In a human ant farm, would it be very different? We humans, like ants, thrive in dorm-rooms in one side of the nest, and every day we commute to offices, work-rooms where we spend most of the day. On our way back, we fetch food in a store-room and sometimes have some leisure in a restaurant or bar.
I can imagine a view of the “living” building, as if we had a device like the tomography scans used in health care that provide snapshots of slices of the body. With such a device, I could observe the behavior of the human community the way people do with ant farms.
Now, buildings are closed boxes that hide what is inside. This imaginary device, like when we extract a frame from a beehive, would revel the inner cubicles and the beings that occupy them:
a boy does his homework; in the bathroom, someone has left the WC cover up; in the kitchen, a soup is being cooked for dinner; an old man lies in bed, sick; a boy and a girl play in disguise; a couple watches TV; in a luthier’s workshop downstairs, a man polishes a viol with garnet paper. In another slice it is not clear whether someone in front of a bookshelf is either mopping the floor or dancing; table ready for dinner; Mrs. Morningsun; , a man is sitting in the closet, reading a magazine; a woman reads a handheld, a man plays the piano; in the office downstairs people check balances and bills.
But if it was too late for colours in the canopy, at my feet a thick layer of leaves covered all the forest.
A bit farther, leaves extended on the surface of a pond in a little stream.
On a rock, with moss.
The last service we will receive from the microbial community that stays within us throughout our life since we are colonized at birth -in the womb we were microbe free- will be to be consumed by it when we die. This statement by Dr. J. Gordon in the paper quoted in the last post, strikes as shocking. But soon we realise that nature is sage, and features cleaning procedures when this complex process that is human life is no longer feasible. For a 70 year old life, the body will have renewed around 7 times its 1013 cells; excluding the microbes that go along with it. We can think of the body as a community of 1013individuals lasting 7 generations ( the average age for our cells being 10 years as I commented two posts ago). A noteworthy figure, the whole mankind along 2.500 generations will amount “just” around 100.000 million people, 1011.
Regarding housecleaning and recycling, our environment of artificial items is not as effective as nature. When we die we leave behind a heap of things, furniture, table service, wear, papers, books, tools, photo albums, video tapes, letters, frames. And somebody will have to be responsible for getting rid of all. Those who had to empty the apartment of a deceased friend or relative can tell that this is a hard job. What could we do in order to ease things for the people to come? Get rid of unnecessary things in advance? Perhaps there are letters o writings that we want to keep while we are alive but are so private that we would not like them to be read by strangers. What do we think it would be worth preserving? Should we point where do we keep legal documents?
New digital media present a new version of the same problem. Today we don’t leave behind shoe boxes filled with old letters and pictures, or notebooks with personal diaries and travelogues, folders with drawings, etc; we leave files. Files in our hard drive, files in mail servers, in social networks, posts in blogs, pictures in Flickr or Picasa. We still don’t have a clear idea about what we should do with them. Should everything be preserved ? Or everything deleted after a certain time has elapsed? Maybe there are valuable websites that are going to disappear when a certain domain or hosting is no longer paid. Some of them may still be retrieved through backup copies from Google or the internet archive that regularly takes snapshots of some sites. Who is entitled to claim for a certain digital legacy? Imagine the case of a writer or thinker that dies without heirs. Can Scholars ask for hard drive an email access? Perhaps today Kafka would have given his laptop to Max Brod asking him to delete everything after reading.
But in most cases, our contents are not the equivalent of a Proust manuscript, an Egon Schiele sketch or a Clifford Brown recording. So, when present users start to die, gigas and gigas of digital garbage will be left. In the “offline” world, our heirs will have access to our belongings, apartments or bank accounts, either because we had given it beforehand, either because they receive a legal entitlement afterwards. What can we do in the digital world? We can subscribe Legacylocker services where we can set the recipients who are going to receive the passwords to our accounts once our decease is verified. But does this solve the problem? What are they going to do? Backup it? Delete it? Browse it all and make a selection? It’s impossible to dedicate to this task so much time. And what is to be done with social networks accounts? Facebook offers to memorialize it if someone proves that the user has passed away. This means that further logins are prevented and access limited to confirmed friends. The wall remains open so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.
