John Wise

How was I so dumb? Why did I believe I needed a central authority to bestow credentials on me before I could do something I wanted to do? What I wanted was to write, but I knew my English skills were severely handicapped because my primary schools told me so. How could I write if I wasn’t adequately prepared for the mastery of my native language?

I read, read, and read some more. I was fully addicted to reading throughout my youth. When I arrived in Germany as a young adult, I was as close to Bohemia as I could get back in the mid-1980s, considering it was still behind the Iron Curtain. I dug deeper into literature, took on philosophy, added some sociology, and continued into the gutter with William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Baudelaire, and any other misfits I could unearth. I had a bit of a routine where, as time allowed, I’d head to a train station to pick up breakfast and the International Herald Tribune. Seated outside, I’d watch the parade of characters passing by and read what was going on around the world.

What I didn’t do was write. I wish I’d known then what I know now: that to write, all one has to do is write. No special permission is required. While I didn’t seek out approval for photography or the consumption of alternative arts, those weren’t subjects that were sanctioned by the state by granting basic competency to participate effectively. Fortunately, I only learned later that photography was a skill where others decided your skills and afforded you opportunities.

It took me years to finally give myself the exercise that would bring me around to writing, and it was related to my curiosity about photography. By the way, my interest in photography began somewhere in the late 1960s when my paternal grandfather gave me a Kodak Brownie camera. Armed with that primitive camera, I felt like a giant, just like my heroic grandfather, who used a 35mm Minolta with an array of lenses. I thought my grandpa was a pro because not only did he have a professional camera, he shot slide film that forced him to show us his photos with a projector on a silver screen.

So the way this ties together is that after many years away from taking photos, I wanted to deeply re-engage with the craft, but just taking photos didn’t seem to be enough anymore. In 2004, I was five years into taking thousands of digital images that simply sat on a hard drive not seen very often, let alone being shared. I’d witnessed the first photo blogs emerging, but as those were proliferating, I already felt they were growing stale as I quickly gained the impression that everyone had a photo-of-the-day website. I realized then that I could try accomplishing that thing I wanted to be passionate about writing. And I would accomplish this by posting a photo and forcing myself to write something about it. That’s just what I did every day for the first year.

Here we are: 14 years after I started blogging, 35 years after I sat in Frankfurt collecting my thoughts, and 51 years after I took my first photo. I’m about to bring it all together with an upcoming trip that will take me to Berlin, Erfurt, and Bayreuth in Germany, where I’ll sit down for some uninterrupted writing while also capturing the situation photographically. I’ll have two weeks of this before Caroline joins me in Frankfurt, where between there and Karlsruhe, I’ll have a few more opportunities for some contemplative writing. Our week in the region will likely pass quickly before we embark on the last leg of our European vacation. What those details are will have to wait.

Most of my travel writings have detailed the adventures of Caroline and me. Even when I’m writing a narrative that she doesn’t appear in, she is still ever-present as when we are together; I believe we see the world differently, and that, in turn, influences how I convey things. While on this trip across Germany, though she won’t be with me physically, I know I won’t be able to avoid her influence because she is somehow always with me anyway.

It is my intention to wander through places exploring the moment to find things that will only be understood by taking the time to selfishly observe nature while my mind participates in extracting things not previously seen or thought of. What words might find my hand while my body sits quietly in the cathedral where Martin Luther was ordained? Walking over the streets, Richard Wagner strode 140 years ago; maybe I’ll stumble upon the inspiration that lends something or other to my perspective. A side trip to Mühlhausen will take me to the church where J.S. Bach performed his Ratswechsel cantata Gott ist Mein König. A year later, he wrote Aus der Tiefe rufe ich after the town and church burned to the ground. Somewhere along the way, I’ll be in Weimar to visit the Nietzsche Archive set in the home where he passed away.

German music, philosophy, art, history, and even the love of my life were found in the country that has had a deep impact on my being. With these upcoming two weeks of wandering through these areas of Deutschland, I hope to find a deeper understanding of just why this land and the creative minds it produced have resonated as profoundly as they have.

