Let me tell you what’s on my mind. There is so much going on in the world at this time, a great deal of it incredibly disappointing, especially if you are someone looking for even a sliver of optimism. As two or three of you may know, I now have a weekly podcast that covers public events. I sift through the news everyday, searching for context, trying to put isolated occurrences into patterns. I wonder what the hell is going on and if there any explanations, ways of justifying our behavior.
Whether on a deeply personal level or on a societal, grand scale, it is always helpful to step back, allowing for a much more dynamic view of whatever is going on inside and out. God knows, I spend enough time writing about my history, in a style I guess you could call experiential. How do I address the Big Picture, without sounding like just another academic orifice? Wouldn’t you know it, it came to me in a flash of pure genius. OK, it wasn’t genius and it wasn’t really a flash; it was a way to dig myself out of the hole of cerebral chaos I was floundering in.
All of a sudden, I imagined the world as a stage. It was a theatre in the round, 25,000 miles in either direction from my reserved, front row seat. I had a one of a kind ticket, a singular, timeless audience. As I watched this Earth Max unfold, I realized that all of the original participants were on a stage that could unpredictably change on them and they either adapted or disappeared. Climatic catastrophes and renegade meteors dramatically changed scenery on stage, but the actors were stuck with their unique, fixed scripts. The incredible variety of dinosaurs perished, while their cousins, like the alligator and turtle never had to change their lines or their lives.
The Theatre Company of Earth has had millions of actors and actresses. The Monarch Butterfly is likely repeating the same scene for thousands of years. The migratory patterns of whales have been remade forever. Forests have stood in proud silence, while the land they grew out of has hosted more life than you could possibly imagine. Mountains and oceans have traded places in shocking unpredictability.
What an incredible show! It doesn’t matter wherever I move in the front row, the view is indescribable. Sometimes, it just doesn’t seem possible that all of this has occurred with such perfection, completely by accident. I don’t believe that either. During nearly all of this time, there were no witnesses, just the players in this unbelievably complicated and exquisite unfolding. Everything miraculously happened and the stage and scenery seemed to change at will. However, it is important to keep in mind that the running time for this play is in the billions of years already, knowing it will likely go on for billions more to come.
This is a great time for intermission, because the next act is much shorter, but much more intense, completely disrupting the current plot and its natural, organic flow. At the same time, remember, although I have a front row seat, all the action to this point is incredibly far away and impossible to see, but imagination is one of the gifts of this kind of mind theatre.
If Darwin is to be believed, over the countless millennia, there has been a progression amongst the entire cast, whether under water, on the land or in the air. For the record, when I refer to living members of this unbelievably diverse company, I wouldn’t think of excluding all of nature, the silent scenery, bearing witness to the comings and goings of this forever ensemble.
Now, you can turn the page in your Playbill, because we are up to the last act in this part of the show. Here is where humans appear on stage. It is not some over the top production, just a couple of hairy understudies with no speaking parts, stumbling from behind the curtain. A number of wannabe’s have auditioned for this role, but Homo Sapiens had the best agent.
The story is a little vague at this point, so we have to set aside precision for speculation, at least that’s what I’m doing, because I am kind of the surrogate playwright. I have created a number of scenes to move this act along.
Communication and Cooperation is the first development that brought our heroes out of their caves, realizing they were not alone and there were clearly benefits in banding together. My God, I almost forgot Procreation and how could I? This coming together likely occurred long before activities from the neck up. I think I might lower the stage lights for this scene, if you get my meaning?
I don’t have any idea how Fire happened, but that had to be a very big deal. Who knows when the first BBQ occurred? I am guessing it was an accident that had incredible ramifications. It was useful and spiritual, a kind of magic for those original woolly, cast members. I will bet you the first time someone actually started one, when there was none, had everyone scrambling for marshmallows.
Now, we come to the Wheel. Can you imagine what kind of revelation that had to be? Finally, you could be smart, without being strong. I would bet it was an accident, followed by an effort to mimic it, likely taking hundreds of years to get right. With Fire and now the Wheel, progress had begun its inexorable march to this very moment, but I don’t want to get ahead yet.
I have entitled the next scene Civilizations and Fractionations. It really started making sense to these early relatives of ours to start getting together in larger numbers. It likely began as tribes, people who looked alike and were from the same neighborhoods. There was power in numbers. Unfortunately, there were differences between these human aggregations and borders were drawn, different languages and mythologies developed. I don’t know when friction reared its ugly head, probably all the way back to when one HS realized that another HS was shorter or darker skinned, etc.
I think it was business as usual for thousands of years back then. Sure, stuff happened, but I don’t think there were any game changers until the Industrial Revolution. The Wheel was very cool, because it was a magical enabler, but machines that could actually do the work of people was unbelievable. Humans still had their primitive tendencies until then, too. Don’t get me wrong, those tendencies are alive and well, just much more dangerously subtle these days.
Now, we are within a handful of centuries away from this time. Technology is really part of the same effort to get gear to do the heavy lifting. The Great Pyramids and Stonehenge were an absolute bitch to pull off and humans were the tools to accomplish these unimaginable feats. We have machines to do the work now and others ones to do our thinking for us.
I am getting increasingly uncomfortable in my posh, front row seat to all that has happened, because the end of this show is feeling like it needs a rewrite. I guess any good story, like any good play, has to tie up loose ends and provide some closure for its audience, in this case, yours truly.
Until we came on the stage, the Theatre of Earth had all the authority and actually still does. Long ago, we became totally preoccupied with our power, completely losing sight of the fact that we did not build this stage. We are actors, participating in a much larger play, in a supporting role.
I want to share the best seat in the house with all of you. Somewhere, behind the curtain, the ageless Playwright lives in some indefinable form. The original script is etched in stone. The newest members of this huge, brilliant cast seem to be confused, thinking it’s their show. From where I sit, this isn’t how this magnificently, convoluted plot will continue to unfold. You have to remember this play has no end. It is these new players, you and i, who are only part of The Theatre Company of Earth. We have to learn to be much more grateful for the opportunity to be on this heavenly stage, sharing the spotlight with everything and everyone that has come before and will come after.
Bring up the house lights and bow to the Stage.
Thanks for watching.