Waxing 2-D

It seems that humanity is a bit like every other species. We cycle through time, corkscrewing through space and time, emulating phases of the moon. We seem to come into the light of awareness and retreat to dark ages and ignorance, sometimes for centuries at a time. I spent a little time this week digging around a bit to find information about a type of textile whose origins are well-documented although the process to make it was never written down. Humanity lost this luxurious type of muslin to the mists of time. The fabric is called Dhaka muslin for the city in which it was made and was so light weight that the wearer felt nude. Clothing made from it left virtually nothing to the imagination but today, not one person on the planet remebers how it was made. Simlilarly, the rediscovery of how to make biochar or terra preta, the soil enhancing material that ancient people used to double their crop production and hold nutrients for long periods of time was lost as well. Researchers noticed a single ingredient amongst those that were required to make it work and then nearly fifty years went by before someone rediscovered the findings and began their own experiments designed to learn more about this ancient black gold. It has taken decades more to find out what made this substance useful. You see, the carbon that is the substrate upon which biochar is based is the only form of carbon that is pure enough to be stable. Once vitrified, it lasts for extremely long periods in the soil, unlike most carbon that we know and understand from our daily lives, the organic kind that represents a component part of all living things. All that carbon is not elemental, stable or pure, it is the underlying catalyst for life, part of an amalgam of chemicals and can be nearly infinitely transformed into tissues of plants, food for soil microbes, birds, bees, bats, humans or trees. We have explored organic (carbon-containing) chemistry to the point of inventing about 400 new chemicals from it each and every year based primarily on the carbon atom. We have gone full bore into the unknown, often releasing these compounds into the air, water and our bodies, before they have been adequately health and safety tested and/or studied to any extent at all. It can take twenty years of research to understand a chemical and it would not be possible to test 400 such compounds every year. If one of the 400 works for our desired purpose or economic benefit, it is deemed a viable option, until, sometimes many years later, the legacy of another txoic, carcinogenic or mutagenic compound has already been released into mass production, the environment and our bodies. When we delve into the complexities of any discipline, we can be lost in a forest by ignoring the trees. In real ways, our understanding of the texture of the world, it's lumps and bumps, the vagaries of what is possible can frequently negate our understanding about whether it makes sense to even try changing things or inventing perviously unknown systems or materials. When we weigh heavily the idea of making life easier (which has been known to be a myth for over a century) or advancing the species in one specific way, say healthier for instance, by definition we sacrifice our attention to other factors. That is why so many drugs have unavoidable side effects. We have valued the outcome more highly than how we will get there. Just as when we travel, picking whether to go by foot, bicycle, train, car or plane, once the choice is made, there is no attending to the possibility of any of the other options. So too our decisions to look to future luxury and forego whatever it takes to get there cuts us off from other possible options or experiences. When choosing the title of this post, we were looking at art that was sculptural, but then, if you added energy, it would transform into something fragile and frail, until the energy stopped going in. Then, it would become a soild sculptural form again. So too, our mind has this quality, as does the collective mind of our community. We frequently charge ahead, putting energy in to whatever our persuits are and pay little attention to the wake we leave behind. Many people have been lulled into the false belief that none of that matters. A very two-dimensional view of reality. In fact, the propensity of modern thinkers to believe in duality is a good place to see 2-D thinking on display. You can't get more two-dimensional than, "Two sides to every story". It validates the experience of bullies and fools, criminals and charlatans. If every story has two sides, does that make life easier to understand? As we continue waxing into two dimensional thought, perhaps someone should be ringing alarm bells for us to wake back up!