It seems to me that we often forget -- or never knew -- that plants, like ourselves, live linear lives. Trees are born, become saplings, experience puberty and growth, mature, and then die standing. They just do it in a much longer and much less mobile time frame than we do -- so much so that I recently found myself legitimately wondering if trees die, at all. Before you scoff, consider: aside from environmental factors, fire, erosion, lightning, lumberjackism, what would kill a mighty oak? If left alone, could a tree keep on growing forever? The answer is, I always assumed, "HYPOTHETICALLY, YES." I always assumed, "Trees are scary and silent and will keep growing forever unless we or Nature kill them."

This absurd notion was probably borne in me by the late Algernon Blackwood, who, like H.P. Lovecraft and Poe, was one of the rare masters of supernatural story-writing. Blackwood I've always found to be sexier than the rest because his stories have no skullfaced tentacle monsters to ruin their mystique (a la Lovecraft). He pretty much reinvented botany with The Man Whom The Trees Loved, a story which chillingly articulates the (I think) latent feeling most people have that trees are inherently scary.

In this story, a man begins to "listen" to the forest and ends up overtaken by the dark winds which blow across the thick silence of branches. It's never clear what happens to him, but it has the warm muffle of wet leaves and it is terrifying. The forest in the story, a crowded mass of rooted life, begins to seem like a mob. Blackwood gives the trees a hint of malice and all of a sudden you have to look twice at the elm in the backyard: is it closer than it was yesterday?

"And in the distance," writes Blackwood, "the roaring of the Forest."

Blackwood realized that trees were scary, because he understood that trees have both permanence and transparency. They are so immobile and quiet that they never remind us that they are alive at all, and we, of course, take them for granted. We see through them. They are so ubiquitous and anonymous that we treat them like strangers, passerby. On some level, this constant and seemingly endless presence is frightening; it lulls us into a false feeling of security, makes us smug in our imaginary knowledge of our coniferous colleagues. Of course, we have no such knowledge: we ignore trees completely, even if we claim to love them. They are our constant counterparts, but they are on a completely different trip than us, existing on an almost evolutionary time scale. What's more frightening than something you always considered to be reliably benign, wrapping a slowly tightening branch around your neck?

If it's any comfort, trees do not live forever, and, as far as I know, do not spend their time plotting our demise. Trees are just woody plants which continue growing until they die (the study of tree age is called Dendrochronology and it is practiced by Dendrologists.) Trees have different lifespans from one another -- some a measly 40 years*. There is a Huon pine in Tasmania that is allegedly 40,000 years old. No matter the lifespan, however, there comes a time in each tree's life, after it passes maturity, when decay begins to set in. The tree overmatures. It dies, but since it is so rooted, it remains standing (a "snag," foresters call this). Snags are considered valuable parts of a forest's health and it is generally recommended that foresters preserve at least three snags per acre, as insects and birds tend to burrow in their cavities. Snags totter around until erosion or the weather knocks them down to "log" status, technically the last stage of a tree's life.

And logs can't hurt us.

*I heard that all the palm trees in LA, having been planted around the same time in the 1950's, are all going to die soon. Does anyone know if this is true?

12:53 AM | Permalink | (6) Comments

Live Polar Zones

Archived From December 19, 2005 (9) Comments

Upon my father's recommendation, I have recently picked up C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures," a mild-mannered examination of the growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectual communities. Despite the fact that Snow's evident bias towards the sciences betrays his claims of existing in the two spheres himself, and despite the unenlightened connections he makes between the Modernist movement's emphasis on alienation and the advent of 'imbecile expressions of non-social feeling," i.e. Nazism, (I find this very unfair considering the scientific community's involvement in say, the atomic bomb, etc), "The Two Cultures" raises some good points.

One, Literary intellectuals have inexplicably co-opted the term "intellectual" to refer only to them, as if there were no others. I will cede this point to Snow, for it is totally true. Literary intellectuals are also, historically, complete luddites about technology and mock the illiteracy of the scientific community without themselves even being able to recite the first law of thermodynamics. I will be the first to raise my hand and point to myself; I just figured out the keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste last week.

Two, If the two cultures cannot manage a way to communicate -- or at least respect -- one another, then the great findings of science and the great works of art will never get the discourse and celebration they deserve. Without a shared language, the great frameworks that intellectuals build onto the natural world on either side of the chasm will only serve to better whatever discipline they are part of, without adding to the whole. Totes.

This may be an illogical segue into this entry's featured internet finding, but bear with it. I just found out last night that there is a 24-hour online webcam on the South Pole. As an admitted member of the so-called world of literary intellectuals (or whatever), my only knowledge of the South Pole comes from a) Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and, b) the collected writings of Fridtjof Nansen. Because of these sources, I had long imagined the South Pole to be a giant crystalline castle full of hell of penguins, ice-forts, diamonds of ice, and sea birds still unafraid of the presence of men. Imagine my disappointment (sure, this is a running theme) when I looked at this webcam. You know what the South Pole looks like -- this unimaginable point, sought for centuries by explorers hungry to be the first to set foot there? It's like some weathervanes, a drab building, and like cars. Every once in a while a dude walks by. It is so ugly. It literally looks like the base camp at Mount Hood Ski Bowl.

