[Music]
This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions,
the still point of the turning world,
the pharmacon that does it all.
[Music]
As we wind down our season during the ongoing pandemic of Anno Dominique 2020,
I thought I would share with you some thoughts today about the topic of shelter and exposure.
Here's an axiom to start with,
"Existence poses you outside of yourself."
If you're not exposed, you don't exist.
Living and non-living matter alike is thrown open to the elements,
to other beings, to the sun, to the universe at large.
It's vulnerable, susceptible,
expropriated into the alien.
Every foundation stakes its claim in the midst of a turbulent and terrifying openness.
Living things are more thrown open than things inanimate.
That's why they need shelter,
why they need protective membranes, screens, and coverings.
The planet we live on is wide open to the universe,
yet it also provides life with its most basic and essential forms of shelter.
The Earth's magnetic field, for example,
which extends thousands of miles into space,
acts as a shield that deflects the noxious gamma rays
and charged particles of solar wind
that bombard us from outer space.
Without geomagnetism, our stratosphere,
including the ozone layer, would be stripped away,
and Earth would be unfit for life.
The same applies to the layer of gases that encircle the planet,
created largely by the metabolic labor of primitive microorganisms,
our oxygen-rich atmosphere,
burns up most incoming meteorites before they reach the Earth's surface,
and protects the biosphere from ultraviolet radiation and cosmic gamma rays.
Without it, life, as we know it on Earth, would not exist.
Humans, for reasons unknown, are the most thrown open beings on the planet.
We are exposed not only to nature, but also to history.
That's why we need even more sheltering than other life forms.
Ever since we have been human, we have covered ourselves with some kind of
shirt, skin, or tunic, and these days face masks and coverings.
We have sought out the shelter of caves, tents, and homes.
We have made worlds within which to dwell.
What is a world if not yet another humanly created form of shelter?
A shelter exposed to its own endemic perils.
I worry less about the bacteria and viruses that share our world than I do about our overreaction to them.
In fact, I worry that our worlds may get so over-engineered
that they'll end up detourrestriallizing humanity and rendering us a cosmic in nature.
What do I mean by that? I mean that we would cease to be a refraction of the cosmos,
would cease to share as destiny as it were.
In Walden, Thoreau writes, "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions."
I don't subscribe to that view yet I do believe that the universe offers itself to,
and even calls out for, our witness.
I've never understood the lament endlessly reiterated by modern thinkers
that the universe is indifferent to us.
Who asks that it be otherwise?
We have family, friends, and firefighters to care about us.
The universe does not exist to love, afflict, or redeem us.
It exists to throw us open and expose us to what exists.
Everything comes to us from this opening we call the universe,
and you can't ask for a more generous giving than that.
Another thing I'll never understand is the distinction between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial.
Every atom in our bodies and on our planet has stellar origins.
Every time we see an object, a landscape, or light reflecting off a body of water,
we have a star to think for that.
At its most basic level, life essentially refracts the sun,
either through photosynthesis or through photo receptors in our sensory cells and organs.
So yes, we are a solar as we are terrestrial in nature.
And if we believe Nietzsche's zero-thrustra, our sun needs us as much as we need the sun
because we shine its light back to it.
You all remember the scene?
As zero-thrustra prepares to descend to the human world from his mountaintop,
he turns to the east and asks, "You great star, what would your happiness be if you had not
those for whom you shine?"
The question of all questions, what would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine?
Aristotle defined happiness as the natural accompaniment of unimpeded activity.
According to that definition, stars are happy to the extent that they slowly burn their vast
reservoirs of nuclear fuel in an ongoing blaze of light.
Yet, zero-thrustra reminds us that there is more to stellar happiness
than the exothermic processes that keep stars in being,
and that maybe we have something to do with it.
Speaking of which, how about we take a trip to the sun?
How about we find out just how solar we are by going there ourselves, we for whom the great star shines,
rather than letting the sun always come to us?
Those of you who listen to this show, the entitled "Epinions Brigade"
are spaced out enough, I think, for such an expedition.
So let's all take a deep breath and then climb onto the intergalactic ship
of entitled "Epinions". The ship is made of thought, from far away as Jupiter's sulfur mines,
way down by the methane sea. We have set the controls for the heart of the sun. Here we go.
We set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Open the mountain, watching the watch out,
breaking the darkness, breaking the great fire.
One to the least, one to shine down.
Love is the shadow of the bright and the sky.
[Music]
Having passed through its corona, its photosphere, its convection and radiative zones,
we have arrived in thought to the inner core of the sun.
