Do you live in a mythopoetic world? You say, "No, I'm rational and scientific in my understanding. Myth is for the uninformed and the primitive. I can read. I have read. I know stuff."

And you are correct. You do know stuff, but some of what you know might, in fact, be as mythopoetic as any "stuff" people knew before Thales of Miletus came along. Remember him. He's kind of the first major "scientist," the first to take the West out of mythopoetry and place it on the road to Newton, Einstein, and CERN. Now, admittedly, Thales was neither the first to observe the natural world nor the first to comment on it. He did, supposedly, predict an eclipse in 585 B.C.E., but he didn't leave any appreciable writings. For Thales' accomplishments and contributions to the rise of a scientific West we pretty much have to go on the word of others, such as the Aristotelian writer Simplicius. "Okay," you say, "if that's what you know."

Well yes, that's what I know, but then Simplicius wrote about Thales a millennium after Thales died. Probably, we have to just take Simplicius' praise of Thales as a bit of mythopoetry in itself. So, anyway, Thales seems to have taken whatever knowledge about the natural world that was available and used it with sufficient skill to do some legit astronomical work. And he probably also dabbled in other natural phenomena.

Why should we even bother with a philosopher/scientist who lived two and a half millennia ago? If he could visit us today, he might give us a new perspective on our knowledge just as he gave people of the ancient world a new perspective. 

Thales started us down the path of knowledge that is neither myth nor poetry, a new kind of knowledge; call it "scientific" if you want. Was he an original thinker? Or was he just a good student who repeated what he heard in a land of intellectual opportunity? He lived in what we might call the birthplace of western philosophy and science: Miletus in the sixth century before Christ. As his remote intellectual descendants, we are now committed to establishing scientific knowledge by irrefutable means while still wondering whether or not we haven't missed something about the natural world in what we accept as fact. It's that lingering doubt that we have "proved" something that just isn't quite more than mere belief or fantasy. In the line of intellectual heritage that runs from Thales to us lies Heraclitus. Heraclitus might have hit the proverbial nail of mythopoetry on the head when he wrote in Fragment 15 that Nature likes to hide.* 

In all our chasing about to master the natural world, we now pursue what we cannot see or even test. We're pretty much committed to our explanations of atoms because our knowledge of them shows itself in practical applications in chemistry and nuclear physics. But for decades now we've been chasing after "strings" without anything beyond formal, that is, mathematical, explanations. Although we have come to rely on numbers and formulae because they seem to be really good at representing reality as they do in chemistry and physics, still numbers and formulae are only a "formal" way of knowing. Numbers and formulae might say that strings exist and that we don't yet have proof of them because they are wrapped up in such tiny, invisible forms they defy not only observation, but also concrete discovery. We cannot at this time detect them. We have no experimental evidence and no product from them like polymers and nuclear power that our knowledge of atoms provides. Are strings mythopoetry? And since a scientific theory is the demonstrable consensus, why do we call "String Theory" a theory?

Are "strings" the new ether?** They might make sense formally and metaphorically just as the ether did in the nineteenth century, but since we can't yet even devise an experiment that makes them show up as an irrefutable part of our universe, are they an example of mythopoetry? Do they really make up subatomic particles and underlie the fabric of the universe? And if we actually find them, will we not look for some new more fundamental mythopoetic foundation of the universe? Are we no different from the ancients in our desire to find some mythical basis for the cosmos?

What do you think Thales might say if he were made aware of our current understanding of the universe? Would he say, for example, "Yes, I see what you are saying and how you advanced what I started, and you certainly know more about physical reality than I knew. You're welcome. But these string things into which you and many physicists put so much money and effort don't at this time seem much more than the mythopoetry of my ancestors."

Look at your surroundings for a moment. How much of what you understand will withstand the test of time? How many of your explanations about why the world is what it is will withstand that test? How much of your knowledge is mythopoetry, knowledge that you think "sounds good enough to accept as reality"? I know what you're going to say. You want to say your knowledge is adequate to get you through your current life, just as the knowledge of the ancients got them through their lives. Is there a difference between truly knowing something and relying on poetic myth as a handy metaphor for understanding? Do we ultimately, because as Heraclitus says, "Nature likes to hide," all rely on partial explanations and myth since our lives are short?
 
