Language, Randomness & Independence

July 4, Almanac for Post Moderns

Language misuses nature. This isn’t true just of extortionists: “mountain tops must be stripped in the name of business and jobs.” It’s true too of holistics: “I am synchronous, at one with natural patterns — the hum composes me.” The first’s violence and the second’s perceived unity have no true echo in nature; she goes her own way.

Whichever voice, economic or holistic, life’s boundless food/reproduction cycle “randomly” arcs from chance pollination to mass extinction, whether caused by a breeze, humans or a meteor.

Both the optimist and nihilist could get behind statistical randomness; “the random joins us wholly to the world, and only in co-creation is meaning”; or “the random separates everything into blind whirl and proves there is only meaning in creative destruction.” Both seem like so much language in the service of hooey.

Instead, I fall along an edge of curiosity. That if a firefly evolves to reproduce with luciferase (light bearer), and to blink in species-based patterns to attract a mate or food, then “all this” is not genetic randomness; it’s an evolved purpose. Their blinking, swarm and flight pattern (pdf) create a greater opportunity for food and mate.

Beings seem to ride a long tail of evolution and whether heliotropic, bioluminescent or civilized are only really true to a leading edge of “curiosity”. Language exists in this edge. Getting out ahead of it too far is only so much religion…

Example, a white cala lily now extends out 16 inches horizontally, out to reach sun and bee. Nuff said.

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