Crude Physicality

The mysteries of life and existence reveal their truths to us in many ways. I suppose that’s the appeal of staying alive — the romance belying the promise of unraveled complexities. Yet while the answers tantalize us from eternities of near horizons, the mysteries of life have a way of disappearing when you deconstruct them to their simplest components. The world doesn’t seem as romantic a place when you peel away the assumptions of awe, profound purpose, and reverent wonder. And after all, what’s life without a little romance? I ask that question earnestly, because I’m not always sure I know the answer.

We imbue our lives with so much significance and insist on the eminence of such things as God, love, society, and principle. I don’t claim to understand any of these things. I am no scientist, and I am no philosopher with a viewpoint worth a damn. All I know how to do is to deconstruct without remembering how the pieces fit back together when I’m done. At times lately, the mysteries of life seem to do nothing more than exhaust me. It’s a tiring game, pretending that life still enchants you.

As far as my imagination will allow me to comprehend, it occurs to me that life, the universe, and existence can all be summed up into a simple phrase: crude physicality. Humanity defines its salvation on the belief that we transcend beyond mere flesh, that we are so much more than just a collection of cells and chaotic particles: molecules, atoms, strings, and quarks, all stirring about in the cosmic stew. But what does it mean to be saved when you reduce the most precious things in our universe to crude physicality?

Everything within the realm of human understanding is rooted in something physical. Thoughts and emotions are a mix of chemicals and electrical charges running through our bodies. Words and songs and poems and laws and inspired revelations are mere conceits of the mind, all rooted in physical stimuli darting about our brains. The most beautiful sounds ever heard, the most profound revelations ever conceived, and the deepest sensations of passion ever endured can all be reduced to mundane explanations of biology and body chemistry. We exist as complex formations of mass perceiving existence through waves of vibrations in matter both within and without us. We exist on a plane of particles and space, actions and reactions, friction and collision. The human body is merely a vessel, crudely calibrated to experience existence on a physical plane.

The mysteries of life and existence seem less distant and a little less significant as you approach the realization that nothing we can define is truly intangible. What romance is there left to find when you reduce everything to a heap of stimuli and oscillating atoms? What is romance at all? What is life?

The best among us might persist in the face of so much pessimism and sing a hopeful song about the beauty of life; but what is song? The most beautiful sounds a human can create begin as electrical impulses in the brain, which travel organic conduits to inform the lungs and the tongue and the diaphragm to inflate and sing. Gentle sounds pass through vibrating bags of flesh up a tube and through the lips, and the sounds stir surrounding air molecules and send waves of vibrating measures traveling to every living thing with an eardrum within range. These sounds penetrate chambers of ears and stimulate tiny eardrums, which dutifully report the sensations to their own corresponding brains. And that’s how song can travel from one mind to another. Song is the perception of creation, one mind almost literally touching another through a vibration of particles in a delicate dance of reciprocity. Song is such a marvelous thing, yet what is song if nothing more than a complex vibration of particles in the air? Song is merely sound, matter set into motion by breathing bags of liquid, flesh, and gas. Life is a mere gathering of mass haplessly prodded into untidy motion. Salvation can seem like less of a sure thing in the course of so much crude physicality.

I suppose this litany reveals me as something of a cynic, though I’ve always thought myself as more of a grudging optimist. In the midst of all this nihilism and detachment, I’ve sought out refuge in even the most unlikely corners. Of all of the strange places to look for reassurance, my journey has led me to a fundamental law of physics: The Law of Conservation of Matter. According to the matter conservation law, while matter is constantly changing its form, it is neither destroyed nor created. In a closed system, while the same sample of water might transform freely between drops of liquid, chunks of ice, or wisps of vapor, the number of atoms within the system would always remain the same. There is no destruction or creation. Matter is merely rearranged.

The physicality of existence is not something that we should necessarily despair. Even without the mysticism of the sacred intangible, there is beauty yet to find. All that has ever existed, and all that has yet to exist, are one and the same. The same substances that make up our bodies, the same particles that we live to breathe, the same molecules that we consume and digest, the same chemicals that swell deep emotions inside our chests — it’s all the same stuff that once composed the dinosaurs, the same particles that those ancient beasts breathed, the same atoms and molecules that once composed ancient civilizations, the same complex amalgamation of chemicals and mass that once inspired our ancestors in distant times to write poetry, to fall in love, to celebrate and commune, to go to war and to make peace. The stuff of life and existence is constantly in a state of reformation and revision.

There is so much triviality that serves to divide us, yet so much uniformity of substance and form that reminds us that we are all but individual specimens of a vast, astonishing whole. In life, though we might act with a fair degree of independence, we all walk fundamentally in step, coasting the interminable waves of mass in unified momentum. Life is a dance of sensations, a barrage of vibrating stimuli, motions of matter that affect us in ways that are significantly the same. There’s a curious kind of harmony underlying our chaotic state. In death, I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of the everlasting soul, but I do know that the compounds of molecules within our bodies never cease to be. In death, there is no destruction, but deconstruction. We are merely rearranged. Perhaps when I die, the nutrients from my body will form into a tree which consumes carbon dioxide expelled from living lungs, and which exhales oxygen into the atmosphere for living lungs to breathe.

Everything that was and is to be exists in a state of infinite possibility. What is life? What is existence? The truths to those mysteries are far more exciting than they might at first seem.

(Featured Image Photo Source: MorgueFile)