* For his discussion on Thales and mythopoetry, I recommend Richard G. Geldard's Remembering Heraclitus, and his chapter on Physis. Lindisfarne Books, 2000.
** The ether was the supposed medium through which light waves passed. It was our mythopoetic reality for quite some time until the Michelson/Morley experiment.

 

The square root of ten run out to about a million decimal places seems useless. Why bother? Well, two guys, Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell, did.* You don’t care? Neither do I, but the computation shows the diversity of human interest.
 
Have a hobby or special interest? Part of a subculture like musket shooters? Obsessed with a particular form of art or music? Like to collect things? If you can justify your own “thing,” can you not also recognize that others can equally justify their interests, however strange they might seem to you? No other species exhibits the diversity that ours shows in our foci on various activities, and that’s because we do much more than merely search for food and shelter.
 
None of us has either the desire or capacity to be genuinely interested in every subculture’s focus. All of us, however, can understand that, again, however strange such foci might be to us, our own focus can be equally strange to others.
 
* http://www.gutenberg.org/files/635/635.txt

I’m way ahead of myself. There is not a Paleoextraterrestrial Period that I know of, so there really can’t be a Mesoextraterrestrial Period, and certainly not a Neoextraterrestrial Period. Those temporal designations have to wait for some future archaeologist to define. Going back to the time of Sputnik doesn’t take us far into the past, and the flights of Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepherd, and John Glenn date only back to the early 1960s. However, if any events can be deemed Paleoextraterrestrial, they are the flights of those three explorers.
 
As humans have done everywhere and throughout their history, so astronauts and the people who launched the many devices now have a history. It’s brief, of course, but it is recordable in the objects that encircle Earth. Space junk and useful items litter space just as terrestrial objects litter ancient rock shelters, caves, and structures. So why not consider them archaeologically? Don’t we have a new cave to explore?
 
We’ve added a new place to our study of junk. Let’s step back a moment. Here are some headlines from Archaeology: 1) “World War II-Era Secret Road Found in Papua New Guinea,” 2) “4,000-Year-Old Tombs Discovered in Romania,” 3) “Medieval Graffiti Found in Egypt,” 4) “Ancient Reservoir Unearthed in Israel,” 5) “Fishing Weir in Southern England Dated to Ninth Century A.D.,” and 6) “Roman Sarcophagus Uncovered in London.” Those are the kinds of headlines a layperson might expect in a respected publication by a national institute. But then there’s this one: “Archaeologists Will Study the International Space Station.”
 
Are we that old? Is the space just outside the atmosphere now the place for archaeology? Although Yuri, John, and Alan have left this world in more ways than one, they both flew and died within the lifespan of current retirees spending their leisure days on golf carts not far from the American’s launch site. People now alive new them personally. Yet, here I am, placing them in the Paleoextraterrestrial Period. The “middle period” is now the time of the International Space Station and all the junk we’ve carried to it. It’s our new shelter, our new cave to explore. What will we discover? And not just in that shelter, but in the landscape of near-orbit space junk? Who will go down into the hole to retrieve or record remnants of life there?
 
     “The U.S. Navy launched Vanguard 1 in March 1958. The cantaloupe-sized sphere was the fourth man-made object in space and is the oldest still in orbit--it has been around earth nearly 200,000 times. Is it "space junk"? Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia, studies this material and wants it considered part of our shared heritage. ARCHAEOLOGY editor Samir S. Patel spoke with Gorman about archaeology in orbit, space as a cultural landscape, and astronaut poop.”*
 
In the interview Alice argues, “I argue this is a cultural landscape and removing parts of it will destroy the relationships within it.” Her comment comes in light of both NASA and the ESA’s desire to clean nearby space of its “junk” because all those orbiting pieces pose a threat to future space traffic and travelers (Think 2009 movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney). Alice thinks the junk, all supposedly useful stuff that we’ve carried to the ISS tells the tale of a culture.
 
Maybe Alice has a valid point. I remember someone once making the comment after visiting an historic site. “You know, there’s a lot of history there.” My comment—sorry for the bluntness here: “What place doesn’t have a history?” In our hominid history, we’ve been just about everywhere on the continents and quite a few places on the ocean floor. Even in the depths of the latter we know there are sunken vessels and junk thrown overboard scattered about. We don’t visit many places without leaving something behind. We mark places as surely as animals do with their scents. And archaeologists go about their business of sorting through the remnants of our existence. They recognize the “lot of history there” in what the people of almost any time often fail to see as having any importance beyond their immediate usefulness and aesthetic appeal.
 
