By The Cupid Stunt
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
– Carl Sagan
There is NO way Mary was a virgin… virgin birth? I just can’t believe that!
– Ms. 91
When I was a teen I read Carl Sagan’s “The Dragons of Eden”. At the time I would have probably referred to myself as an agnostic and the book seemed to confirm this fact, after all, Sagan’s subtitle is “Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence” and like the agnostic he is only “speculating” and not confessing to KNOW. Currently I’m reading Stephen Baxter’s “Evolution” Guru’s favorite book. I never thought that books or one's thoughts could create such profound connections, but they would. These days I lean more towards atheism, how can I not with that little hussy Ms. 91 running around debunking biblical myths to everyone she meets. She vividly remembers her childhood priest, Father Splinter, how handsome he was and the feeling of awe she felt at church, but we all go through transitions in our lives and we should.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
- Francis Bacon
Sagan, brilliantly, discussed the intelligence of the information in the bible (again we assume these folks were speculating too). He found that the bible and its writers might have had some things right in regards to evolution. He sites what God says will happen to Eve if she eats of the tree of knowledge. "In pain shalt thou bring forth children" (Genesis 3:16) and in human evolution the brain developed much faster than the female body did to handle the expansion. The fontanelle or the incomplete infant’s skull evolved, according to early theories, to accommodate this.
Of course the writers of the bible and many religious folks, even today, would say that God knew that eating from the tree of knowledge would enlarge babies' brains. The whole thing seems rather metaphorical to me and man's way of explaining why animals give birth rather easily and women do not, but that is just me.
What hit home with me the most, however, was how Sagan compared creation (Genesis) with evolution. I thought it was pure genius. And Baxter in his wisdom takes it beyond the bible's description of creation and into the future, but he confirms Sagan’s writing in a most wonderful painting of these evolutionary events… hundreds of millions of years ago.
Let there be light.
- Genesis 1:3
To Sagan the first day would represent the Jurassic period and that night? The time the comet hits the Yucatan Peninsula and renders the Earth dark and the dinosaurs extinct. The second day came “seas” from a frozen comet-bombed planet into the start of the boggy end to the Cretaceous. Then dry ground, then plants, then fish, then birds, then land animals, then man, woman and alas some rest. In Sagan’s astute brain the seven days of Genesis represented the two hundred million years of evolution. In Baxter’s equally excellent mind it is the fishes, sea turtles too, and the birds and small plentiful mammals that begin to thrive after the comet wipes away the dinosaurs… he writes as if the first set of creatures never had a chance to evolve, but perhaps the next set was a better path to man.
May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? It is quite conformable with what we know of the transmission of formerly well-developed characters, that they should appear at an early period of life, and afterwards disappear-like gill slits in human embryology.
– Charles Darwin
Even a fetus goes through an evolution of sorts.
Have you ever experienced the feeling of falling in your dreams and woken up suddenly?
I have.
Like the apes we once descended from or Purga, a small mammal, from Baxter's novel that took refuge in the trees.
Fall and refuge is lost. So we wake ourselves up in our nests to make sure we are still safe from harm... the predators lurking below us still at bay.
The Dragons of Eden amazed me… Darwin amazed me. At the time, mom was organic gardening, we watched PBS, did Yoga, dug Julia Child AND Carl Sagan. My brother was sneaking joints, I was smoking menthols and probably had had my first acid trip, was shaking my booty at discos and certainly was no longer a virgin. The farm, Father Splinter and atheism were not on Ms. 91’s mind then and she could still remember what she did two days ago. It was an amazing time and somewhere in Manhattan was a boy that was digging the same shit – yeah maybe digging hot pants more than Julia Child - that same boy, just like I, was raised up in a southern religion and yet began to question everything.
Things would change for us both in the eighties. Guru would watch as his peers cast their votes for a movie actor with an agenda and I would butt heads with my father, who found my decisions, to study art not advertising, to study communism AND risk getting the family on the black list!, to live with a man without marriage. Suddenly I was supposed to think a certain way, have morals I hadn't been taught since I was five in bible school.
