The Fathomlessness of Space

Once again touching back to former posts I just wanna briefly express my appreciation and fascination for what has become one of my absolute favourite authors; H.P. Lovecraft. Moving my way through his complete works on my Kindle, I came across a short story yesterday, one of many that I am re-reading, which is definitely one of my favourite of his tales; The Colour Out of Space. As in many of his other tales it involves ordinary people who come into contact with cosmic forces and entities beyond grasping and control and as a result, are usually in gruesome and hideous fashion both mentally and physically destroyed. A key feature of Lovecraft's, is that he only always hints at what these forces are and what their effects are on us, leaving a lot of stuff open to the interpretation of the reader.

What Lovecraft and I share is an intense fascination of the unknown, most notably the deep oceans and outer space. In earlier posts I touched briefly on this fascination, as in the scene from Life of Pi, where the camera dives into the deep ocean and provides a brief glimpse into this astonishing world of mysteries, a journey my mind occasionally undertakes as well when staring into an ocean horizon. Or more tangibly in Kaikoura, New Zealand, when I was fortunate to observe two sperm whales resting on the surface before once again heading into the depths to feed in the darkness several kilometres below. To think of all the things that is going on right now so far away from the sunlight in untouched and unexplored chasms and abysses can really tickle the mind. Time that by infinity and you get a sense of what outer space is about. Here it is not even a joke, only a small, even ridicoulous amount of what's out there have been observed and documented by humans. So much could be out living personal legends that are far beyond the comprehension of us feeble beings. Touching back on the previous post about why even rocks can potentially be interesting, think about all the rocks that are currently floating around in the vast sections of space between planets, maybe after previously have been a part of one or several planets that have now long gone. Hell, our own planet is made up of precisely such rocks, they are the ones that allegedly brought life to earth. But where did they come from? What journey brought them across the space into our solar system? What could they potentially be bringing with them?

Are you fascinated yet? If not, I will quote Lovecraft. In The Colour Out of Space he tells the story of precisely one such rock, a meteorite carrying something unknown, something out of space that ends up spelling disaster for the inhabitants of the plot where it lands. The way Lovecraft describes the meteorite excellently summarizes our mutual fascination with outer space:

"...that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside: that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force and entity.",

and again towards the end of the story:

"a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."

Although Lovecraft's examples are always highly dramatic, I too can sense the fathomlessness that space offers. The distances and objects out there are really beyond comprehension for us cosmically insignificant creatures, which only serves to make these "extra-cosmic gulfs" all the more fascinating.

"Just a Rock"

A lot of people find museums and ruins boring while I find them absolutely amazing. I think this is a matter of perspective. Being a pragmatic person myself I rarely give anything more meaning than it deserves and looking at ruins and only seeing a bunch of stones is absolutely understandable. It's when you open your mind and starts to hear the stones telling their story that they become fascinating. I am not talking about hearing actual voices here, I am talking about appreciating the history which has made these ruins ruins, and what lead up to that particular point when they seized to be walls, ceilings and liveable and became nothing but rocks. This is achieved partly by studying history or, to take it even further, geology, but as these are intricate and difficult sciences wrought with biased opinions and theorizing and exaggerated tales written by victors, using your fantasy and speculating is usually enough to make even the most insignificant looking rocks intriguing. This is not really a new epiphany as I have always found history fascinating but through the series of epiphanies described in earlier posts I can now easier put my fascination into words. 

I did have an epiphany of sorts in Kakadu National Park staring into our campfire (staring into fires always sets the mind racing, and this was no exception), feeling the accumulated history of not only that place but of the entire world weighing down upon me. In Kakadu they have some of the oldest art in the world in the form of aboriginal rock art painted upon rocks that coincidentally also are some of the oldest rocks in the world, formed 1.5 billion years ago, at least according to our exquisite tour guide. Having been a tour guide myself I know the liberties from fact that are sometimes taken, not always on purpose yet especially when it comes to numbers I found in retrospect that people will believe anything you tell them, however implausible. Either way, it did set my mind racing. One painting in particular really put the age of those paintings into perspective. It depicts the Tasmanian tiger, a creature that became extinct as late as the 20th century on its last bastion of Tasmania. But 6000 years ago they existed in the northern part of Australia as well which means the painting of the tiger in Kakadu is AT LEAST 6000 years old. Hold on, SIX THOUSAND. Just grasp that for a second. I am 27 years old, the painting in front of me is 6000 years old. The rock it is painted on is ONE AND A HALF BILLION years old. The rock was created during the meteor showers that brought water to earth and formed in the most chaotic and hostile environment to then erode and be owergrown throughout unthinkable time until sophisticated animals start painting on it and then later on, more sophisticated animals wearing clothes and carrying technological gadgets arrive and take pictures of it. Being in this environment brought back a lot of my earlier thoughts on history at once. History is everything we are, have been and ever will be. To think that if I trace my ancestry far enough back, my forefather trod the earth at the same time aborigine people were painting images of the animals around them and going further back all of us alive today was at some point a one celled organism. This particular epiphany was spawned by Terence Malick's Tree of Life, a film that almost everyone hated, but if I watch it again I will come back to it in another post. This film brilliantly makes the connection that I am trying to make here and which crashed down on me while staring into the fire in Kakadu. That we are all here because of what came before us, the universe and our planet being created, life spawning in the oceans, evolution, the rise of Man, all has led to this exact moment in time where we are now, and we are all part of the same world and same history and carry it with us everywhere we go, whether we realize it or not. Every time you drink a glass of water you are drinking hydrogen atoms created in the Big Bang and just think about the age of stones lying around you and what they have been around for and witnessed. 