For those really provident, my wonderful life allows you not only preparing your funeral, writing your obituary, and designing your headstone (!), but also writing letters to people you love, listing where your stuff is, listing your favorite music, memories, photos, etc. and give instructions about taking care of your pets. I cannot help thinking that, if we really want to communicate something to somebody, or share our musical, art or cooking discoveries, we could start doing it right now while we are still alive, there is no need to keep waiting our friends and relatives for an email with a link to our digital legacy when we will have passed away. On the other hand, I have serious doubts about whether we should want to leave a permanent legacy, as if this could help in relieving our anxiety for the fact that our life is ephemeral. Perhaps it’s better to exit discreetly, without loud noise and leaving no burdens behind. My daughter said once that our imprint could be like that of a rain that has fallen. I like this idea very much, an easy rain, that wets the soil, waters the plants, and leaves no visible trace. I’d rather be like a rain that comes and goes, than a plastic bottle that is going to stay forever.
An appropriate post for All Saints day! perhaps this is going to be a series following last year’s post, Death row, life row. Also related: Extending life span, New runners, last steps.
Among other things, they produce some vitamins such as thiamine, pyridoxine and vitamin K. They digest “complex plant polysaccharides, the fiber found in grains, fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be indigestible (Read article in nytimes) Scientists from Stanford University have attempted a census of the gut microflora. They have identified 395 species of bacteria. Now they are working in sequencing the genes of the human gut microflora, and until now, 78·106 have been listed. But estimates point that “the vast majority of the genes that a person carries around are more microbial than human. Humans are superorganisms, whose metabolism has both microbial and human attributes.”
It’s extraordinary, “we” is not just “us”, our cells, in order to survive we need a foreign community to perform certain tasks. This is biological outsourcing. And this community outnumbers us in a proportion of 9:1.
Biological outsourcing happens also at the most basic level of biology, according to the endosymbiotic theory. Mitochondria, the organelle that charge “the batteries” that power processes in eucaryotic cells (that is, protozoa excepted, all cells in animals and plants), would be bacteria that in a certain moment across evolution were incorporated into cell space and logic.
In the last post I commented the feeling of our body being serviced, repaired, its damaged parts substituted, after an intense work out. I knew about the capacity of regeneration when I drilled accidentally my finger with a power tool. Every week I could see how the hole was moving upwards while filling up.
How is our body regenerated? Are we like an group of marble buildings, immutable, that only change when some tile is damaged and has to be replaced? Actually your body is younger than you think (Your Body is Younger Than You Think, New York Times, 02/08/2005), the average age for the cells of an adult being around 10 years. Research reveals different renovation rates depending on the function and the organ.
Cells from gut surface are renewed every 5 days, those from the skin, every 15 days. It’s like the walls of city buildings being repainted every two weeks.“The red blood cells, bruised and battered after traveling nearly 1,000 miles through the maze of the body’s circulatory system, last only 120 days or so on average before being dispatched to their graveyard in the spleen”. It’s like renovating the city car fleet.
“As for the liver, the detoxifier of all the natural plant poisons and drugs that pass a person’s lips, its life on the chemical-warfare front is quite short”, around 400 days.
“Even the bones endure nonstop makeover. The entire human skeleton is thought to be replaced every 10 years or so in adults.” Other tissues like muscles last 10-15 years.
The neurons of the cerebral cortex, the eye lens and perhaps the heart are the only cells that seems to last a lifetime.
So, instead of a complex of monumental stone buildings, immutable, we are rather more like a camping or a market, where each place is occupied temporarily by someone until it parts and is replaced by another one.What are we? Which kind of body identity do we have? We are an ephemeral aggregate, a set of molecules assembled temporarily in a structure, united and dissolved like water drops in clouds.
We are not a thing but a process, “surfing over matter like a strange slow wave” in the beautiful expression of Lynn Margulis.