BUT this story begins after my own rebellion, the heartbreak and struggle of the Reagan years, when a sudden loss of the seeking of enlightenment seemed to sweep the whole country and my rise to success under the Clinton years when we all began learning again. This story begins after I had closed a successful special effects studio, born of a fascination of all the new technology, a studio that had weathered one recession and then I saw the other one coming. I was sick of the greed and lack of ideas in the advertising world that provided my fodder and instead found work on job boards and with direct clients (entrepreneurs). I had begun to play fantasy football, which landed me some good cash and I had a fairly lucrative Ebay business.
And I started writing… And so did Guru wander the same sort of path.
I wrote on a sports site called The Sporting News. I was the wild girl amongst mostly conservative Christian sportswriters. My fantasy league, a brusque group of stockbrockers, even kicked me out for smack talk! When I wrote I hacked code, added animation to my page, then video and along the way I was learning to write again, but for a girl who was into Carl Sagan, the Tao de Ching?
It was a transition.
I had come to believe by this time that there was a force in this world. One I could tap into with meditation and yoga. It was similar to the Christian thought “Let go, let God”, but it was more a feeling that the carbon atoms that made us all up were connected, that somehow if you let things flow (let go) you would move with them in the ways you were meant to.
Hardly fare for the working man that was looking for stats on his teams, but I made it copacetic... combining sports with life in my scribblings.
Today Ms. 91 and I laugh at the crazy creationist ideas that dinosaurs and man lived together, but back then I was working on a way to create a home for her, my Dad had died suddenly, she had broken every bone in her body and I didn’t think it would be long before she needed to leave the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee and move in with me. She wasn’t religious, but she had yet to be exposed to her daughter’s ideas so intimately. She wasn't yet a Tiger's fan or someone that thought Derek Jeter was hot. She needed my help to survive the every day stuff.
Her bills, her garden, downsizing…
It was around then I found Guru. A man now (at least partly), who had returned like I had in my adventures to a home, his in the mountains and caverns of Manhattan, which had long been a home away from home for me. Here he was, on the same sports site, spouting off about religious fantasy and science. I sent a comment to him one day that I once had hoped that Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden” would be a bridge for those two worlds and I forget how he answered, but it was something along the lines of “Any woman that groks Sagan has me intrigued!”
We flirted, we were both living with old lovers (platonically) at the time, and we wrote long emails. He once said “Hmmm a girl from the south named Mary, the same name as my mom.” He WAS intrigued and so was I, but I had Ms. 91 and Slouchy and he had NH Girl and Cowboy Mama, who was a southern girl fo’ sure, but it would be years before I met her.
When I did, and NH Girl too, I instantly loved them both, so beautifully, like Stephen Baxter's words did he paint them. And in those brief moments I spent with them they loved on me too.
Ms. 91? Guru, if he had ever met her, would adore her. Instead, he sent his herald and all of us had an adventure. Ms. 91 and I, Speedy, Guru and those we picked up along the way.
At the time, I was always working and I still am, my companions were employees of fifteen years or more, they still are mostly. I didn’t realize I had no life.
Meeting a kindred spirit was a thrill – he was also a load – a charming, sometimes sad load. Without him this endless battering of keys would have stopped long ago. He told me I had a voice too and I believed him.
He had multiple personalities barely controlled by a charming semi-merged force I called Matthew. The rest of Guru was a flirty bisexual, an overly aggressive and controlling manly man or he was the loud mouth kid that could be both petulant or heartbreakingly full of the pain only a child feels – the kind adults learn to cope with, but I didn’t know any of that yet.
Nor did I know about the oral fixation until in a moment of stress I watched him almost engulf – like Galactus (Google it) consumes worlds - a pizza meant for four.
He took his time revealing himself and agonized over finally uncovering it all. And by the time he did Ms. 91 was firmly ensconced, Galactus’ herald had been sent and our venture had already begun.
