778
ever will be. Since the first time, over 4 billion years ago, that rebirth continues
unabated; urgently recycling and regenerating its impulses, ideas, feelings, and
material predilections.
88.3 Organic Interiors
Whether a biome of choice predisposes one’s remains to be reborn as a begonia or
baboon has never been confirmed within the empirical confines of consciousness.
But then, empiricism does not constitute a protein, an enzyme, a cell, or a molecule.
It is a biochemical process that has as much claim to metaphysics as to hydrology.
And while within its machinations there comes a threshold of belief in facts, it is
not, itself, a fact. It has neither earth nor fire; water nor air. What is empiricism other
than a generally self-satisfied observation by a Self whose quantifications cease to
have meaning at the instant of qualification. Any laboratory is absolutely given to
the character and aspirations of the empiricist. Authoritarian space as duly described
as any other. A geometrical tyranny by which all coordinates within its planes are
pre-conditioned by the bias of the experimenter and his/her tools. Science has built
itself up upon the laws of Nature, central dichotomies, pre-disposed speculation, the
first description of animacules, rules of energy and mass, Lotka Volterra equations,
rates of evapotranspiration, Re (Reynold’s Number) and fluid velocities, Stoke’s
Law and ten thousand other conceptions, all emerging from that same room with
four walls and a roof, the laboratory. Imagine, by extension, the interior of Mauna
Loa, the biggest mountain in the world, and what that space has accomplished? The
boundaries, unseen, undetected, it has broken? Or the nearly 480,000 board feet of
lumber, with its teeming populations of microbial communities, of any senior redwood? (Fig. 88.2).
Such a space has its microcosm in the brain of an organism. That brain has windows through which, if we could see, we would take in glimpses of the hollow bones
of an albatross that abet its soaring, global circumnavigations; those species that
seldom drink water, like the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii); the long- horned
coleoptera (Derobrachus hoverei) whose adulthood in the summer months is all
about mating, not food. The shedding of skin, a multitude of metamorphoses, each
phase of an embryology, as determined by our making up of laws and rules and
phenomena, are like ordinary and partial differential equations, a calculus encompassing the likes of such mathematicians as Bonaventura Cavalieri (infinitesimals),
Leonhard Euler (topology), Joseph-Louis Lagrange (analytical mechanics), Jacob
Bernoulli (the law of large numbers), Isaac Newton (fluxions), and Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (higher derivatives). Little wonder that the plural form of calculus in Latin
refers to “small pebbles”: so myriad are the ingredients of our perennial curiosity.
88 Rebirth
ever will be. Since the first time, over 4 billion years ago, that rebirth continues
unabated; urgently recycling and regenerating its impulses, ideas, feelings, and
material predilections.
88.3 Organic Interiors
Whether a biome of choice predisposes one’s remains to be reborn as a begonia or
baboon has never been confirmed within the empirical confines of consciousness.
But then, empiricism does not constitute a protein, an enzyme, a cell, or a molecule.
It is a biochemical process that has as much claim to metaphysics as to hydrology.
And while within its machinations there comes a threshold of belief in facts, it is
not, itself, a fact. It has neither earth nor fire; water nor air. What is empiricism other
than a generally self-satisfied observation by a Self whose quantifications cease to
have meaning at the instant of qualification. Any laboratory is absolutely given to
the character and aspirations of the empiricist. Authoritarian space as duly described
as any other. A geometrical tyranny by which all coordinates within its planes are
pre-conditioned by the bias of the experimenter and his/her tools. Science has built
itself up upon the laws of Nature, central dichotomies, pre-disposed speculation, the
first description of animacules, rules of energy and mass, Lotka Volterra equations,
rates of evapotranspiration, Re (Reynold’s Number) and fluid velocities, Stoke’s
Law and ten thousand other conceptions, all emerging from that same room with
four walls and a roof, the laboratory. Imagine, by extension, the interior of Mauna
Loa, the biggest mountain in the world, and what that space has accomplished? The
boundaries, unseen, undetected, it has broken? Or the nearly 480,000 board feet of
lumber, with its teeming populations of microbial communities, of any senior redwood? (Fig. 88.2).
Such a space has its microcosm in the brain of an organism. That brain has windows through which, if we could see, we would take in glimpses of the hollow bones
of an albatross that abet its soaring, global circumnavigations; those species that
seldom drink water, like the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii); the long- horned
coleoptera (Derobrachus hoverei) whose adulthood in the summer months is all
about mating, not food. The shedding of skin, a multitude of metamorphoses, each
phase of an embryology, as determined by our making up of laws and rules and
phenomena, are like ordinary and partial differential equations, a calculus encompassing the likes of such mathematicians as Bonaventura Cavalieri (infinitesimals),
Leonhard Euler (topology), Joseph-Louis Lagrange (analytical mechanics), Jacob
Bernoulli (the law of large numbers), Isaac Newton (fluxions), and Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (higher derivatives). Little wonder that the plural form of calculus in Latin
refers to “small pebbles”: so myriad are the ingredients of our perennial curiosity.
88 Rebirth