I guess we’re all in the business of making jobs for future archaeologists. We’re all in the business of making places “historical” and indicative of a culture and its relationship with its environment. Are we much different from those who dwelt in rock shelters and caves? The International Space Station is the new rock shelter. Whether or not it is part of a “middle period of extraterrestrial life” will be determined only by time and some Alice who goes down the hole into that metallic cave that orbits high above all those other shelters and caves.  
 
 
* Sounds archaeological to me. You can read the interview in Archaeology, Vol. 60, No. 6, November/December 2007, or online at http://archive.archaeology.org/0711/etc/conversation.html

Verbally consecrated by Lincoln’s famous speech after the 1863 battle, Gettysburg had already been consecrated by the spirit and actions of the soldiers who fought and died there. In Lincoln’s brief Gettysburg Address, he says that those gathered in the town after the battle were meeting in a place of unfinished work that had been nobly advanced.
 
Every place has the potential to be consecrated by action. What will you do today to consecrate where you are by “work nobly advanced”? You have the opportunity if not to complete unfinished noble work, then at least to advance it for others to complete. 

Instructions on use: "Place the Miracle-Gro Tree and Shrub Fertilizer Spikes at the drip line." Think of a tree as an umbrella. The rain drips at its edges. 
 
Without such instructions from the company, many of us would probably put the fertilizer spikes near the trunk of a tree or shrub. But trees and shrubs are better served when we place fertilizer at the periphery of their roots, and that coincides with the farthest lateral extent of branches and leaves.
 
Like trees and shrubs, our ideas have a lateral extent, their farthest reach and the boundary where they meet other ideas. Our personal drip lines mark where we need intellectual fertilization if we are to have new ideas or extend the roots of our thoughts. An influx of nutrients works best at the drip line of the mind. Close in, the thick old tendrils of our neurons are less efficient at creative thought than those thin new offshoots exploring far from a well established trunk. New ideas lie at and beyond the boundaries of what we believe and know, that is, at our ideological and philosophical drip lines.
 
Ideologues keep fertilizing near the trunk. Everyone could learn a lesson from Miracle-Gro.  

Chill out. Things aren’t as bad or as complicated as they seem.
 
We have a tendency to regard our busy lives as highly complex, but in a comparison of apples and apple seeds, on the macro scale of human existence very little goes on either currently or historically that matches the complexity of cell activity and evolution. How many things do you have to do today? How many interactions with others will you have? How many thoughts or emotions will pass through your central nervous system? You would no doubt say “too many to keep track of,” but if you search the Internet, you’ll find all sorts of estimates. The number is irrelevant though you, personally, would be correct in saying not only “too many to keep track of,” but also “because it seems like ‘too many,’ does it really matter?” And you would be right. Now reduce yourself to the working of a single cell and all its organelles and components. Check out the interaction of genes. Think about what role ribosomes play now or played in the evolution of life. How does one compare the macro and the micro? On the tiniest scale many little things have to happen in order for a few big things to occur, and many little things have happened to get human evolution to where it is today.
 
In their search to discover how cells arose, theoretical biologists examine the smallest living units. How did living things come to be? Single-cell organisms undergo complex processes and their past is shrouded in a history that extends billions of years into Earth’s past and maybe even beyond Earth itself. What was the “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA) of biological makeup or processes that led to the development of self-replication and ultimately of cells?
 
You could argue that since you are a collection of trillions of cells, you are much more complex than individual cells, and that understanding YOU, the PERSON, is the most complex problem. In a physical sense, you are correct, but only insofar as you are multiplying the actions within a single cell by the interactions of many cells. Yes, you are physically complex, more so than you are intellectually or emotionally complex, even if you run through thousands of thoughts and emotional states during a day (the latter dubious and the large number debatable).  
 