Having recently visited Uluru, aka. Ayers Rock, the idea of the history of stone and the fascination that history and geology potentially holds really got put into perspective. So many people have said to me: “it’s just a rock”, the same way ruins are just rocks. This is where you should start to listen to the history of this particular rock. It was once part of a great mountain range, has been continually shifted in numerous directions and now is primarily underground. If you go or have been to Uluru and understand how big it is, these facts will become much more visceral. To then say “it is just a rock”, really makes me feel sorry for people who look at the world like that instead of appreciating history like I do, pragmatic as I believe myself to be.

This thought is a very heavy one, and basically connects to everything I have talked about on this blog so far. As such, it will no doubt pop up again in future posts as it is too big a subject to handle in one post. But give history a chance; it is actually extremely interesting if you open your mind up to it. Not only does it make museums, ruins and big rocks interesting, but since EVERYTHING has a legend, potentially EVERYTHING has an interesting history to tell. Thus EVERYTHING is potentially interesting. When you look at the world with this type of fascination and curiosity I can assure you, you are never bored. Needless to say I don’t carry this notion with me everywhere I go, but it is always refreshing to pop it up once in a while and look at the world with a fascinating gaze even if most of the rocks you encounter are indeed “just rocks”.

The Little Things

Through another beautiful coincidence I recently came across the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. I picked it out of the book exchange because I knew about the movie by Peter Jackson although I had not seen it. I knew however the main plot; that it is narrated by a dead 14-year old girl who is murdered by a serial killer and then narrates from heaven how the world continues without her. I have always had a morbid fascination with serial killers and the darker corners of the human mind, finding it fascinating and disturbing at the same time, what some people are capable of doing. Alongside with my fascination of death and ghosts I have always wanted to watch the movie, but as chance was I ended up reading the book first instead, another blank coincidence. I remember a specific occasion standing in Blockbuster in Copenhagen picking up some of my complimentary free movies due to my employment in another of their franchises and choosing between The Lovely Bones and another film and opting to go with the alternative. Now I am glad I did because I am sure I would probably not even have read and certainly not have enjoyed the book correspondingly had I not. 

This book is extremely well written and furthermore it really hit the mark personally for me aimed straight at my softest emotional core and I think a soft spot in most other people as well; childhood. Mainly through Susie's (the dead narrator) flashbacks back towards the time she was alive of time spent with her family, little seemingly insignificant moments of standing on her porch in her sleeping wear a cold winter morning, looking at her parents' hobby grave rubbings with her sister and watching her baby brother play with his friend. The way these memories are described really reminded me of seemingly as insignificant moments from my own childhood, playing with my brother and his friend, reading through my father's books and rolling on my grandmother's lawn. To reiterate a cliché, these little things are what life is all about because somehow they are the moments that always stay with you. Deep down inside of you these moments of a happier and carefree time will always stay with you and define your inner characteristics no matter how many layers you add on through your life and how different a person you become. Not to say that all these moments occur in childhood. Little random moments that stay with you for years and years continue to occur all through your life. Some of the epiphanies that form the backbone of this blog could even be said to be of similar character. Sometimes it is just a feeling or a thought that creates the memory. 

What really made The Lovely Bones hit home as well is the fact that this girl who meets a terrible and way too early end holds on to precisely these moments in the afterlife, which I find a truly beautiful thought. From the afterlife she continuously watches over her family and observes how they evolve following her departure leading to other really emotional scenes. In many ways the gap she leaves behind greatly affects the personal legends of her family and friends, including directly through all her belongings, some of which take up a lot of space in the plot of the book, accentuating my notion in the earlier post that objects have legends as well that can affects us as much as personal legends if coincidence wills it.

