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An Eden of change
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Published: May 11, 2009
The 1969 movie classic, "2001: A Space Odyssey," has been re-released in the dazzling Blue Ray video format. I had to have a copy, of course. It's my all-time favorite flick.
The mystical part at the end where the black monolith ushers Dave (the astronaught who's outwittted HAL, the bonkers computer) into the next level of human existance never fails to produce the sense of pure awe that director Stanley Kubrick orchestrated so well.
Kubrick understood the sensation of awe so well that he superimposed it forever on what had been a little–known piece of classical music, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zoroaster). Forty years after "2001," everybody still recognizes Richard Strauss's majestic musical depiction of a sunrise because of the awe it helped Kubrich to evoke.
Another awesome movie moment is the climax of Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when the mother of all Mother Ships descends from the vasty deep of space to meet human kind. The ship's surface is not shiny and neat but rough and pock-marked from space dust ecountered at intergalactic speeds––a clever touch.
Like Kubrick, Spielberg triggers a rare sense of awe.
Sadly, Kubrick's now translated to the next plane but Spielberg is still with us. I'd like to see Spielberg direct his finely-honed sense of awe toward a new spin on the famous Roswell flying saucer visit: the aliens come to Earth not to spy or slum with lower beings but to worship in a uniquely holy place.
In this scenario, the aliens are pilgrims from various worlds that are serviceable enough for life-sustaining purposes but otherwise as dull as dirt. They lack the unique forces that keep Earth in a perpetual state of transformation and adaptation––including global warming.
Earth is an Eden of change. The 23° polar tilt provides the miracle of seasons. Twin fluids, the atmosphere and the oceans, ferry thermal energy around the globe in a complex dance that we've only just begun to understand.
Below them both, the slower-flowing lithosphere shuffles continents, squeezing up mountain chains for the wind and water to wear back down.
Niesche's famous claim, What does not destroy me makes me stronger, could be the motto of Earth's biosphere––the thin skin between the vacuum of space and hot sterile rock where life goes on, fueled by change itself as Wallace and Darwin worked out in the nineteenth century.
Change didn't snuff the dinosaurs out but rather taught them to fly, to incubate eggs in the sub-zero polar night, and to sip nectar from tropical blossoms. With help from Colonel Harland Saunders, they even help fuel human metabolism.
In the late 1970's, a precision instrument maker named James Lovelock introduced a concept that seems the embodiment of awe. It was called "the Gaia Principle" and its name referred to the Greek goddess of Earth, called Terra by the Romans.
Lovelock saw the earth itself as a living organism whose systems adjusted things to sustain life. He observed that, in the same way that populations of a species adapt overtime to changing conditions, the whole universe of living things operates in unison to keep the Earth livable. When carbon dioxide levels increase, trees flourish, binding it up.
In a darkened theater, with enough popcorn, Steven Spielberg could convince me that visitors from some planet near Sagittarius would star trek to Planet Earth to watch all this happening.
Early in the last millenium, unnamed architects understood as well as Kubrick and Spielberg how to induce in people a sense of awe. They gestured in stone toward Heaven with towering cathedrals whose very scale was awe-inspiring. With only colored glass and sunlight to work with, they created images that Disney and Pixar took centuries to equal.
I've often thought the essence of awe is best captured in words by the author of Psalm 46: "Be still, and know that I am God." The Gothic cathedrals of Europe seem illustrations of the psalm.
When it comes to church architecture, somehow down the years awe seems to have given way to reverence and reverence to respect and respect to peace and peace to simple good will. In the same time frame, pipe organs have given way to guitars.
We can still turn to nature for our awe fix. I've yet to meet anyone who has seen the Grand Canyon for the first time and turned away humming "Is That All There Is?" And just as we visit the Grand Canyon, I can picture Spielbergian aliens visiting Earth routinely from all over to worship the perfection here, as pilgrims converge on Mecca.
If we do live on a globular Eden, it is the unending variety of change that makes it a proper object of awe––locally in the Solar system and (who knows?) perhaps, on a larger scale as well.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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