Take emotions, for example. Aren’t we quite simple? The only reason that psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and therapists can deal with emotional problems is that they are ultimately reducible and understandable on a practical level. Emotional states occur with variations, but not beyond the context of basic categories found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5). Those “disorders” can only be identified in the context of basic emotional categories. I’m going to risk it: We know disorders because we see them against a background of “normal” orders. That’s not to say that those with emotional problems can reason out the nature of their maladies, but rather to acknowledge that psychologists can make a list of characteristics associated with the sundry human emotions that plague us or exhilarate us.
 
The common nature of human emotions can be seen in fictional representations.  There’s a leveling and a categorizing that marks our emotional lives, and we learn by experience to interpret their indicators. Dramatists can make us laugh or cry, feel empty or fulfilled, scared or confident, or angry or frustrated. “Feeling depressed today?” “Feeling elated?” “Feeling disinterested?” “Feeling angry?” Go ahead, you name some others; your list won’t be as long as the list of interactions of cell molecules. You know just about all of them or certainly most of them. Your only difficulty might be in interpreting the emotions of people from a culture you never experienced. But with a little bit of exposure, you will become fluent in reading any emotions from any culture. No surprises ultimately, just categorizing. Can we search for the Last Universal Common Ancestor Emotion?
 
It’s that LUCAE that serves as the source of our ability to advise. We seem to know it both intuitively and experientially, but we have trouble identifying it rationally. Can we ever identify the LUCAE? What is our current state of inquiry?
 
Psychological knowledge, regardless of the relatively short list of human thought and behavioral categories and stereotypes, lags behind biological knowledge. We seem to still be in a stage of tearing apart. The DSM-5, after all, is number 5. Will there be a number 6? No doubt.
 
Biologists, whose task seems unencumbered by intangibles, began tearing apart the cell a long time ago. And during the last century they made efforts to try to “put one back together” as Harold Urey and Stanley Miller did in their famous experiment. To reconstruct required delving into cell history. Where and when did the cell’s parts arise? How did they self-organize? How did they come to cooperate? Because of cell complexity and the depth of time that shields cell origins, biologists might never discover the ultimate LUCA of cell parts. But they are far ahead and much closer to LUCA than any psychologist is to discovering LUCAE.
 
Here’ what I refer to. The following comes from research by theoretical biologists who looked into the role that ribosomes played in evolution. They end their study with this:
 
          “We believe that our results provide tantalizing insights into evolution processes that bridge the RNA-world and compositional approaches to the origins of life with LUCA approaches to provide an intermediary state of organization that integrates self-replication with protein translation. A self-replicating ribosomal entity would provide a logical intermediary between self-replicating RNAs or compositionally-organized aggregates of molecules and highly organized, cell-encapsulated genomes. “Selfish” ribosomes, in short, provide one potential intermediary in the process of evolution from the first macromolecules to hyperstructures and finally cells.” *
 
Biologists have not achieved their goal of discovering the cell’s LUCA, but they seem immeasurably closer than psychologists are to discovering the LUCA of human emotion. Nevertheless, you, I, and just about everyone else can identify in the context of any culture the rudiments of emotions and their sundry variations and also why playwrights can portray them. And that’s why I believe our personal collections of trillions of cells lead relatively simple lives.
 
Chill out. Your life isn’t as complex as you claim.
 
* Roof-Bernstein, Meredith and Robert Root-Bernstein, The Ribosome as a Missing Link in the Evolution of Life, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 367, Feb. 21, 2015, pp. 130-158. Online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778  
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.11.025

According to the editor of a 1930s illustrated magazine (essentially, a comic book) of scientific tales called Astounding Stories of Super-Science, “the only real difference between the astounding and the commonplace [is] Time.” In his introduction to the first issue Harold Bates, that editor, notes:

      “… if you lived in Europe in 1490, and someone told you the earth was round and moved around the sun—that would have been an "astounding" story. Or if you lived in 1840, and were told that some day men a thousand miles apart would be able to talk to each other through a little wire—or without any wire at all—that would have been another. Or if, in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing airplanes and submarines, world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story [sic.] buildings, radio, metal that can be made to resist gravity and float in the air—these would have been other "astounding" stories.”*

Time makes the astounding commonplace. It does that not only with technological advances, but also with human relationships. Maybe that’s the primary reason for getaways. People like being astounded by the thought of a relationship. When astonishment fades with time, couples seek ways to renew. And there’s no shortage of renewal methods and renewal places, some quite pricey.
Because humans have been around for a long time, there’s little new under the sun. Astonishing someone in a commonplace relationship can rarely be original. Often, the renewal of astonishment takes place in an unfamiliar setting. Renewing astonishment is difficult in well-known environs.