My poor dear legs, after a day walking for 8-10 hours, are weary and worn out too. In the evening, after an early dinner, I lay on the rest pad and, while rewinding images from the day, paths, cols climbed, I feel a pleasant of tingling in muscles and joints. It looks like a process of regeneration and repair is in progress. I feel like if an army of little men, maintenance people, are working intensely to substitute injured parts, repair damages, lubricate articulations. Thanks to their job, those weary legs tomorrow will walk and trot happily again among pines and rhododendrons. This ability to regenerate is amazing, isn’t it?
When you see an inka building, the first thing that strikes you is the inward slope of walls, a feature that made buildings earthquake resistant. If I were peruvian, I would register a patent for a “Lego” trapezoidal bricks. Simple buildings are made of small stones without polishing, nobler ones use carefully cut uniform stones.
And sometimes, and this is what caught my interest, all the stones are different, maintaining their original form, they have been polished just to match perfectly with their neighbours. The result is of exceptional beauty and originality and as far as I know, unique. Stonemasons do not cut stones into uniform blocks, they have find out how to place them in order to fit without altering them very much. They do not supply like uniform brick blocks, but rather unique pieces, sometimes almost sculptures. We don’t have like a lego set here but a 3D puzzle. And again, if I were peruvian I would register a patent for a wall scale model.
These walls and stones could be a beautiful metaphor about the group and the individual, the whole and its parts, in the sense that, in order to contribute to the general structure, there is no need to cancel the individual particularities, just to adapt a little. Small stones are not discarded for not reaching the standard size of a block, bigger ones are not fragmented in order to obtain uniform blocks. The inka stonemason tries to respect the natural size and shape of each stone.This attains the category of the sublime in some parts of the Machu Picchu complex where it seems precisely that the artist “reads” and “interprets” the form of the rocks and, with some kind of dialog, complements them, as in the Sun Temple or Condor Temple.
This “reading” of the natural form and the respect for her implies that symmetry has little or no importance at all. It’s worth admiring an obelisk, a column, a pyramid, but it is hard to overcome the elegance and originality of the Intihuatana Stone in Machu Picchu, which besides its astronomical and ritual functions is in itself a superb work of art. We won’t find a similar abstract expressiveness until 500 years later in some works of Eduardo Chillida or Henry Moore.
If one visits the Convento de Santo Domingo in El Cusco, Peru, one will find the remains of the ancient Temple of the Sun (Inti kancha) or Gold Temple (Qori kancha). Besides admiring the walls built by the Inkas, there is a copy of the sketch of the gold panel over the altar, drawn by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacutic in 1613. This panel depicted in a concise way the andean cosmology.
It is remarkable how everything was included: between two constellations, the sun, the moon, the evening star and the morning star, there is an ellipse representing Viracocha, the god demiurge that assembles the universe. Below there is the normal world and some sources of change: The seasons of the year, summer symbolized by a group of stars (perhaps the Pleiades) and winter with clouds, meteors like lightning at left and hailstorms at right associated with the small feline quwa. Mother earth “Pachamama” (still today many people perform the rite of burying some coca leaves, part of snacks, or spill the first drops of a drink, as a tribute), is under a rainbow, it has a river and “Apus”, sacred mountains; at its right the symbol of the primordial ocean encompassing everything. At the center, man and woman, at their left “the eyes of all kind of things”, as seeds or energy inside the earth that are the origins of all living beings. At right, a tree symbolizes the ancestors. The grid at the bottom corresponds to the faring terraces.
I wonder what would we draw if we had to illustrate our view of the universe in one of the main buildings of our city today.
The idea of a god creating and ordering things has been substituted by a universe expanding since the big bang. In a remote corner of that universe, and by a very unlikely chance, matter has changed to become complicate structures, living things that have evolved until a species that can speak. Our life still has the influence of the seasons and weather, but it depends also on absurd economic cycles, or what becomes fashionable. So, in that modern version of the Qorikancha altar, besides the agricultural seasons, there would be too screens showing the stock exchange index, CNN news, the most viewed at Youtube, the items most searched for in Google. Poor “mother earth” is not in very good condition, its resources almost exhausted, global warming, dump and waste …
Sometimes everything seems to disappear and all that is left is a little everyday space surrounded by a dark nothingness with no limit. We stare at it while sitting on the edge.
