What Radiolaria are teaching me about Eternity
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” — Jorge Luis Borges
I recently gave myself this magnificent book as a present. It contains the painstakingly detailed and equally beautiful illustrations of the early 20th century naturalist and artist, Ernst Haeckle. In it, I discovered the strange and wonderful creature, radiolaria, for the first time.
Radiolaria are microscopic plankton that fill the oceans, floating around eating bacteria or even smaller phytoplankton like diatoms. Side note: phytoplankton (which mostly consist of diatoms) are responsible for about 50% of the earth’s oxygen production! Radiolaria exist at all levels of ocean depth — there are polar deep-sea radiolaria and tropical radiolaria which exist within the first few feet of the ocean’s surface. They have existed for over 500 million years.
When diatoms and radiolaria die, their silicate skeletons drift to ocean floor, forming a kind of sea ooze. These microfossils make up a large proportion of ocean sediment. Due to the large variety of radiolaria, and their evolution over time, geologists can use their remains to perform geological dating. This process is known as stratigraphy.
I’m drawn to radiolaria and diatoms, as I am to other small biological phenomenon, because of their intricate beauty that has existed for millions of years — well before human observation. Haeckle, in speaking of his 1904 publication Art Forms in Nature said,
“I wished to make accessible to far more of the educated general public those marvellous treasures of beauty that lie hidden in the depths of the ocean or which, on account of their diminutive size, can be viewed only through a microscope.”
I’m also drawn to them because, in their smallness, they still power a remarkable amount of life on earth. For example, diatom skeletons formed from ancient lakes in the Sahara dessert (in modern-day Chad) blow across the Atlantic ocean, fertilizing the Amazon rainforest with their mineral-rich dust.
This genealogy of magnitude and time is well beyond human history. As so many more-than-human creatures teach us, if we are willing to listen, time (and the intoxicatingly short interval that is our lives) is not a possession of humanity. Time is, rather, the possession of a vast and expansive universe.
Linear time is a conceit of humanity, due to the constraints of our feeble bodies and minds. We walk along the thread of time, observing it as a journey from point A to point B. But that thread pierces through a cloud of infinite, eternal possibility. Hannah Arendt observed that our “finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of [our] own short time span, set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities.” Time, and our experience of it, frames our waking and wondering. Our memory, our dreaming.
We rush forward in order to live, in this dazzling and infinitely radiant — and crushingly cruel — place called earth. This place situated at the perfect distance from a large, warming star, with an atmosphere that protects life on the planet, which is filled with water and which has every impossible and infinitesimally small right dial tuned so that the planet teems with life of all varieties, colors, shapes, and sounds.
This planet, and its tiny creatures, is the best science fiction story. Landing here is a greater mystery than any of us can truly fathom.
As corporations and states corral the most precious of human resources — attention, time, creative energy — we get sucked into believing that whatever political scandal, market movement, or catastrophe is of immediate and utmost importance. We lose our sense of interbeing with all material phenomenon on this planet and in galaxies beyond.
I wonder what it might be like if we told stories about the mystical world in the Marianas Trench, the quorum sensing of bacteria, the collective intelligence of a slime mold, the complex language of whales…that there exist many intelligences and many forms of life all lurching forward towards their own meaning, however embodied and primal it may be.
That radiolaria drift along, searching for food, in all their radiant splendor. And as they float, they feed and then sink, as so many waves of humans have done before us.
This creates an oscillation of the passage of time — layered and cyclical.
We float, we feed, we sink, adding our stratigraphy to this place. Our buildings, our inventions, our highest art — float, feed, and ultimately sink. Down into the crevasse of time, layered and oozing, with the meaning making of a primal animal, searching and yearning for something without a name…
Float, Feed, Sink (a poem inspired by radiolaria)
Bodies, layered and congealing,
sweep the thresholds of time.
Floating, feeding, sinking
in an endless rhyme.
Civilizations like layer cakes,
rise and fall like waves.
Floating, feeding, sinking,
within time’s deep caves.
This is eternity,
a mystery hard to grasp.
We float, we feed, we sink,
in time’s cyclical clasp.
