POEM: THE STONE CAR

The Stone Car

In a room beneath

the Great Pyramid at Giza

archaeologists watch on a monitor

as pictures are transmitted

from a mechanical robot

making its way up a tiny channel

cut deep within the stone.

The Chief Archaeologist is excited.

The camera, he says,

reveals a hidden door

sealed for millennia.

Behind the door,

he proposes,

is a further channel

that reaches to the top of the pyramid

and through which

stars can be seen!

Its purpose, he explains,

is to allow passage

for the soul of the pharaoh

to leave the earth and ascend to heaven.

In that hot basement,

wonderful mysteries formed,

much in the same way

(an age or two hence),

other mysteries will form,

in other basements,

around those who’ll look in wonder

through their machines

at our machines.

I was writing a poem today (sort of) about a scene with two people painting in a cave—ten thousand years ago or perhaps it’s ten thousand years from now, I’m not sure. But The Stone Car for some reason popped into my head, and I decided to put it up for your amusement. It’s fairly old, but I’ve always kind of liked it. It’s simple and straight forward: I’d watched a National Geographic program on TV (one of our “machines”) where, indeed, an archaeologist sent a small mechanical robot up a narrow shaft in the Great Pyramid at Giza and discovered a small room or alcove with an exit door. He made suggestions about what the shaft and door atop the pyramid were for, and I wrote the poem with his comments in mind. Was he correct in his assumptions; he’s a well-known Egyptologist, after all? Who knows? It certainly sounds plausible to me, but then answers to mysteries have to sound that way, don’t they?

     And here I will digress for a moment because this idea of ‘solving’ mysteries leads me to another train of thought that stems from a blog post by John Michael Greer and his thoughts on the failure of climate change activists to bring about substantive changes in how we confront the challenges of global warming.

     Those mysteries of the world around us and mysteries of the world in us need explanations. Like the passageway in the pyramid, they need ‘splainin’! And we do our best to come up with reasons why the sky is blue or where stars came from, or why we hate. And we operate with our understanding of how things work, and for good deal of the time it’s tickety-boo—trains run on time, coffee is hot and the doughnuts are fresh. These accomplishments come from our understanding of the world, its processes, and how we have learned to manipulate them through science and technology to perform the work of making electricity, building engines and bakery ovens and so on. But when, to use the example of climate change, we are confronted with a reality that doesn’t conform to our understanding of it, we often don’t acknowledge it. 

     With incontrovertible proof that global warming is caused chiefly by human activities, JMG asks why it is that we, as individuals, don’t take the necessary actions in our own lives to lower our dependency on fossil fuels and reduce our personal emissions of carbon. He cites climate scientists as a case in point. These many thousands of individuals have the knowledge and understanding to appreciate how human activity through fossil fuel use is contributing to global warming, as well as how ethically wrong it is to live a high-carbon lifestyle. And because they have dedicated their lives to studying climate systems they certainly have the necessary will to make changes in their own lives; why then, JMG asks, do such knowledgeable and concerned individuals continue to travel to conferences on airplanes, commute to their labs in automobiles and live energy-profligate lifestyles?

     I don’t mean to pick on climate scientists by any means; all of us, to one degree or another, are guilty of denying our personal responsibility in this matter. And another point to consider is how we are far less likely to heed the advice, proscriptions and dire warnings of climate scientists and activists if we see that they fail to ‘practice what they preach’. I agree with JMG that this glaring hypocrisy goes a long way in explaining why most climate change activism today is a farce. But again, the question is why? Why, do we (again, the vast majority of us) look at the world and what it is telling us (screaming at us, in some cases), and ignore it's cries? JMG suggests there is a deeper process at work here, and that it is because we live our lives within a variety of what he calls “paradigms”, some of which we hardly are aware, that we fail to 'take in' the evidence before our eyes or to act accordingly. He states:

     In every human society, every aspect of life is mapped out according to a paradigm of some kind, which defines what’s important, what’s relevant, what’s possible, and what’s unthinkable in that part of the world of human experience. This is by no means a wholly conscious process; it’s more akin to the habits of hearing by which most of us can tell when a musical note is out of tune, say, or the visceral discomfort most of us feel when some norm of our culture is violated. The more successfully a paradigm addresses its area of life, the less it’s likely to be noticed; it’s only when crisis comes, and the only way to deal with some pressing problem is ruled out by the paradigm of those who must confront that same problem, that the paradigm itself becomes fully conscious—and when it does, it generally loses its power to shape human behavior.

     He goes on to suggest that it is “anthropolatry” (or “the love of humanity as god”), the chief paradigm of our time, which undermines our ability to appreciate our true place in the scheme of things: that we are not the lords of creation but are merely one part of the intricate web of life on our planet. But with such a dominant paradigm guiding us, we act as if we controlled nature and were separate from it and any effects it might bring upon us. I recommend his clear and accessible writing on the subject. (He says it so much better than I can!)

     For the purposes of this blog post, it struck me that we have a set of “paradigms” today—ways of understanding the world with our “machines” and our tools of science and technology—that may be different in the future. I think that was one of things I’m trying to convey in The Stone Car: that there will always be new mysteries for us to solve, and new ways of understanding and solving those mysteries, new paradigms, in other words. This shouldn’t be seen as frightening: We need to consider that, after a time, it’s just necessary for old paradigms to ‘shift’. And how we view ourselves on our little blue planet at the moment is one paradigm that is badly in need of an overhaul.*

* I add an additional link to JMG's Escophia blog site and a 12/19/18 post where he discusses further the disconnect between the modern world with its lavish energy-consuming lifestyles and the effects such lifestyles have on planetary systems; how we can continue to ignore this reality. It's worth a read, as the quote below suggests:

"At the heart of the bizarre disconnect between what climate change activists call on everyone to do, and what they’re willing to do themselves, lies the simple fact that most people in the modern industrial world have never really grasped that they themselves are part of nature."