No book has ever made me cry as much as this one, mainly because of the aforementioned connections to my own memories it brought forward making the tragedy of the book feel all the more real. However it is by no means a sad book and what Susie's story leaves you with is a real appreciation of and thirst for life. And it's all about enjoying the little things J

A Network of Legends

Following up on my previous posts about Personal Legends and Road Takens I would like to extend this notion of a forward moving itinerary that we all follow under heavy influence of coincidences and random circumstances. Not only do we, thinking human entities, follow these routes but EVERYTHING else does as well. And by everything I mean everything. This connection dawned on me the night before I left Cairns to go to Darwin to start work there at another office of the company I worked for at the time. This transition was extremely stressful as I was in the midst of learning a new job, bidding farewell to friends - new as well as old - and moving all my stuff from place to place at the same time. Yet as I was eating a hurried dinner at my hostel before going downtown for my last night celebration I had another epiphany (you never know when they occur!). I was consuming a salmon salad, not a regular dish of mine yet I had a couple of days earlier said farewell to a close friend who was leaving for Brisbane and she had left some of her food behind including a can of salmon, and I was now getting rid of my remaining food. Whilst eating I bit down on a fishbone of one of the salmons which made up the contents of the can and that's when the legend of that particular salmon dawned on me. This was a creature spawned in waters somewhere far away from my current location, had lived its entire life before being caught by fishermen stripped of its good parts before being chopped up in a meat grinder, canned and put on the shelf in a supermarket in Cairns, bought by my friend and then through her passed on to me to have its bony remains flicked away by me to end up on the floor outside the hostel kitchen. From there it would presumably be swept up and sent to a dump somewhere where its journey would probably come to an end. This particular example may not be the most interesting to think of, yet it did make me realize that everything has a personal legend even fish and their bones they leave behind. By coincidence they end up halfway around the world crossing legends with countless others, both persons and objects. Since then I really appreciate the act of passing on objects to others. I exchanged the copy of The Alchemist that was given to me by a special friend to another book which made another huge impression on me and will form the subject of a later post and concordantly I'd like to think that my copy of The Alchemist will similarly be picked up by another person and cause a similar train of thoughts as it did to me. Another example is a snorkel I picked up of the bottom of the sea in Sydney just like new. In Darwin I went to the extraordinary Kakadu National Park where my friend and tour guide lost his snorkel while diving freshwater pools there. Thus before leaving Darwin I gave my spare snorkel to him continuing its own personal legend. These inanimate objects all have personal legends and to think about where it has taken them can be a fascinating train of thought. As anyone who knows me can tell you I often cite The Simpsons in almost all contexts. But the show also provides a great example of the personal legend of objects in the very memorable episode spoofing Citizen Kane where Mr. Burns is trying to get reunited with his lost teddy bear, Bobo. As viewers we are shown Bobo’s personal legend from the moment Burns lost it as a child after which both Charles Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler briefly possess it before it ends up in the Kwik-E-Mart and bought inside a block of ice by the Simpsons. Obviously, few objects have personal legends this interesting, but the very notion of what they might have witnessed can be tantalizing in itself.

I remember looking at a helmet of a German knight of one of the crusades at the National History Museum in Berlin, Germany back in February 2012. The journey did dawn on me then but only now can I label it. To think about the journey this helmet had taken from being formed through to the tools of a blacksmith several hundreds of years ago, to being on the head of a knight fighting and possibly killing people or being killed while wearing that very helmet, to ending as a trophy or heirloom handed down through generations perhaps stowed away in a casket or an attic for years on end, to end up in front of me in a museum in the modern sprawling metropolis that is Berlin, a city which is incredible on its own, is indeed fascinating. This ties in to my general fascination with history and how everything around us tells us a story of what came before. This will form the subject of a later post (I've had a lot of epiphanies lately!). This helmet had a personal legend that spanned several centuries, longer than any of us, yet as the fishbone I chewed shows, even after life fades away our personal legends may continue and cross and by chance influence the legends of others such as the fishbone of a random salmon did mine. Everything has a personal legend, a road taken, and together this network of legends is what makes up the very foundation of existence. See how much you can get out of chewing on a fishbone? To be further developed...

The Alchemist and the Personal Legend

I recently came across a book entitled The Alchemist by Brazilian author Paolo Coelho. This book tells the story of a young shepherd boy who by a number of random aquiantances and occurrences is pushed onto a quest to fulfill his "personal legend" which is finding a treasure at the Pyramids of Egypt. Along the way he becomes wiser and wiser to the nature of the world. Helped by a wise alchemist the boy learns to listen to his heart, read the omens around him that exists in everything and the nature of love and its place within, or more appropriately; outside, his personal legend. Without giving any more of this wonderful book’s plot away, I can truly say it is one of the best books I’ve read in many years and what makes my reading experience even more special is the manner and timing with which this book that I had never heard of came to me. 

