…OF A LIFE…

Stage 74 / Thursday 9 July / From El Acebo to Cacabelos / 33 km

 

The evening in the little village of El Acedbo was very pleasant. It culminated with a magnificent sunset above the mountains to the west that we are soon going to cross, then a good dinner in exchanging good stories with other pilgrims. One of my companions invented a melody that somewhat resembled a military march. So we are vigorously whistling this march this morning as we descend toward the valley and Ponferrada. I feel the exaltation that happiness gives in walking in good company.

 

Lots of good memories continue to come back to me. The let me compare what I discover with what I have already seen, what I hear with what I liked to hear in my childhood, what I smell with other odours that go back to a distant past. Through the liberating effect of walking, these memories become more precise: I can identify with greater precision when I have seen such and such flower for the first time, where and when I heard my first cuckoo, or discovered the tantalizing perfume of honeysuckle. I compare what I have thus in memory to the ramifications of a tree which pumps from the inert soil the nutrients which allow it to live. Each memory is built on the base of preceding memories, and recognizes various nuances: my first insect, my first butterfly, my first firefly, etc.: the roots of my “me” help me today to better appreciate the unique qualities of the present instant.

 

This image of the tree, which grows from the immobile and static soil, plunges me again into this research of the line between living vegetal and inert mineral. It is a domain where science is still quite mute. Everything that happens inside a living cell is known precisely, how to decode certain complex spirals of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) which records the genetic history of a plant or mammal, but we don’t yet know what permits the passage point between a mineral salt contained in the earth, and its absorption by the sap of the tree so that it produces leaves and fruits. The human body is in large part water, but at what moment does the water I drink become living in me?

 

Equally disconcerting is the passage of the material of pebbles chosen by the bird’s beak to assist digestion in its gizzard to help produce and shape the egg that it will lay in the spring. The oblong form of the shell which will facilitate the laying has a surprising geometry, but what it contains is even more surprising: two gelatinous liquids of different colors, one of which will rapidly organize itself into a solid embryo which will feed on the nearby white of the egg.

 

The passage from inert to living, reproducing the aspect of the mother and father, can only happen on the condition that fertilization takes place before the formation of the impermeable shell! Where is this threshold of life situated, imposing a special meeting between two feathered beings? Because, without them, things that might have become alive only rot instead and become inert (i.e. the difference between a hatching egg and a rotten one)! What was organic will return to mineral and it often smells bad!

 

If there was fertilization, how will the sex of the chick be determined? Which dominant genes of the father or mother will determine its plumage, song and primary reflexes? If a cuckoo came and laid an egg in the nest of a warbler, what phenomenon would permit that maturation of the cuckoo’s egg is faster than that of the eggs already there? What vital process will determine that it is the young cuckoo that breaks out of his shell first and will have the reflex to push all the other legitimate eggs out of the nest?

 

In a more general way, what makes it possible for the living to keep the unity of its being and appearance when its food will only transit through it? Is there truly in him a stable material bone structure elaborated from transitory materials? At what moment is there an autonomy of spirit in relation to such matter in temporary visit, but still able to keep in memory the individuality that it meets? Does the spirit precede matter, or is it the reverse? The creative spiritual light is so well sung by the psalmist of the Old Testament which, in Chouraqui’s literal translation, addresses himself thus to IHVH-Adonaï (Yahweh father): “Not occulted my substance, for you, from whom I was formed in secret, knit together in the vaults of the earth. Your eyes saw my embryo, and my days were all inscribed in your book, before a single one was formed.” (Ps 139:15-16)

 

But perhaps this spiritual light is only the poetic formulation of an “information field” where all the ingredients and energy necessary for life, and even thinking, are found? This information field would be the equivalent then of spirit, without the divine! Organic chemistry obeying the same laws as mineral chemistry, the same sort of atoms existing in a rotten egg as much as in a fertilized egg, the opposition between the inert and the living is truly very tiny.

 

And yet, once launched, the energy necessary for growth or the maintenance of the living is much greater than that which is necessary for the conservation of the inert. And while the living is in the state of continuous imbalance because of this necessary supply of energy, the equilibrium of the inert is much more stable and nearly permanent. To such an extent that one can say: “dead = inert” and “life = structure in precarious equilibrium, soon destined to become again inert.”

 

For several days I have evoked at length the interdependence of matter-spirit, in adopting the principle that information is capable of structuring them in a bivalent way. I wonder at this point if everything is potentially living in the universe, on the condition that it has a structure apt enough to accomodate life permitting virtual to pass into real. It is almost like this pilgrimage in my armchair! I sometimes see myself truly on the path, all the ingredients of my thoughts enabling me to see the reality of my walk, of what I rediscover and would never want to forget!

 

Come on, would life in fact be a naturally intrinsic property of the matter-spirit binomial? We have traditionally grafted what is living onto the inert. What if the opposite were more precise? The inert would then be a lack of universal dynamics, not yet reaching the threshold of imbalance which generates life!