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This is KZSU.
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions,
coming to you from the Stanford campus,
honor around the spring equinox of the year 2022.
It's not the most propitious moment in world history
to say the least, not with that small, evil, feral,
eyed man in Moscow, lugging his id across the world stage
while the rest of us watch and disbelief.
If I could, I would give you all a magic carpet ride
to the methane sea on the outskirts of infinity.
But alas, we're stuck here on earth,
which really would be a beautiful place
where it not for the psychopaths that have always held us
hostage to their lunacy.
However, Victoria and I did not come down
to the bunker of KZSU today to propose an owed to dejection,
but to revive the intellectual sanity of entitled opinions
and to share with you some thoughts about life.
This is our first salvo after a couple of months of hiatus
here on entitled opinions, a few brief thoughts about life
in the face of death.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges often
wondered whether our reality is something
that is being dreamed by another entity.
And who knows?
Maybe life is the generic thought of primordial matter.
What kind of thing thinks into being
the Amazon jungle or thinks up the wild array of ichtheological
and animal life forms all across the globe,
many of which seem to emerge from a disordered psyche.
Our own human species, with its sanguinary history
and fits of delirium, resembles nothing, if not a bad dream.
The first thing to note about life
is that where it exists, nothing comes easy.
Life's initial struggle to break into existence
from inanimate matter and to maintain itself
in existence thereafter is beyond our imagination.
The sheer determination and tenacity,
the stubborn will and resilience that allowed life
to face up to the overwhelming odds that were
arrayed against it in the earliest stages of its history
really do boggle the mine.
Given the enormous suffering that life entails,
where did that drive and resolve come from?
It probably came from the overwhelming fury and passion
of our planet's origins.
In the beginning was a deep black infernal earth
with arkuit red cracks where immense,
fountaining volcanoes broke the Hideo N.
Arkei and surface.
Jets of dirty white ash laden steam obscured the globe.
meteors incessantly bombarded the surface,
showering shattered rocks and agglomerations
of magma across the plains.
Countless volcanic cones grew to heights of many thousands
of feet, their magma fountains powered
by the explosive release of steam and other volatiles
that would eventually, very eventually,
cool enough to become the Earth's ocean and atmosphere.
But meanwhile, no trace of oxygen to be found only toxic
sulphurous compounds, venting steam and noxious hot gases.
At life, dared stray into being under such conditions
tell us something about its genesis in shock and trauma.
It also tells us something about its long or deal
of acclimatization in the most literal sense of the term.
It took a very long time not to mention effort and ingenuity
for primitive life to gradually transform land,
sea, and air into elements hospitable to life.
It was thanks to the discreet, yet relentless metabolism
of microorganisms over untold millions of years
that an atmosphere, rich with oxygen and carbon dioxide
slowly formed around the Earth.
That atmosphere in turn made possible the process
of photosynthesis, which in turn transformed the planet
as a whole into a living organism.
In some, it was life itself that first brought about the conditions
that favor life on Earth today.
If Earth has become a thriving garden over time,
archaic bacteria were the first gardeners.
The first terraforming agents who generated a biosphere
fit for complex organisms and the proliferation of species.
We humans are the belated and mostly ungrateful beneficiaries
of their heroic labor of domestication.
And since I've invoked the image of a garden,
let me quote one of the writers who my Moses' team
among the 20th century tribes of Scriveners.
I mean the check author Carl Chapek.
I may have mentioned Chapek once or twice
on entitled opinions, or maybe I haven't.
I don't remember.
But for the record, I regard him as highly
as any of the other trustees of this radio program.
Chapek was in many respects the founder of Modern Check
Literature, a fantastically rich tradition
that remains way too much under the radar in my view.
I'm a big fan of Chapek Literature in general
and of Carl Chapek in particular.
And before I quote him, let me mention
that Chapek was a gardener, both literally and figuratively.
He cultivated and transformed a wide variety of genres,
plays, novels, short stories, pamphlets,
political discositions, newspaper columns,
and unclassifiable testaments, such as his book,
The Gardeners Year.
It's a passage from that short and marvelous book,
The Gardeners Year, that I'd like to quote from.
The quote comes from a section where Chapek is reflecting
on the humus or soil in which gardeners plunge their hands
as they go about their business of cultivating
and nurturing plant life.
