BY DR. AGONSON
There are things I know I don’t understand, but it frustrates me that the ignorant are so sure. It’s not even that they think they know; it’s all in a general atmosphere, the question’s already settled, it’s obvious. One point is the unbridgeable gap between living and dead things—and I’m not even considering the awful ignorance into which we living must go. We know that life comes from life—a mystery, but also a romance, a process we see whether we understand—but how does Life come? We think we know: we have old stories about river mud or dust and the hand and breath of God, but that has been supplanted by a newer story about slime and lightning and acids and whatnot.
It is this new story that people think is an answer when it is not. What we have is a supposed process that might take dead things and might make more dead things. Unlike the mystery of life from life, where we can wonder at the steps; in our own kind of life we know of sex and pregnancy and birth—all beautiful mysteries—a shocking pattern but still a pattern. It may not be a logical progression, not a mere scale climbing at regular intervals, but a tune, a happy tune, a theme of the grand symphony—life may irrationally come out of life, but we see the weird path it takes, have seen, have become familiar, and forget that it’s a miracle.
I do not much care that we feel we know that life comes from life, for it does; we know it in the sense of participation, not necessarily of comprehension. Yet the other source of life, the first life, we think we know it too, though we do not comprehend and cannot participate. We cannot form clay and breathe life into it ourselves, and if we could, would such a golem be life? Maybe. Let me take it that it would be, that our science or magic might let us participate and sew together our own Frankenstein’s monster. We might, but we have not.
What is the point of my rambling? It amazes and frustrates me that the two things are conflated: we have sex and make new life, an inexplicable fact, and this same attitude of assurance regarding the mystery that we see and play out is assumed in the mystery we have never seen nor yet taken part in.
I fear it is foolish. If we talk about extraterrestrial life, we know we are imagining, but when we talk of the origins of life, we forget that all we have is imagination. We do not wonder at the chasm between us and dead matter. It leads, I fear, to materialism, to a sort of worship of death, and from this to the living death of determinism. We do not see what a great difference there is between the living and the dead, and so think that the dead things which are closest to life and the living things closet to death are not irreparably separated.
Let me take two examples, a tree and a river. A tree is like a dead thing in how still it seems to us, and a river like a living thing in how subtle and grand its movement is; yet one is dead and the other alive. A river may be enchanted with a spirit, but it is a spirit that goes down, invariably, to the sea. The tree may seem to us still, solid like stone, but it is a rocket, blasting into heaven.
When we forget this, we forget that we ourselves may go up or down. For the tree, to go down is to die; for the river, it helplessly goes down. We, we are on one side of the chasm, and if we forget that there is a chasm, if we cannot be still enough to see the tree grow, then we will be as helpless as the river falling into an ocean and there losing our names in a great mesmerizing pool that cannot rise again but that a great light from heaven shine on it.
Tale Told 