EssayNavigating the site:
by Joseph Siry
We are a sentient creature that symbolically represents
the world so that we may compare an impression with other people's perceptions.
By contrast and comparison each creature conveys information about her
surroundings to others. Our skillfully articulate creation of language requires humans to think with a rich symbolic imagery about the world
we encounter. Expressing the depth of that encounter with the world and
its various living things is one purpose of telling one another stories
about nature. Yet we must be careful to use symbols that adequately convey
the complex conditions of nature on whom we depend as people, families and
social groups.
On a journey one needs a guide and the great books are abiding guides for our steps down the entropy-ridden tunnel of time that wraps around our mortal experience. The indisputably original thinkers whose minds apprehended an entirely new vision of reality have left to us an unbelievably rich legacy of thoughts, analyses, and methodical proofs. They reveal our living earth as a fundamental, yet anomalous place in an otherwise dark, remote universe of 100 billion galaxies. These are clusters of stars both larger and smaller than our devoted sun, are beacons of radioactive energy scattered across the immense curvature of space. The solar system's width is dwarfed by the milky-way galaxy and all but lost in this expanding menagerie of gas fusion engines called stars. Suns and stars explode providing the chemicals of existence; essential atoms in the molecules of life.
Fortunate are we to find ourselves in the midst of a water-cooled and gas heated planet that harbors more life in a few meters of earth, air and water than anywhere else in the earth's gravitational mass. This is because the molten interior of nickel and iron surfacing as magma in volcanoes is far too hot and nutrient poor to breed life. Where the lava or extruded magma meets the sea an explosion of heat and an opportunity for life in the frigid waters of the deep emerges. The boiling and roiling guts of the planet spew forth enriching the seas with a potential haven within which life might thrive. "And his spirit moved across the face of the deep." Buried in the primal stress of cold dark water meeting the viscously hot yet congealing lava, life thrives in the frigid lightless depths of a global ocean. There bacteria eat away through the nutrient rich sulfur vents where submarine volcanoes rise up from the ebony depths of the otherwise stillborn seas.
Life has grabbed a stubborn and uncommonly tenacious hold
on the character and descendants of this planet's myriad assembly of living
creatures. From single cells, to flowering 
plants the variety of natural
living things has been symbolically rendered into five great domains or
kingdoms of life. Depending on how they acquire a living, their complexity
and their formal distinctions, these five kingdoms are like the individual
fingers of a working hand and represent this planet's life. Bacteria and
plants make up the forefinger and thumb of this dexterous hand. Fungus
is the middle finger, single celled plants or animals the ring finger,
and multi-cellular animals are the pinkies. The irony of this hand of
nature is that the smallest, most exposed finger represents the enormous
range of different animals that seem to overwhelm our ideas about what
makes up nature. Animals appeal to us because we are one of their kith
and kin. The world of animals rests on a mightily complex and majestically
sublime stage or foundation of bacteria, fungi and plants. This symbol
--the hand of life- conveys a new framework or an ecological perspective
because it functions in unison.
Animals are at the mercy of climatic and geographical
conditions. But we are even more subject to limitations imposed upon us
all by the creatures on whom we depend for food (prey), fuel (oxygen),
fiber (cellulose), and fodder (hay). The world obviously does not appear
to be a functioning hand but the five kingdoms of life is the truly "hidden
hand" in the symbolic imagery that is needed to reformulate our vision
of the world. This revolution in our story about nature requires us to
redefine and articulate our duties to its survival. It should inform us
of our debt to this vast experience of life on a remote planet orbiting
a tiny star in a distant, tangential arm of the lavish Milky Way galaxy.
738 words
Fall, 1997