Here at the heart of the star, the temperatures and pressure levels are unimaginably intense,
intense enough to squeeze two protons together. Only under the most extreme conditions
will two positively charge protons. Overcome their natural repulsion and succumb to the indignity of
fusion. When protons are squeezed together, they release a tremendous amount of energy.
Exactly how much is determined by Einstein's famous formula, E equals MC squared,
energy equals mass times the speed of light, the speed of light being 186,000 miles per second.
For some reason, no one knows why. The weight of two fused protons amounts to 99% of their combined weight.
It's a law of nature, not a consequence of a law of nature, that two protons lose 1% of their
mass when they fuse. Multiply that 1% by the speed of light squared and it equals the staggering
sum of 34 billion something of energy. The visible universe, along with all life on earth,
owe their existence to this ongoing 1% loss of mass in the internal activity that crushes
protons together in stellar interiors. E equals MC squared may be the most elegant equation in the
history of science, yet its equal sign masks the enormity of the violence that converts mass into
energy at the center of stars. That conversion engenders massless quanta of light called photons.
Let there be light said God and there was light. Well, not exactly. Light has anything but a sudden genesis.
The photon released by nuclear fusion has a long and errant way to go before it actually becomes a
form of visible light. The estimates among astrophysicists vary wildly, yet it takes anywhere from
170,000 years to many millions of years for a photon to make its way from the sun's core to its
radiative zone and from there to the churning gases of its convection zone and finally to the
photosphere of the solar surface. Its odyssey could not be more arduous because at every turn,
the photon gets absorbed and re-radiated by the atoms it interacts with.
That's why astronomers refer to it as the photons drunken walk through the body of the star.
A poet might compare it to a gestation. I would compare it to a penance or mortification.
Given that the photon encounters nothing but obstruction in its outward drive, so much so that
by the time it completes its journey, it emerges at the star's surface in a bruised and battered state.
No longer a high energy gamma ray but as a much weaker ultraviolet and infrared light.
Let there be light and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years later, there is light.
Nothing could be more antithetical to the photons drunken walk to the sun's surface
than its subsequent rectilinear dash through interstellar space at 300,000 km/s.
That is the miracle of the sun's surface or photosphere. Free at last, free at last,
for the photon, or so we imagine, freedom means traveling through the universe in a straight line
at the speed of light. But who is to say whether this luminous freedom realizes the photon's dream,
the photons tell us, or whether the photon, in fact, has some other reason did.
Does its release from the body of a star represent a new birth of freedom or merely the elimination
of a waste product? In the latter hypothesis, the gamma ray born of nuclear fusion
fulfills its intended purpose in its terrible fight to make its way out of the star's interior
because without this centrifugal energies produced by fusion, that is to say without the
counter-pressure of gamma rays pushing to get out of their interiors, stars would collapse
under the influence of gravity. So maybe the photon fulfills its telos not when it becomes visible
light, but in its drunken walk through the star's interior. One way or another, whether the photon is
released from the surface as a bird from a cage or merely as a form of exhaust, the visible world,
as we know it, has its origins in the exothermic processes I've been describing. Note that I
say as origins, not its end, for there is more divisibility than the constant stream of photon sent out
by the star's photosphere. If stars did not have those for whom they shine, they would not only forfeit
their happiness, they would no longer even shine. Let's follow our solar photon on his brief journey
from the sun's photosphere to planet Earth, a journey that takes exactly eight minutes and 20 seconds.
If on its course, the photon happens to find its way to your eyeball, then a new stage in its
odyssey begins. It first passes through your cornea, then through your lens, and then onto the retina
at the back of your eye. On this thin layer of tissue with its light sensitive nerve cells,
the photon impinges on either a cone or a rod, which converts the packet of light into an electric
impulse that is conveyed to your brain by the optic nerve. Once it reaches your brain,
the photon's trek comes to an end, its massless packet of energy generated by the fusion of
atomic nuclei now gets absorbed into your living matter. In truth, while the human eye is sensitive
enough to detect a single photon, it requires a plurality of them before the retina will actually
send a message to the brain. That said, about half a billion photons enter the cornea of the human eye
every second, and half of those actually reach the retina and enter the brain as electrical
impulses, bringing with them a flood of kinetic visual images from the so-called external world.
What this continuous intake of sunlight, bouncing off objects means, is that a considerable
quotient of our organic substance, as well as our psychic life, is essentially solar in nature.
The most intimate recesses of human vision and selfhood connect with the deepest interior of the
sun through the photons that traverse the distance between them.