This visit to Germany is, in some way, my recapturing of a lost moment I neglected to seize back in the mid-1980s. Back then I had all the freedom in the world to chronicle my adventure as a bohemian hedonist who all of a sudden had the latitude to explore in all directions, but I failed to grasp my opportunity. While today, my hedonism has withered and the crazy experimentation of youth has been satisfied, my curiosity to write through the filter of maturity gathered over the ensuing 30+ years is burning to express itself. Lucky me to have a friend and partner in life who affords me the luxury to satisfy my whims and dreams.

Of all the things I can attempt to describe, the moments I will never be able to share are those when I begin to encounter death and then finally succumb to it. What is my role in even preparing myself to recognize it when it begins to appear? Will I know what it is as I’ve never seen it? Does it have a sound, a smell, a feeling?

I don’t want to imagine that the body shutting down will be synonymous with pain; maybe it’s just the motor slowly coming to a quiet halt. I think most people afraid of death are more nervous about excruciating pain where life’s exit is a landmine blowing off your face, metaphorically speaking. Too often during our lives, we are shown gruesome deaths that titillate our sense of the unknown and pique our anxiety about stepping into something we won’t like. What if natural death were a calm walk among the flowers?

Then what after that? Well, my sense of things suggests that what I consider me will be something relatively unknown afterlife as I’ve known it ends if there’s anything at all. Like a newborn infant, the sense of self will be unaware that an “I” is present. First, the new non-organic transitional me will have to adjust to the light that illuminates my new reality; time is likely my new sun. Somewhere out of this vast expanse of the future, maybe I’ll be able to recognize that time is emanating out of everything and that it’s infinitely expanding, taking me with it.

Until this new awareness forms, I must learn my way. Language, as I knew it, will mean nothing and so it is not required to try to explain what has happened or where I am. In that way, it’s kind of like the DNA in a seed that bursts forth in a flurry of activity that ends up sending a single tiny bud out of the murky depth of soil into the sunlight. Little do the leaves know at this time that a flower will someday grace the top of the stem that stretches into the sky and will require a flying insect, seemingly from another dimension and certainly from another species, to randomly wander along and fertilize it so its offspring will inherit its genetic blueprint allowing it to move into the future. So, what did the DNA think about its future? It did not think; it simply grew into its reality. This is what we do before consciousness takes hold.

Faced with being one with the universe, there will be no orientation, no image of God or his son. We will be looking into the energy and matter creation element known as time. We will have merged from surfing on the wave of time as an organic entity to being a thread traversing the unknown while we learn to orient ourselves in the framework of time without physical being. If communication exists it could be on the quantum level with a kind of attenuation to threads and bands that pulse with information that exceeds any ability of us in human form to describe such a place.

Of course, death can just as well be the final cessation of all with a drift into the darkness of nothingness. But we already know that there is nothing known as nothing where a real void might exist. Time, exotic particles, dark matter, and gravity are all flowing through every nook and cranny of every corner of the universe. Even particles that exist momentarily as they flitter in and out of their quantum state are, in some respects, ever-present. If they are “here” or “not here,” they still exist in the potential and a kind of certainty that they will again be known.

Regarding human consciousness, we cannot yet be certain of where exactly that might be, how large it is, and if it’s transferable or ever-present. While the connectome may prove one day to be the structure within our minds that supports our consciousness, will we, upon making that determination be closer to the center of precisely where the point of self is? Is it larger than a molecule, could it be smaller, or does it simply exist in time?

But all of this is about life, not death. I guess I just have to accept that I cannot write of that which I know absolutely nothing about. Death will remain elusive until it is as intimate as it will ever be, and I will then own it.

