The more I know, the more I seem to get a glimpse of what I don’t. When I know what I don’t, I soon find that the I-don’t-know part expands and expands. I don’t seem to know much about the past or the future. Even better, I don’t seem to know anything about the present.
Let’s travel to our past. 5 years, 100 years, 1,000 years - how about 50,000? Scientists recently sequenced a Siberian girl’s DNA from her pinkie bone. Much like me, she had dark eyes, skin and hair but she got to hang out in the Altai mountains back in the days. They call her kind the Denisovans. Denisova hominin are an earlier species of humans and Neanderthals - suggesting interbreeding between the two. What’s more intriguing is that 2.5% of my DNA (and that of most living Asians and Europeans) might be Neanderthal-laced. This means that my ability or inability to fight diseases today may be the result of sexual choices of my prehistoric grandparents. Ahem. Do we really know our past? How much past is good enough to call it so?
Let bygones be bygones - the present should be more in our grasp. But time, even in its present moment, is wide and deep. What we see is not usually what we think it is. Fungus on old bread isn't just fungus on old bread. Learning a little about mycelium, I now know that fungus serves as the Internet and circulatory system of our ecology - transferring food and intelligence. Molecular communication in the environment occurs through cellular mats of fungus, sometimes spreading over thousands of acres. I'm hardly aware that my lunch is a product of this network that has been in the works for generations past. So is the present moment really about now? I don't know.
That leaves our future. When I think of the future I'm reminded of Sonmi-451, a genetically re-engineered waitress in Cloud Atlas - a deliciously chaotic movie by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. In the year 2144, Sonmi starts a revolution when she discovers that bodies of her species are “recycled” into food to produce future waitresses. Centuries later, most humans are destroyed and the tribe that remains worships her as a fearful deity. This amusing take of the future makes me wonder about the reality of today that embeds unknown influences of the past. It also makes me wonder about the future that will borrow from an unreal today. What is future then?
When we only see the red dot on a white board, we miss the vast nothingness that stares at us. Time is expansive and cannot be contained. I don’t think Time thinks of itself as linear dots neatly arranged as past, present and future. In fact, Time possibly thinks of itself as a repetitious sphere going round and round - think night and day, season after season, yearly revolutions, solar and lunar eclipses, water cycles and so on. Why should our time be any different?
We love the false sense of security that I-know offers. But in reality I-don’t. The more immersed we are in I-don’t-know, the more we may indeed know. May be.
