I come here without much spleen and a skull that feels relatively empty, but I do need to get on with some writing.
Opening the editor with nothing to say and hoping that this cat skull that now sits in a hydrogen peroxide bath will spark something witty to fall from my imagination feels as futile as thinking this cat might say hello. As a reminder, this skull came to us when Caroline scooped it out of its roadside fur sarcophagus back on June 1st. It wasn’t good enough to just pick it up to get a closer look; she brought it home. After nearly two months of it sitting out on our balcony baking away more of the still decaying flesh clinging to its bones, the wife brought it into the kitchen to finish the task of cleaning things up. Now it sits in that mason jar, looking creepy.
I’m not going to be satisfied in writing about how ghoulish Caroline can be because she’s not really that, she’s just seriously curious. Yeah, I know there are other things to be interested in, but when an opportunity presents itself, she takes the bait. So I sit here waiting for the floodgates of inspiration to strike and instead find the spleen I’ve vented so often about this, that, and the other to be talking to my brain saying, “That shit’s gotten boring, write about something else, ANYTHING else.”
I know: “How about you watch some YouTube?” I can’t be the only person for whom streaming and social media are becoming boring. No, I must turn to this page with 450 words on it already and tie something together so I can be at peace with myself that my fingers are still able to talk for my brain. Speaking of brains, staring at the skull in the jar is radically different than looking at this photo. What I mean to say is that my brain knows the object in the photo, but when looking at the skull itself, there’s a kind of perception where the animal that was embodied can be understood as a living, moving entity and not just the subject frozen in pixels. I can look at the teeth and sense their use during the lifespan of however long this cat lived. The feline that relied upon its mouth to nourish itself could have never had the recognition that nine months after it died, someone would be gazing upon the place its mouth once was and consider how it would have chewed its food or extended its tongue beyond those fangs to help groom itself. While the animated pulse of life is gone, the ghost of its existence survives based on images of other cats I’ve known, as I had no contact with this animal prior to its demise.
Just like me, that cat rose up from the soil after having been birthed, following the encounter of its parents that produced a litter. Its bones, brain, fur, organs, nerves, and curiosity propelled it through a world where it sought out shelter, food, and social interactions with people and other animals. Now it’s silent. Was it a friendly house cat or a feral hissing thing? Did it purr a thousand times in its life or ten thousand times? Could it remember its mother? Are its offspring living in my neighborhood? How does this contrast to my fellow humans?
We are over 7 billion, and I know nearly none of them. They, too are going about lives unaware that someday someone else might be staring at their skulls and wondering what kind of life they had. But bones don’t tell very good stories beyond the obvious biological ones we’ve been able to figure out. We won’t know how they enjoyed music, food, night skies, the affection of others, or the color of their first car. It’s only from these words we attempt to leave for posterity that someone else might come to some greater insight into who inhabited the bones they are contemplating.
So I guess it doesn’t matter if I once again spill my guts of dissatisfaction regarding politics or the state of education, as who would begrudge me for eating pizza 100 times over a lifetime? Every time we return to something, we experience it a little differently, although the nuance of the encounter is typically lost in the repetition of what we accept as a kind of routine. Still, the pizza cannot be the same from maker to maker and what stage we are at in our lives. So, can thoughts and ideas be shared in an identical manner from year to year when we are no longer the person we were a year before?
Today, a train is burning on a bridge in Tempe, Arizona, after it derailed. We as a species and as individuals will not be known by this mechanical anomaly that is being featured with big drama on the news media, and yet that is what we are focused on right now. The U.S. Representative and civil-rights leader John Lewis died recently and while on one hand a common man, he was an extraordinary man that surpassed what many will be able to accomplish in a lifetime. He’ll be remembered as his story has been captured over and again during the nearly 60 years he was politically active. Mass murderers such as Stephen Paddock will find their place in the history of humanity even though he was responsible for the death of 59 people in Las Vegas one night. This is because, at our current stage of development we are still struck by the sideshow, celebrities, and tragedies far more than we are with someone who just goes about their life.
In a universe where no less than 7 billion minds might be able to contemplate their place in the cosmos, we can’t know if, in 50,000 years, anyone will wonder anything more about John Lewis or John Wise as by then, maybe we are just the lost bone fragments and ash from a side branch of evolution that came and went as the previous eight hominid species that walked the Earth in the past 300,000 years did before us.
Then, when I think about what the average Egyptian or Greek might have thought about particular circumstances during classical antiquity, could it possibly have any bearing on how we see anything today? I think the obvious answer is no, but then again, what if the lessons of early people had been codified and our minds had evolved to take from the best lessons and use those to guide ourselves? Some may say that is religion, but I’d disagree as I can’t see most Western religions being about the fundamentals of good living. Instead, they are guides to subservience to the powerful. That, though, is a whole other subject that risks taking this entry off the tiny rail it’s barely skating on. The bigger point was, do we care how somebody saw their world in 300 B.C. or even in 1930? Well, I do, and if I could peer over the shoulder of someone preparing dinner 2,000 years ago in Italy or read the diary of a person in western Africa after being raided by slave traders, I’d be up to be that fly on the wall.
Go back further, and I certainly would love to watch the people who were painting horses and other animals in Chauvet Cave 35,000 years ago, and if all that was available was a transcript, I’d take it. Share with me a real day in the life 130,000 years ago of one of the earliest Neanderthals and how they saw their world. I’d sign up for a front-row ticket. In this capacity, I write as someone who may as well be from the Homo erectus branch of archaic humans. Like them, I know how to use fire, tools, and desire to care for others, most notably Caroline. Unlike them, I have some limited mastery of abstract symbolic tools that only require gestures for me to extract knowledge from an electronic library and to communicate with others. But ask me if I believe that after 2 million years of hominin evolution, I believe we are on the cusp of enlightenment, and I’d have to say we are likely still hundreds of thousands of years away. Collectively, we are too primitive and enraged to qualify as truly smart and aware.
Ten thousand years from now, I think my quaint musings on whatever topic will appear primitive and nearly stone-age, and that’s if they are even retrievable. From a pair of eyes out of the future, might someone look upon my metaphoric skull wondering about what this creature was chewing on that they felt compelled to leave some hints about just one more anonymous life amongst the trillions that preceded it? How long will they stare at the word shell of John, trying to decipher what kind of Homo sapiens I was? I wonder what kind of voice the cat, I will never listen to, had. I can only wonder.
