Olduvai (Part II)

What's Olduvai? This is a self-referential answer. If it doesn't strike your imagination on a deep, thrilling chord, then you are dead inside. I don't mean that. What I mean is that you should probably listen in more closely. What is it? The cradle of humankind. That--to your primate brain--is the closest thing to home we've ever had. Since then we've seen unfathomable serenghetti plains, alluvial flood plains, mountian gorges, ice sheets, pacific islands, moonscapes, office buildings, jungle thickets, tundras, stadiums, highways, lecture halls. But these things never touch our inner wealth--or should I say our inner wounding? The Buddhists would have you think that bare nature, our instinctive self stripped of the accumulation of development is inherently wonderful. I have difficulty accepting this from a Darwinian point of view. But maybe we are both right. The answer might be sought in Olduvai. Not by studying its rocks and fossils, but by the feelings it evokes, just as someone going to their roots--the old country, the childhood home...

Lately I've been on a big kick of integrating my history and making sense of it, making my narrative mean something. Wrestling with it and wresting from it something to motivate, to get me out of bed in the morning. So why not go to the root? That distant root? That root we're so separated from that it can't move us unless we make it move. But that's where we were of ourselves moved one time. Group proto-songs of proto-lament, proto-worry, proto-joy, Homo Ergaster Buddhas, Caligulas, Catos, Macchiavelis gathered around a proto-hearth. It's where we were all born and we all died. Our bones piled on our grandparents' in a gorge cutting off sight by mountains.

We're in a similar place right now. We think our sight is unobstructed--we see so clearly into our motives. And maybe we have gotten better at looking out. Radio telescopes touch quasars; arguably we've touched the background radiation that is the "soup" of the universe. But we haven't looked within enough, And maybe what we'll find inside is a valley enfeamed on all sides by truths tought unmoveeable. Unmoveable like the geocentric theory of the universe, like the four elements, like phlogiston, like the aether.

Intellectually, I have no problem with descending and breaking into Oldivai as a human living 2.5 million years later. But the strangeness of that place, and all place,s, tohugh intellectually acceptable, may be more than I can bear. But there's the beginnings of a strange project here.

Consider: "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."