I am the toad sitting upon a lump of coal by the dead tree in the woods; you ignored me as you walked by my pond. The world is turned upside down with her guts strewn about while the bowels of hell poison the atmosphere and threaten the very existence of us toads. How did things get this way? I can tell you most assuredly that it wasn’t from us amphibians; it wasn’t the insects, nor the birds, squirrels, or even the bears, that caused this topsy-turvy reordering of nature. It was humankind; it was your species.

My ancestors and I have croaked on countless evenings long before the appearance of any of the hairy, two-legged mammals. Matter of fact we trace our origins back to ancient wetlands when the earth was a far different place about 370 million years ago, and amphibians ruled. Of course, we didn’t appear then as we do now; while our lineage is from early amphibians, it wouldn’t be until 265 million years ago that the “mother toad” first appeared. We were here before the dinosaurs and survived as they disappeared. It was 55 million years ago that the first apes appeared, and then a mere 6 million years ago, the hominids started trekking over the land with their bipedal gait.

Through this passage of time immemorial, as evening falls, we bellow out a croak, assuring the other creatures that we are on watch over the night, waiting for the sun to return. We are the sentries that allow the rest of life to sleep securely while our star remains out of sight. We transition from our night lullaby to morning song, signaling to the other animals where freshwater has been accumulating. Our existence assures everything else that the water is healthy and that the balance of things is in check. If you no longer hear or see us, you yourself will already be long gone.

Let me explain why I’m here; I’ve been asked to communicate something with you that the toad community isn’t sure you can understand. I am the spokesvoice for the order of Anura in the family of Bufonidae, with a knowledge greater than your primitive thoughts allow. We know that you cannot see or comprehend anything that looks like truth yet, as your species is far too young.

You might ask why, after emerging from our earliest amphibious roots, we never took to further evolution and instead hunkered down and remained frogs and toads. After 13 million years of existence, a cataclysm was happening on Earth where an impact at the Wilkes Land crater caused the antipodal discharge of volcanic material at the Siberian Traps. This was the moment in history when the extinction of nearly 95% of marine life and about 70% of terrestrial life on Earth began. We were witnessing 350 million years of multicellular evolution coming to a screeching halt.

Yes, we survived where others perished. Shortly after this Permian extinction, the dinosaurs rose up to become our neighbors. Although they survived for 179 million years, it was an asteroid impact on Earth that would ruin their day. Again, we were on hand for another mass extinction where, this time, only 75% of life was going away. When the dust settled, the continent of Pangaea was a distant memory and had broken up into many parts. On all of them except Antarctica, the frogs and toads lived on to sing and bellow another day.

It was only 200,000 years ago that your species started walking on our lands. It has only taken you a little more than 200 years to create a situation where the writing scrawled on the wall suggests that you are intent on bringing on another extinction. We know that our kind will survive, but we also know that if you do not mend your ways, you will not be around to see us once again rule the planet that you believe you have divine rights to.

We live at the water’s edge, coming out at night to sing our songs. Our eyes can detect a single photon, and so to us, the night sky is a riot of light emerging out of history; our version of the movies is found in the beauty all around us, emanating from all points in the universe. Our food, air, and water are all free. We live in a symbiotic ecosystem that gives and takes. Some of us can live for many decades and never feel indebted to anyone or anything that allowed for our existence. We are not beholden or frightened by anything as we have known our place here on Earth for 100’s of millions of years. So you should ask yourselves, what really makes you so smart in your servitude and indebtedness?

You are afraid of your own place here. You cannot be sure of your continued survival due to your violent tendencies. You have created mythologies that you hope will help you cope with so much uncertainty, but you are deeply fearful of the unknown and the stranger. You fight one another in war and strive to destroy all that is wild. Instead of working with your skills, you are ignoring that your kind is intentionally despoiling the Earth in much the same way as mindless asteroids that accidentally crashed into our planet did so very long ago.

Your ignorance seems programmed to end your reign after only 200,000 years among us. Your disappearance portends great things for the kingdom of Anura as we will once again have the front row seats to watching what comes next while enjoying the wetlands of our planet’s return to health and our skies clear of the smoke of your fires.