The Painter without Pinky Finger
Translated from Indonesian in Eseinosa Wordpress
You and I are dusts of the universe. We are so small and meaningless, so I guess we have to deal with this reality. All things that we consider important today, from religion to love, are nothing but fairy tale. Relax, even when apocalypse come, we’ll be the only ones who die. The universe will continue and the afterlife will prevail only in books and artifacts we left behind.
Homo Erectus exist since 1.9 million years ago and extinct about 70 thousand years ago. Our species, Homo Sapiens, emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago, and started to show physical evident like us modern human about 50 thousand years ago. Their minds could’ve been a lot more primitive than the Homo Erectus who had built houses with woods and carpet floor with animal skins.
The oldest evidence that made us consider early humans as homo sapiens like ourselves, was not from their fossilized bones, but from the products they left behind. Such as the Lascaux cave painting in France which was not only realistic but also narrated a story of animal movements. The 16 thousand years old painting was the first animated images ever created. From the hand print on the walls we know that the painter had lost his/her right pinky finger.
These facts are not the main topic of this article. I put them there just to show our portion as humans in the universe; how small we are and how far we are, even with our nearest species Homo Erectus. I haven’t even begin to compare human beings with dinosaurs, or the universe as a whole, which will make us a lot more smaller. But at least, with all this, I can say that I am a true agnostic, and religion are nothing but old tales for a human species who temporally hitch-hike in this vast universe.
The logic and concrete evidence of evolution, the carbon dating and the development of science has made me calmer in living this life as an entity whose existence is not so important. These facts also help me like the bible or religion help those who believe them, in embracing their life and melancholy. Religion teaches how small humans are, how temporal life is, how afterlife is more real than reality. Science teaches almost the same things without the afterlife, heaven, or hell. Science gives room for me in giving meaning to my life. I can read many books, listen to many stories, music, watch many films, play, and in turn let me left artifacts of my own.
I have never have the ambition of afterlife, heaven or hell. My ambition is to leave my work in helping people today and people in the future, just like the painter without pinky finger. This, I think, is our signature today: that 16 thousand years time and space, can be read and interpreted today, and give meanings to us as fellow humans. The painter did not know words or arts concept. He painted it because the unknown-Gods inspired him to do so, to record what he saw outside the cave, or most likely the Australian Aboriginal legend, painting dreams in the cave to create the outside world.
O, how small are we. How small am I. And in that smallness, life becomes light. Most of us are easily stressed out these days, moreover those people who live in big cities and connected to the internet and global network. Lonely people are everywhere. Interpersonal relationships around us can make us hard to breath, can make a teenager shooting a church congregation, killing school children.
These days, crisis is our daily meal. From the middle east, the economy block discussion, until environmental crisis. If I may borrow Gabriel Garcia Marquez terms, this is our hundred years of solitude.
Never mind. Let’s just do our jobs and live our life anyway we want it. The sweet and bitter, we should enjoy. I’m going back to read world history after writing this, or a story of a blind girl who learn Darwinism from a lunatic.
Enjoy life and have a good struggle.