Nothing is Truly Lost?

I believe in the conservation of matter and energy.

I believe in the private history of inanimate objects.

I believe that if the Mona Lisa were situated on the far side of the moon, her smile would still charm.

I believe that if a Scandinavian elephant falls in the woods, it makes a sound, even if there were no elephants in the Scandinavian woods of Scandinavia.

I believe in the veracity of mythos, and of logos.

I believe that knowledge may be lost to all Mankind, if we willfully ignore it, but that all knowledge is Known by Another, and nothing is truly lost.

Ugaritic script on a gift-shop replica.

Every time I see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I am amazed and chastised at both the beauty and depravity of the human mind. The fact that we can spin out of blasted sand objects so lifelike they counterfeit the real thing – petals so fine they seem almost yielding to the touch, stamens, tendrils that curl and seem about to sway in the breeze – exquisite, delicate, inimitable: the technology! But also, above all, the delicacy and craft, the skill, the patience – lost forever with the last of the family who were such skilled glassblowers they knew no equal in their time nor in ours.

image from Wikipedia

No one on earth right now can recreate those flowers. If they crack – and they are under constant atmospheric strain to do so – they are lost forever. Only an untold amount of money keeps them housed in a room where they are preserved for as long as possible. When the money runs out, when we cease to value them enough to devote resources to them, they will crumble to dust. And yet, even this is only a temporary solution to an inevitable end: we can only slow decay, not stop it entirely. And yet the things they mimic – the living, breathing flowers they cunningly recall, the things themselves have some secret lightning to them that continually generates, that ensures a kind of organic immortality – not for the organism, but for, perhaps, some essence, some inherent thing smaller than we’ve spliced the gene – and we don’t spare those a thought or even a second look.

Atlantis was drowned beneath the waves. The Library of Alexandria was destroyed. The artifacts of China were brutally smashed, its priests and devotees humiliated, in what we call the Cultural Revolution. The beast within has no respect for culture, for refinement or beauty – it is pure instinct: pure basal instinct, and rages against all things created by wisdom and intellect to reflect Beauty. It rages against the machine. It rages against the Man. It rages, it rages against the dying of the light, and in so doing, it snuffs it out. It is the godlike in us that creates art, creates secondary beauty, the imitation of Living Beauty. It is the war between Beast and God that fuels the cycle of destruction and creation, destruction and creation – And it is our job to appoint curators to the things we are on the verge of losing, because there is an inherent good in it. We may never be able to read it again, but then again, who are we to say? Even now they are deciphering the script in that previously-indecipherable tablet up there, with computing power that would have stunned the ancients.

If we put our mind to it, that awesome collective brain of the most educated human race in history, I believe we can recover – we can even recover the very depths of history and pre-history, and pre-pre-history, in the dark backward and abysm of time….