In so doing, they discover that soil is in fact a battleground
where the forces of life confront the merciless resistance
of the lifeless and inanimate.
I tell you, to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory.
That's a quote.
To tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory.
You probably need to be a gardener
to fully appreciate that statement.
It's because gardening is fraught with so many risks
of failure that its victory is afford a singular satisfaction
to those who engage in that activity.
Only by participating in the domestication process that created
our biosphere in the first place,
only by witnessing close up the adversities that life
at its most fundamental level has to deal with.
Does one come to realize what plant life is up against
in its struggles to secure a place in the ground we tread upon
for the most part mindlessly?
At this late stage in Earth's geological history,
the ground we walk on is rich and promising,
but the gardener is someone who knows first hand
the extreme poverty in which it all began.
Quoting topic.
And if you have no appreciation for this strange beauty,
let fate be still upon you a couple of rods of clay,
clay like lead,
squelching and primeval clay
out of which coldness oozes,
which yields under the spade like chewing gum,
which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade,
yield-tempered, unmaliable, greasy,
and sticky like plasters of pears.
Slippery like a snake and dry like a brick,
impermeable like tin and heavy like lead.
And now smash it with a pickaxe,
cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer,
turn it over and labor,
cursing aloud and lamenting.
Then you will understand the animosity and callousness
of dead and sterile matter,
which ever did defend itself and still does
against becoming a soil of life.
And you will realize what a terrible fight
of life must have undergone,
inch by inch to take root in the soil of the earth,
whether that life be called vegetation or man.
Cultivating is garden plot somewhere in a corner
of the city of Prague.
Chapek came to understand intuitively what science
now knows with relative theoretical certainty,
namely that the first primitive cells with membranes
containing RNA occurred within phyllo silicate clay minerals,
which provided the basic platforms for the formation,
growth, and division of some of the earliest living cells
on earth.
In the beginning, there was clay.
It was the labor of living organisms,
fighting every inch of the way that turned it
into the soil of vital generosity.
Again, the human gardener is a late comer
and a late participant in, as well as a beneficiary
of the chemistry of vitalization that the primitive
bacteria of an inhuman earth brought about over deep time.
I don't mean to ascribe care in the human sense
of primitive microorganisms.
I would say rather that human care in its self-transending
character is an expansive projection
of the intrinsic ecstasy of life.
What distinguishes life from unliving matter
is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts forth
from the lifeless and extatically maintains itself
and being through expenditures that increase rather
than deplete the reserves of vitality.
Life is an excess and overflow.
If I had to offer a definition of it,
I would call it the self-extricacy of matter.
That self-extricacy has one defining feature, defiance.
Life begins in defiance and perpetuates itself in defiance.
This is as true today as it was back when,
every living thing suffers the consequences
of its insolence.
To quote an axamander, they must pay recompense and penalty
to one another for their reckless injustice.
And that goes for you and me, as well.
Our constant struggle to precariously stand outside
or just beyond the condition of lifeless matter keeps us
and everything else that lives in a permanent state of anxiety
and, yes, even of terror.
Since entitled opinions as a show devoted to thinking,
I would like to ask by way of conclusion how thinking
relates to life.
Is thinking merely a specialized activity of one life form
among others on earth, or does nature,
does matter itself, think?
Does matter, think life and its species into being?
When asked certain questions, not because they have answers,
but because they lead you to the edge of a chasm
where you can hear something flowing both into
and out of the abyss below.
An abyss for which a determined concept is lacking.
That is the sound of life flowing into thought and thought
flowing into life.
85% of our lungs are water after all,
and 73% of our brains are water, so yes,
life and thought flow into one another.
Thinking is something that wells up in me and streams.
I don't know whether this flow has its source in being or in non-being,
but it does have a source, and I have to assume it has its estuaries.
Whatever is alive in me moves along with it.
If life indeed is the self-extricity of matter,
the flow of thought is one of the forms it takes.
To modify very slightly the epitaph on the tombstone of
the beet-poet Gregory Corso in Rome,
thought is life, it flows through the death of me endlessly,
like a river unafraid of becoming the sea.
I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions. Thanks for listening.
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