#133

#133

THOSE LIFE EXPERIENCES BUILD ONE AFTER ANOTHER FOR BETTER OR WORSE

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

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verything becomes a bit more interesting after looking inside – with a few minor exceptions.

Look inside a beehive and there is honey, but a lot of nasty whirling dangerousness coming at you, as well.

A more magical experience may be infused in the direction provided by traditional Chinese nesting boxes in which a larger box has inside a smaller box which itself has inside a smaller box.

This motif of a surprise within a surprise can be found in literate and in art.

A filmmaker, for example, might use a frame narrative by nesting a larger idea within an opening scene sequence – the larger idea receives more attention but is actually inside the smaller idea revealed in the introductory scene sequence. The Romancing the Stone franchise films use this narrative device in which the protagonist is writing a fictional action-adventure novel who is then folded inside the film as a character in the novel being written. The film about the writer in the apartment working away at the typewriter gives way to the fantasy of the novel as the main narrative.

Of course, as individuals know, there is normally a lot more going on inside a person than is revealed in a public presence. The fictional story in the head of the writer that become the film is just the beginning.

Society is involved in the same non-reveal with a lot of action required in the background to enable the neighbourhood to run properly during the day.

Think of it, that the essentials of the day, such as power and water, function inside the home only at the great effort and expense of an elaborate system of public works in the background, often only functioning after great steps have been taken in the past, over many years.

Just parts of a whole – no. One box inside another box is another complete story within a complete story, whereas one part is still one part until connected to the other parts of the whole.

More like a sourdough starter used to make another independent loaf of bread, a successful trope can create another interesting narrative in an entirely different film, over and over again. Unfortunately, a bad trope can create a lot of self-perpetuating misery.

Language creates meaning with a lot of tropes. Language is itself recursive because of the limitless constructions with various words used again and again in different combination to convey different meaning in different context between different people. And yet everyone knows what you are talking about eventhough the creation of meaning might be limitless.

In the end, though, everyone ends up together in the collective consciousness, often with the language projecting common images into a cloud bank that exists within the mind shared amongst the population.

Of course, climate doom arrives in the same way, in small boxes inside larger boxes of greater doom, that may lead to the end of the human species on Earth. Industrial age is that beehive of pleasure and pain that no one looks into seriously enough.

The human species may be saved through space exploration by extending the human consciousness on other planets, or so is the luxurious hope of space explorers. Make everyone recognize that the planet has become uninhabitable to force society into forward thinking about life on other planets, especially now that the owners of rocket propulsion have made entering near orbit like going through the drive-thru for a meal of fast food.

Why the nesting idea is not exclusive of the Chinese culture may be in part that the human species does share a consciousness full of archetypical patterns.

Joy may arrive in similar form in different societies for the same reasons. While the struggle in attaining that experience, or in maintaining that emotional state, may have been so similar that a Chinese nesting box has the same fundamentals as a Russian stacking doll.

The rocket ship to planets beyond Earth’s solar system only needs to be stacked enough to get into space, and then the creator has taken care of the rest of the journey with zero gravity acceleration.

If rocket fuel can be manufactured on the Moon in zero gravity, then the only remaining question is how long can a humanoid survive in the vacuum of space. Space travel has nasty effects on the human form, such as muscular skeletal degeneration and destabilizing brain functions that are not accustomed to so much isolation.

Boredom can kill a person’s brain functions even on Earth, amidst billions of people, let alone in deep space searching in the darkness for familiar faces that simply are not present other than in the fantasy that the mind creates for us, during our weaker moments.

Astronauts are also subject to various forms of radiation from which the Earth’s atmosphere protects the species. Since the spacecraft and living quarters in space are built as light as possible for lift off within Earth’s gravity blanket – you don’t get the armoured protection of a tank in space that is needed to protect the human body from radioactive particle beams.

So far, just over a year is the longest journey a humanoid has travelled in space. Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days and 18 hours in the Mir Space Station during 1994 and 1995. Mir preceded Russian participation in the International Space Station.

Despite the many unknown dangers, Polyakov was unphased in the long term by his stay in space, living to the age of 80, likely developing a longevity for living for other reasons than cosplaying as a matryoshka doll inside a nesting box.

The next big lea of humanity in space is a human travelling to Mars. When considering the limits of the human form, a trip to Mars is a long way away because the space engineers discuss the effects on the human body and mind in terms of years, and not just months, when referencing trips to Mars.

Those galactic cosmic rays will well away at the humanoids.

Life as a big box can often attain a modicum of success because of a number of smaller boxes inside, some boxes packaging success and other boxes containing failure to that small square footage, allowing another chance in the bigger box.

Success is often only possible by containing failure to something as small as possible. No doubt only so much containment is possible inside the little box, before success in the big box is no longer possible, and failure becomes an inevitable infinite.