Growth: The Physics of Aging

A man walks through a store with his child tucked safely in his arm. The child leans over and grabs indiscriminately at passing products. The colors and shapes captivate her. The father keeps his child at a distance from her tempters. He moves with purpose past these possibilities back to the area of the store where the product his family needs is located. The father picks up the related products and grabs at the price tags. Cost per ounce, percentage of active ingredients--the numbers captivate him. He selects the winning competitor after comparing the potency in his mind.

Watch this sequence of events--or any other one involving parents and their offspring. Think that only some twenty years hence the same sort of event may be played out again, only the person who was in the role of the child may being the one playing the role of the parent. What is the link between children and adults? How many links are there between the two and how many lie severed on the floor between them?

Difficult questions need to be meticulously analyzed to be answered: examine the pieces separately, gain an understanding of them, and then a person can put forth a solution.

Vision is an immediate means of examination. People see in pictures, a series of fluidly changing images. Sight is always framed by a perimeter which gives every waking perception a limited dimension. The scale is amenable to human consumption. Is it any wonder that people often think in images as well? Pictorial thinking is manageable--like playing a game. There are boundaries and easily defined relations between the aspects of the image (i.e., the rules of a game). With the aid of pictorial thinking--a simple metaphor for an elaborate subject--something that was big is made small and what was confusing is now understood. A person paints a picture of something profound in life, shows it to his audience, and can now say, "There, I have made the big small for you." The artist has served his audience and releases his authority over his creation when he publicizes it. The audience is free to consider the work, critique it, leave it behind, or order a print.

Picture: Elevators

I take up my thought brush and paint thusly for you, my dear audience. The lives of people are like a set of adjacent elevators: as one elevator drops, the strain on the cord causes the other elevator to rise. One elevator is pure potential. One elevator is actuality--is being. Thus, when a person is conceived the actuality elevator is on the ground floor. Never can it go lower. The potential elevator is at the top of the building. Never can it go higher.

The little one, our exemplary individual, begins within the potential elevator. She can be anything at all. Potential is pristine, free from the taint of error. It is perfect in its vacuity. Naturally, the audience (I presume) thinks of the best of possibilities--the lawyer, the doctor, the president! Oh! Hope of hopes--what if she could be the leader of the free world? Time will tell.

The elevators operate on a time schedule. As the days go by, the potential elevator drops and the little one develops. Like grains of sand, the little one trickles into the elevator of actuality. Reality is defiant, stand-offish, proud of its dimensions and girth. It is noble in its density. The individual becomes something real and thorough, something fleshed out. She comes down to earth. The child learns a certain language, grows to a certain height, sees certain things, and so on. The actuality elevator rises as she ages. She becomes perhaps a student, a lover, a parent of her own. At some point the elevators meet. For a tenuous moment they are equal. The person whose life is pictured by the set of elevators now is fairly divided between the two. An instant later, disequilibrium returns. Now, more of her leaves the potential elevator and steps aboard the actual one. She is now ready to be more actual than potential. With the next moment, the tragedy comes--she realizes that the more she becomes, the less she can be! Oh! Terror of terrors--what if she has become the wrong sort of thing? The audience worries about the worst of possibilities--to be a failure, a vagrant, a disgrace. Whatever she is, it is impossible to change course. The elevators only move in one direction as time only moves forward. She becomes tired; her body aches. The prospect of deviating from habit or searching beyond the familiar confines distress her. Downward plunges what the person can become as who she actually is rises higher and higher. If the mistakes are too many or too great, the image is eerily reminiscent of an execution. The height kills. But if the triumphs have piled up, the image is of a catapult. The load is delivered unto the heavens. When she reaches the top, at the end of her life, the doors open, the cord is severed, and what was rushes to earth in a race to become nothing.

The audience wonders, what floor has she reached? Did she walk out? Is the ride simply over?

As the artist, I have the luxury of being coy. I can refrain from expanding upon my work and drawing out implications I think would infringe upon the responsibilities of the audience. I will say, though, that here I have painted a picture of life that is principally defined by time. In this way, childhood and adulthood are opposed. The contents of the elevators are inversely proportional. A person becomes less like a child the more like an adult he becomes. There is truth in this, is there not? One may look at life through time like a lens. Then the link between childhood and adulthood is a loose one because one has stepped outside of a life to look at a life.

Potentiality, with childhood as its representative, is the antithesis to actuality, with adulthood as its representative. Potentiality is open because it is empty. The distinction between potentiality and nothing is that we expect the former to become something else whereas we expect the latter to remain the same, to remain nothing. There is something there when we consider potentiality, however undeveloped. We press the raw material into molds or press stamps onto it. Now, it is or contains something else, it is formed. Actuality is binding because it is full. It resists alteration because of its structure, though it too can be undone.

