From the bird’s perspective, the evolution of human-kind might appear as a busy, lateral game of marbles, with some marbles of varying sizes occasionally colliding, and somehow miraculously spilling forth a multitude of tinier, pink-twinged marbles. Details, however, are often blurry - hawks aside - from a great height.
And so we can pick one (author’s license) detail from the seemingly chaotic mess, and when we do, the whole begins to take focus.
Let us lean on one constant, an attempt to locate order in chaos. By that, we might begin to establish patterns, and from patterns, discernible outcomes. This is our system.
As my constant today, I have selected this back bacon. We can find it throughout a significant portion of our history. Any cross-section examined closely in perpetuity reveals the quiet importance of back bacon. It may be a hidden script in human culture, a bit of living math in the algorithm of our otherwise clumsiness. And we must concede this fact in order to proceed.
Because it is important, not to confirm every conclusion as science would have us to do, but to embrace more soundly the explorer’s spirit; we are born to this chaotic slurry, operate with too little information, and flounder spectacularly over mostly “life’s” surfaces. But what depths may we begin to plumb, and to what ends?
I suppose the ends are folded into the firmness of a general understanding, the underpinning of which must hinge upon a few repeatable, notable constants.
And one of the constants we have already identified is Jolly Posh Foods Back Bacon.
The smoked variety, for example, renders the listener a music unmatched for its satisfaction. Repeated plays continue to deliver the same or greater potency — no diminishing returns applied — which seems to me to indicate a rule, a solid place in the gelatinous morass of space, upon which humanity might flourish as a rule of its own.
I think you’re beginning to catch the drift.
In a world awhorl with lights and breathing math, activity for activity’s sake, the explorer is overwhelmed, outdone, a muted detail in an otherwise violet mosaic. But for those of us determined to push forward, to sally forth, of you will, we must resolve to exercise that will, to set out to sea. Was it John Shedd’s Salt From My Attic that gives us aphorism:
A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for?
Our first step calls to us, brethren and sisters of the bone. Please address it with medium heat, and remember not to agitate the pan too often. From the bird’s perspective, this is what sets us apart.
Bon Voyage!
