Imagine that scene, or whatever version of it you grew up with yourself. Watching water flow over stones is almost universal among humanity. Imagine watching such a trill, and then you hear a rock upriver shift in the flow. This changes the pattern of the river ever-so-slightly, but the trill you were admiring for its beauty and perfect curves suddenly vanishes and can never be restored by anything you can do.
Such, I realize tonight, is the human condition. We are like the trills in the river. All the parts of us that were us are already long gone down the flow. All the parts that are us are just coming to be us, will be part of us very briefly and will then flow on accordingly. And someday, when something in the world changes just-so, the trill itself will vanish and no human effort will be able to bring us back.
But what is it to love a trill? What is it to mourn one? What reality did it ever really have? It was just a shape of moving water.
20 comments:
From a timeless Creator's perspective it is always there
Yes, all of them all at once.
Ever notice the pattern repeat in different places?
A cloud, a ripple in sand, a piece of mother of pearl, a stone, a section of wood, all can show the exact same pattern.
Speaking to your post, I was once a bit ahead of a group on a trail. Waiting for a bit beside a rivulet, and thinking about how it resembled some beautiful Japanese water feature, I decided to rearrange the stones to make it "perfect". Alas, all it got was more and more forced and awkward. It was instructive.
You cannot step into the same river twice.
You cannot sail on yesterday's wind.
On the other hand, maybe everything depends on whether we ever learn to control tachyons.
Eric Hines
Riffle, pool, riffle, pool, I learned to read flowing water when I was in graduate school, to get a better sense of what the stream was doing, then see if I could sort out why, and how to restore the stream to health if that was desired. Riffles and pools move downstream with rain, snowmelt, and seasons, unless they meet a knickpoint, a place where the bedrock says "thus and no farther," only to begin again below the fall. The pattern repeats over centuries ebbing and flowing with the waters, sometimes carving a mark on the land that will remain until the end of time, other times ephemeral and faint that survives only in an observer's memory.
Rivers are the oldest of things, yet always renewing themselves. Perhaps that is why they inspire reverie and contemplation, and serve as metaphors for so much of life, in so many cultures and times. Riffle, pool, riffle.
LittleRed1
Of course, then too there’s nothing to mourn. Nothing is lost.
We are immortals created in the image of God. It is only fitting that we love our fellow immortals because we should spend eternity together. We rightly mourn their deaths because we are not made for death and separation. It is a grievous thing.
And pass the mead, please.
“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
You’re welcome to some of my mead, but that came to me in a dream. I got up out of bed to write it down.
Mead, dreams, poetry, it's all related.
There is something true in this. I used to live within sight of the sea, and have missed it ever since I moved inland. I may have missed it from before I ever saw the sea, though I don't rightly remember. There is something calming in a creek or small pond, even.
Maybe listening to water is listening to the primordial world from before Creation.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
I've also heard it suggested that it is recalling our early life in the amniotic fluid of the womb, when we go through our own creation cycles.
I also always loved the way the Silmarillion has creation coming from song, IIRC.
Paradoxes, or, at least, difficult questions:
Materially, we are just trills in the creek. Everything supports that. The human body -- which is everything for a materialist -- is like the ship of Theseus, constantly replacing its cells. In the geological timescale, one human life isn't even a lasting trill; it's a momentary flare of water. Christianity says something quite different, though, and somehow both of these beliefs can co-exist in a sort of uneasy tension, although I think the Christian subordinates the material to the spiritual and resolves it that way.
Buddhism has a similar seeming paradox. A permanent theme of Buddhist thought is the transience of life. Yet, they also believe in reincarnation. The universe is an endlessly patient teacher which will reincarnate you until you get it right, tens of thousands of times, millions of times, if necessary.
Another paradox seems to be between human epistemology and divine revelation. Is man the rational animal, or the image of God? If both, how does that work? There are very well-developed answers, but many thinkers have rejected them: some land in Unitarianism, others deism or agnosticism or atheism.
And the trill analogy itself points toward the paradox of free will vs determinism: Does the trill have any choice in its flow? Water doesn't seem to; are we different in some way? Or is it that the past has already determined our present and future? A common topic at the Hall.
I know these are not really paradoxes proper, but they often seem paradoxical to me. We are both transient and immortal, rational and divinely inspired, determined and free, all at the same time.
That seems like a cool way to spend your time.
Swiftwater rescue training had a lot to say about how to read a river, which is a matter of life and death when you're engaging with one in flood. It's a highly useful skill.
Determined and free is a genuine paradox, at least if it isn't a contradiction.
Interesting! I've never spent much time with rivers and am quite ignorant on these matters.
Another related issue is that of meaning: Does a human life have intrinsic meaning?
Materialism, determinism, and human-centric epistemologies suggest not.
Yes, Existentialism is the answer to the problem of meaning proposed by the materialists. So, no, but you can find or make your own, they claim.
I also have always admired that metaphor.
Yet another idea stolen from a Christian thinker! But yes, I think it is difficult to live as a complete absurdist for very long. Even Camus talked about good and evil as if they were real things in an absurd universe.
Post a Comment