This picture is weighty, is it not? Does it not saddle you down? It adds a great, painful, anxiety-inducing gravity to all of one's time because it paints imprisonment as so inescapable. Life is a process of binding. Being bound is what makes life like a gamble, for once the bet has been placed (i.e., the choice made) there is always a record of it and a consequential reckoning. Once a person has gambled wrongly, it impoverishes him. He takes that err with him in the form of an empty pocket, whether or not he remembers why he is poor. He never escapes it. He wriggles on the pin of failure. It is as though all moments of time impale a person and fix them at that point. Could it be that all these frozen people are what push the elevator of actuality downwards--that keep one from rising higher and faster? What heights could a person attain, how tall would the building of his life be, if not for all these instantaneous duplications! Is it possible that all the people a person has been are pinned onto this latest person? Oh how the woman now is different than the baby she was--that little balloon so scantly adorned!

Do not despair. We are looking out from time and time is ambivalent in the abstract. A person might just as easily be lifted up by her becoming. It is after all the natural motion of the elevator of becoming to move upwards. In potentiality there is freedom. What if a child took the advice of a beneficent mentor and developed a talent for piano instead of listening to his friends encourage him to vandalize? How many times does a person, going upwards, have the opportunity to become something they would approve of in quiet reflection--away from peers? Yes, life is a process of trial and error, of learning the truth of things from within them after assessing the truth of them from without them. So long as there is some depth for the potential elevator to descend into, there is still hope. Would it not be enough for a person to renege on her shameful missteps just prior to the door opening? Could she not shed those copies of herself that constrained her? In ways yes and in ways no, but if I elaborated I would be leaving my picture behind and moving somewhere else.

Impartial

Who are we to ask for guidance if we become disoriented and need to know where to go next? Let us set aside the suggestions of people. Their judgments are fraught with mistakes and rarely are preferable to our own judgments. What about old mother nature? She is well liked. We laud her for her impartiality--how she never discriminates. (Discrimination is unnatural, after all.) She tolerates everyone equally. Perhaps she is the fount of knowledge we are looking for. Ought we model ourselves off her posture? I have seen many people knock at her door. When she answers, what does she say? What fables does she teach us with?

A bear takes a wrong step and lands in a trap. His foot is crushed; his hide is punctured. Writhing in pain, what does he do? He takes to gnawing off the effected limb. Moral: Live at all costs.

Ought we be like the bear? No. Life is good. It is the most basic good. But should we live at all costs? All? No, no. One loses life trying so hard to keep it. The bear dies hemorrhaging.

A wolf takes a wrong step and lands in a rut. His leg is broken; his stride is undone. Writhing in pain, what does he do? He takes to limping off alone. He refuses assistance. If a helpful human came to set the leg straight, she would be bitten. Moral: Vulnerability is death.

Ought we be like the wolf? No. Death is bad. It is the most basic bad. But does vulnerability entail death? Entail? No, no. One gains life by permitting help. The wolf dies starving.

To live at all costs pits individuals in a mortal competition. Vulnerability is death pits individuals in a mortal competition. The impartiality in nature is a direct cause of confrontation amongst her children. Without the striations partiality--some individuals being embraced, others being confronted, and others being ignored--there is only homogeneous relating. Only the brutest facts are consequential--that one eats and reproduces. These facts constrain within the fixed limits of natural scarcity. One's eating takes away from another's; one's reproducing takes away from another's. The option is posed: either draw daggers or take leave. Fight or flight. There is no relating here; there is no cohabitation or dwelling. Is this any way for humans to operate?

I anticipate your objections. You will come at me and say, "You have gone too far. The bees--they cooperate! Lionesses carry their cubs in their mouths. Some birds mate for life. In nature, there is special treatment amongst some species." And to you I say: Yes. Quite right. I never said that mother nature never had good advice. She is alive and so she must have some good in her. One cannot exist without containing some good. My point is principally that those who rap on her door exclusively are doomed because she will sooner or later sell them down the river. And no, she certainly never meant to. It was the inquirers' fault for going to the well too many times.

We have observed how impartiality leads to inhumanity. If we heed mother nature's advice, the same results follow. One need look no further to see this than one's local instantiations of bureaucracy. One becomes abstracted and is referenced by a series of numbers. The end is not compassion, but collation. "We want to treat you all the same," says the bureaucracy. "Do not blame me. It is out of my control," replies the bureaucrat to your pleading. There is no place for specificity within bureaucracy. There are only greater and lesser generalities. Life is reduced to a flow chart, to a logical system of if-then statements. All of its agents are blameless--they only follow rules.

In this way, nature and artifice relate. They are perfectly devoid of intention and thus are innocent. (Guilt is, after all, unnatural.) We can scoop up the indiscriminate soil of nature and plant in it the seeds of our industry. What flowers grow? The delightfully ambivalent blooms of technology. The guillotine is impartial. Why? Because it harnesses nature. Gravity pulls the blade down upon all presented necks. And before you interrupt me, I can hear your thoughts already. Yes, yes. The wheelchair is impartial, too. Have you already forgotten my point?

To treat every individual as an individual, as a unique being within a unique context--how joyfully unnatural!