Apparently, for many people place is key to renewal: A new place, at least temporarily, means new astonishment. But in most instances and for most couples, time will once again do its work. Once-new environs can become commonplace. We are restless creatures looking toward an imagined “super-science” future in which “world-girdling Zeppelins” can soar above “sixty-storey buildings.”

It’s our lot. The need for astonishment seems to be deep-seated. Who knows where we picked it up along the path of evolution? But the need is in there, gene-deep, and its presence is probably linked to breakups, infidelities, separations, and divorces between once astonished partners who allowed the astounding to turn into the commonplace.

That we look for the astounding in new places has to make travel agents happy. They profit from a seemingly irresistible drive in humans to renew relationships by going to a new physical setting. Maybe most, if not all, getaways, dates, and vacations serve the same fundamental purpose: Turning the commonplace into the astounding for a moment.

In a relationship of some kind? Astounded? No? Try a new place.
 
* Bates, Harry, Ed., Astounding Stories of Super-Science, Vol. 1, No. 1, January, 1930. W. M. Clayton, Publisher. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41481/41481-h/41481-h.htm#Introducing

On the original National Road, route 40, not far east from Washington, PA, lies the community of Scenery Hill, originally called Hillsborough. From its highest point one can see Pittsburgh's tallest building off to the distant north. Central to the community is the tavern/inn called Century Inn. It stood in continuous use from 1794 to 2015, when a devastating fire consumed much of the building and its valuable antiques. It is now under reconstruction. Why? Can it be restored?
 
Aside from the economic value to its owners and the charm it has afforded to its many patrons and visitors for more than 200 years, Century Inn is, in American terms, “old” in the “good sense.” It is “historical,” having been visited by the Marquis de LaFayette, Henry Clay, James K. Polk, and Mexican General Santa Anna. It housed a harpsichord used for special occasions like weddings, and it also graced its tavern with the flag of the Whiskey Rebellion. Old wooden floors, silverware in antique curio cabinets, and antique tables and chairs made the dining room warm and inviting. Upstairs there was a collection of antique dolls. There might even have been a ghost as some rumor. Charming in all, and graced outside by large trees, its stonewalls withstood the onslaught of the flames.
 
Old places and things. We seem to distinguish among those we want to keep and those we want to throw away. In an affluent age, accumulation is seemingly not only inevitable but also inescapable. Look around. Got old stuff? Clutter? Need to treat it as something you just have to replace if it’s broken (or burned)? Most of the patrons of Century Inn look forward to its reopening, eager to see how such a restoration is possible (the company has a website: http://www.centuryinn.com/ ). Would you be eager to see how you could replace the authentic appearance, texture, and color of your old stuff? Or are you of a mind to acquire something new?
 
That which reminds us of a happy or idealized past (No one now living ever met the beloved Marquis) seems to be worth keeping. That which we cannot idealize seems relatively, if not completely, worthless. Landfill material. New and different construction necessary.
 
Similarly, we look at an inner city and we have a choice: Revitalize by destruction of the old and construction of the entirely new or revitalize by sprucing up the old and making it “trendy.” And we all have personal inner cities or Century Inns. Not just the stuff we have accumulated in our excessive affluence and scattered about the places we occupy, but the stuff of our lives. We are all structures with old emotions and ideas we have accumulated through our rich experiences. In a sense everyone is emotionally affluent. In such affluence we face every once in a while the dilemma of what to do with a familiar but now burned out edifice. Do we rebuild, all the while knowing that we cannot replace antique emotions exactly? Can we really replace the antiques with which we have lived in the Century Inns of our lives? Or do we tear down, change the landscape, and make the place entirely new?
 
No one expected a fire to consume Century Inn and change what people had come to cherish as a reminder of an idealized past, one whose current charm they had not participated in making or witnessing centuries ago. Everyone has some bit of idealized past, even if it is a small personal matter never shared with others. All of us encounter unexpected destructions, even those faultless ones like an accidental fire. Do we rebuild in the knowledge that what we attempt to reconstruct will be, in a sense, a mere replica?