It was given to me by a girl I met in the hostel in Sydney where I worked for two months whom I eventually ended up being very fond of. At the same time I was at a crossroad in my own travels as the job I had returned to Sydney for kept getting pushed back and eventually proved to be non-existent. Then when the girl left I felt Sydney really had nothing for me anymore and I needed a change of scene and a fresh start. I would then be lying if I said that the aforementioned girl’s travel itinerary didn’t factor into my decision to head up the east coast of Australia with her and her friends eventually ending up in Cairns where I am now located. I have now found a great job with a travel agency, a job that I probably would not have gotten had I not decided to undertake the trip with the girl and experience some of Australia’s tourist attractions along the way. Although the girl has now moved on I truly feel that my life is back on track and that I am now again moving closer towards my own personal legend after months of doubt and uncertainty. That this book should then be the legacy that the girl left with me before she left suddenly makes the last three months seem like one unbroken string of coincidences that surely enough led me straight to where I am now, back on track.

This is precisely one of the main points Coelho makes in his book. That if a person has a will and determination to follow his desires then the universe will strive to make this journey possible by providing omens and coincidences that will lead the person in the right direction. Had I not been offered the fake job in Sydney I would never have gone back there, had I not been stationed on Heron Island before my return to Sydney with a person who knew the manager of a hostel in Sydney I would not have gotten my nightwatch job, had I not gotten my nightwatch job I would not have met the girl, had I not met and started to like the girl I would not have spent the money to travel up the coast, had I not travelled up the coast I would not have gotten my current job and of course a little treat; had I not travelled with the girl I would not have come across The Alchemist and made these connections J

It all ties back to what I was talking about in my earlier post entitled The Road Taken. That life is just one main road, the road taken and that everything that happens on that road shapes who you are and where you end up. This latest series of events just confirms this point as well as how potent coincidences are to who we are and who we become. In the words of The Alchemist my getting this book at exactly this point when I am feeling blue that the girl left, yet confident that this new job will point me in the right direction, is definitely an omen that I am in fact heading in the right direction. Not that I ever doubted this as there is only the one road taken anyway, but reading The Alchemist has only confirmed this notion and I warmly recommend reading it, no matter where on the way towards your own personal legend you are.

Life according to Pi

In my pursuit to watch all the academy awards nominees for Best Motion Picture I recently went and watched Ang Lee's "Life of Pi". First off, I like movies that make you think, and this movie did just that. Enough so that I walked an extra round around my block before returning home because I needed to process what I had just seen. Without spoiling anything, the movie asks the viewer to make up his own mind as to the stories being told in the film, and through that choice determine whether or not you are a believer. I do not really care for the religious message in the film but I do like that it leaves interpretation fully up to the viewer. (Which is always the case in some sense) Besides that there is some beautiful cinematography in this film, very fitting for the 3D format in which I saw it. Some of the images definitely stuck in my mind especially the CG animals that crowd the film, most notably one of the lead characters, the tiger Richard Parker. My own favorite animal, sharks, made numerous appearances as well, the one that I remember most vividly is the sharks fighting it out with a hippo underwater at night. Pretty stunning image! The stunning imagery continues in my favorite scene in the film when Pi and Richard Parker are both on the brink of starvation and Richard Parker is gazing into the abyss below. The camera then tracks his view into the depths and reveals the plethora of life that exists beneath the waves in a dreamy, surreal manner. Seldom has my love of the oceans been so beautifully condensed into on sequence. That scene also reminded me of my earlier idea of everything in the world happening at once, see the post entitled The Water is Still Running in the Niagara Falls. As a Divemaster I have a natural fascination of the underwater world that goes back to when I was a kid. Particularly the open and deep ocean is something that continues to fascinate me today. Just thinking about what amazing scenes take place deep below the waves where no human eye can see blows my mind. Just imagine, kilometers below the surface giant squids are fighting to the death with sperm whales as featured in the scene in "Life of Pi". The ocean is such a treasure trove of life where only a brink of it ever comes into contact with humans. Doing my Deep Diver Specialty here in Sydney some months ago I had a genuine Circle of Life moment doing my safety stop after diving to 40 meters. Just below the surface right in front of my face was these small blue cylindrical shapes, no longer than half a centimeter. At first I thought they were just thrash pieces floating around but when I approached one with my finger it actually jetted away from me. It was alive, I was surrounded by tiny life forms. And that after a dive which had offered more convenient oceanic life such as sharks, rays and fish. That experience further enhanced my fascination of the deep and expanded my own personal world, as explained in the Niagara post. That is something that often strikes me when looking at the waves, especially at open seas, how much stuff is going on right now under the waves, just like Richard Parker in the film. This realization is sometimes overwhelming to the point of being scary which is something I will come back to when I get around to writing about one of my favorite authors; H.P. Lovecraft, who also has a morbid fascination with the mysteries of the deep.