Our daily incorporation of this never-ending stream from the sun's roiling surface is so fundamental
to human vision, so fundamental to our mode of being, so fundamental to both our material
and spiritual lives that it cries out for a name. I will call it Arthurian Intimacy.
Theia was the Greek goddess of light, in particular of the ether or shining blue of the sky.
Helios, Selene, and Eos, Sun, Moon, and Dawn were born of Theia's union with Hyperion.
So every time an extraterrestrial photon reaches us from her domain, we receive the goddess into us.
I could phrase this differently by saying that the human eye is an aperture through which the light
enters the body sweetly. I'm alluding here to Cavalcanté di Cavalcanté,
who is a shade that Dante meets in Inferno 10, the Circle of the Heratix,
where Cavalcanté inquires of Dante after his own son Guido. He wants to know why Guido,
a fine poet, and a good friend of Dante's, is not with him on this extraordinary journey through
the afterlife. Dante offers an ambivalent response which leads Cavalcanté to assume that his son
is died, and he reacts in sorrow, exclaiming, "Is he no longer alive? Does the sweet light no longer
strike his eyes?" The Italian for strike is Fierre, from Fierida to wound. Does the sweet light
no longer wound his eyes? Eyes are the open wound, the volness through which the sweet light
plays on our world vulnerability. Like the arrows of Eros, we crave more wounding. On his deathbed,
good they could not open his wounds, that is to say his eyes wide enough for the photo stream he
was about to lose, and he called out for lique, merlique, light, more light. And even if his last words
were less striking than that, it seems that he said in fact opened the shutter so that more light may
enter. Good then, the hypesisterion, aspirin, and lover of colors was calling out for more
thayon intimacy. I have defined the human condition as sheltered exposure. It is above all the
sun to which we and other life forms on earth are exposed. The sweet light wounds are eyes. This,
despite the geomagnetic field, and the planets atmosphere, both of which protect us from the more
destructive effects of the sun's radiation. The solar blaze bears down on us with enough intensity
that we are obliged to seek out additional shelter from our overexposure to it.
I refer here not only to the risk of thermal scorching, but to the existential condition of exposure
in general. Exposure to the light of the public world, for example, or to the celestial
immensity above our heads. We are not altogether at home in such openness, otherwise we would not
associate home with a roof or the roof space of interiority. A way or protected from what the Irish
poet Desmond O'Grady calls the "Lights agony." Be it the light of the sun or the light of history.
O'Grady calls it that in his poem "Pillotalk," which recasts in lyrically condensed form the
return of Odysseus to his wife and their matrimonial bed chamber on the island of Ythaca.
And out of the lights agony leaving behind all past destruction. Let's lie us down again on that
old bed, steadfast under the bamboo and seaweed ceiling, opening glad white arms to one another.
Then let me tell you all that story that's the skill of survival in the daily struggle.
The blows given the beatings taken of wandering for years and of winds and losses in the search
not to end a destroyer. While I watch over you, let down your long hair to shadow your shoulders
before sleep, for all this place shall break and fall apart. Should you go absent?
The arms are wiped because they've been sheltered from the burn of a Mediterranean sun.
And shadow here stands for asylum from both the sun and the human history that takes place under
its glare, or what Hanahir had called the light of the public sphere. Yet even under the bamboo and
seaweed ceiling, they are slips into the room through its windows and shutters and open door
as well as through the sleeper's dreams. And let's not forget that the old bed steadfast under the
bamboo and seaweed ceiling was carved by Odysseus into the trunk of an olive tree that has
its roots in the foundation of the house. It's thanks to the sun that the olive grew to its great size
and thanks to the sun and the miracle of photosynthesis that the ceiling could be made of bamboo
and seaweed in the first place. The very matter of the house speaks of our sheltered exposure
and exposed shelter and that is a condition we share with all the other living tenants on our home
planet this very strange third stone from the sun. This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions
Happy summer stay well.
♪ ♪
He's a beauty bird
How deep he's got this rice
He's got this rice
Oh, feel the promise we heard
Now, the stage will burn
The rest of the world's gone
Forever, that's what we're looking for
One, two, three, yeah
He's got this charlotte
Whoa, two, three, yeah
He's got this charlotte
Whoa, two, three, four, yeah
He's got this charlotte
♪ ♪
It doesn't show, it doesn't show
It doesn't show, it doesn't show, it doesn't show
He's gonna fly, he's gonna fly
He's gonna flying, he's gonna fly
That's the stuff that the kids want
It's the stuff that they want
I mean, it's the fight, it's the fight
That's the fight, it doesn't get coming
He's gonna fly, he's gonna fly
(upbeat music)
(buzzing)