothing more than the natural order; they are not obstacles, but simply the next turns or twists. the mind of god is very likely not a giant computer, crunching numbers and logically spitting out causes and effects, but a chaotic and self-organized system of unexplainable mystery, wheels within wheels in spiral arrays that have an order far beyond a pattern we will ever grasp. it is like wind: we know what it is and what its effects are, we know the mechanisms that create wind, but we will never really understand the how and the why. every discovery leads to another mystery. the one answer is never found, and if it ever were it would likely be a very unsatisfying 42.

and therein lies the beautiful joke douglas adams gave us. thousands of years spent crunching the numbers and the great computer responds with the final answer to life, the universe, and everything in it being 42. we will toil relentlessly to find the answer, but when we get it we won't like it. we're not supposed to. we're not built for that. we're part of nature, not its overlords. this is our charge, not our command, and we are not wiser than the mind which set it up.