Of course, I am talking in extremes. One pole of intellectual society is a world apart from the other; as the South Pole of my dreams has been squelched by the South Pole of reality. Snow writes, "that unscientific flavour [of literary people] is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific. The feelings of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other." Granted, my hostility for the South Pole 24-hour webcam is unwarranted and is, precisely, the kind of anti-feeling Snow discusses.

However, what I mean to say is: it is not as if this new, ugly South Pole of scientific research has to negate my fantasies. They both exist, and mine can naively continue to be populated by diamond-coated polar creatures as the real one trudges along its ruined path. The important thing is that we all acknowledge the legitimacy of both conceptions -- that the real and the mythic are both acceptable expressions of the same concept. The lack of communication between the two worlds is probably rooted in an inability to see common ground. What better terrain than the Antarctic?

10:28 AM | Permalink | (9) Comments

Tusks and Swords

Archived From December 15, 2005 (3) Comments

Enthusiasts of marine biology -- the most accessible branch of the Sciences, considering its general aesthetic -- will probably have already pounced on this news item, which has been floating along the New York Times science section for a few days. For those who haven't the time, however, to remain constantly updated on experimental developments in Narhwal Tusk Theory (an ancient discipline, practiced by the Phoenicians), here is the gist: a team of Scientists -- always in teams!! -- from Harvard and "The National Institute of Standards and Technology" has just turned an electron microscope on a narwhal tusk for the first time and discovered millions of nerve endings embedded in it. "New subtleties in dental anatomy," they call it. Essentially, they've found that these completely absurd-looking tusks, which are, if you ever find yourself looking at a picture of one, always longer than you remember them to be, are actually complex sensory organisms capable of registering changes in light, temperature, and particle gradients.

The Romantic poet John Keats once made the claim that Sir Isaac Newton's experiments with prisms had destroyed the mystery of rainbows. Of course, the Romantic disenchantment with the sciences, now referred to as their fear of "unweaving the rainbow," is totally regressive and pompous. Sometimes scientific discoveries bring us new poetics: the nature of light and color in terms of physics is deeply more interesting and confusing than Keats gave Newton credit for.

Yet, this sentiment -- this antipathy towards clarification -- is sometimes unavoidable in the face of a development such as the Boring-ificiation of Narwhals, long considered (by myself) to be rare beasts capable of extraordinary violence, ice-piercing, and tusk-fights.

Oh, this is a great and interesting development, really, but there go centuries of exoticism and bafflement: gem-encrusted Narwhal tusks in museums, weird lore about "sea unicorns," the very idea of Arctic tribesmen using tusks for jousting, the latter of which I might just have made up, but thus is the nature of mythology. The Inuit call Narwhals "those who are good at curving themselves to the sky." Unfortunately, progress in marine dental biology -- and other such fields which didn't exist as recently as twenty years ago -- will continue to shatter the dream, unwinding these corkscrew tusks as Newton unwove the rainbow.

12:50 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments

The Scientific Community

Archived From December 14, 2005 (9) Comments

In one of the most important scenes of the original Godzilla movie, the old Professor character, a moral force throughout the film, becomes clearly upset about Godzilla's egg being sold to a corporation. Misunderstanding the older man's sadness, a cadet reporter asks the token girl character what the problem is. With all the forlorn sympathy in the world, the girl responds, "Oh, can't you see? The Professor is a Scientist." Her pithy statement completely elucidates to us, the viewership, that the ethical quandary faced by the Professor is deeply informed by his schooling in the objective and humanity-progessing discipline of Science. This is because Godzilla takes place in the 1960's, when these things still meant something.

Ever since queen and king times, human beings have been using taxonomy to enact their distance from and fear of the natural world into a discipline that we like to call "Science." I know the whole deal with "Science:" the Altruistic Pursuit of Knowledge, the Betterment of Dudekind, New Frontiers, Great Advances in Health. These things were definitely the case when we were still trying to figure out what shape our planet is, as well as in Isaac Newton-times -- they may even have been the case up until the early 1960's, in which people still believed that the moon came from a giant lava tide ripped from planet Earth.*

In modern times, however, something has gone awry. It seems that every news article I read in the Science section aims to outperform the last in terms of complete bullshit weirdness. A year or so ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an article about how Scientists had managed to get monkeys to send "telepathic" messages -- that is to say, had managed to transmit electromagnetic impulses from their brains -- over the internet, and into robotically reconstructed fake monkey hands across the country. This kind of news represents the confidence that Scientists have in the fact that we -- the laypeople -- have ceased to pay attention to their work. They're getting a kick out of the fact that once what they're doing bobs up in major newspapers, we are so complacent and out of touch that it completely freaks us out.

As much as I am in favor of tomfoolery in the Scientific community -- if I had an insane budget and fancy equipment, I'd be working towards simian telepathy, too -- it is our duty as enthusiasts of popular Science to remain vigilant. In the past, to be a scientist meant great moral and civic responsibility; now, however, this responsibility has befallen us. I present to you, friends, Universe, a blog for the Betterment of Dudekind.

*This is true.

9:40 PM | Permalink | (9) Comments