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| An abstract painting with red, brown, green and yellow shapes flowing in layers suggesting intimacy and fertility |
I find there's something beautiful about the way the rules of nature we observe and dictate break down when you look closer.
Relevantly to my own transition, for instance, the haphazard, hazy, barely understood science of sex and gender. It bears mentioning, because the kind of people who hate that there exists people who they perceive to be different from themselves refuse to believe it, the middle school science we're taught about X and Y chromosomes is hideously inaccurate and incomplete. Man and Woman are the only two genders like China and India are the only two countries.
All natural science is like this. Hard and soft, its precision only goes so far. We can always look closer. Mathematics is the exception. It's pure abstraction, able to describe the natural world in as much depth as we can see and more. But once you touch the real, things become, in a word, blurred. Soft.
Streetlights sway in the wind. Bridges swell and compress in heat and cold. The universe has pockets of stars that, to the best of our measuring ability, are much, much older than the universe that created them. The absoluteness, the rigidity we intuitively imagine the world possesses – at least I do, having being raised with Lego – is an illusion. An optical illusion caused by distance.
Things fracture when we look closer, and for all that I was raised to be a natural scientist I find this beautiful. Enticing. Something haunts me in there, inside, something wet and red and wild and hairy and half-light. Something I don't really have words for. Something hot and nasty, like cheap rum. I picture it like dark red earth splitting softly, with that unpleasant sour smell I love. To me the smell of fresh furrowed earth is the smell of life.
I picture something growing explosively between us, twisting, churning, uncontrollable, wild, free. It is the quintessence of wilderness, red in tooth and claw, and also the comfort of warm fires and worked earth growing food. Something hot and hungry and horny, digging and reaching and spasming.
In the process of life, we eat and fuck and kill. We speak and touch and listen. We take into ourselves that which isn't us and make it part of us, and then split apart. Blending, changing, becoming. In the mundane action of eating and shitting we touch upon the borders of the illusion of self, of consciousness; the stubborn perception that our mind and body and time is limited and apart from the rest of the world, as Einstein puts it.
And really if you look close enough, if you study the molecular process of how the starch in a potato is turned into fat and heat and motion in your body, the boundaries of you and potato, of self and not-self, become very blurred. I don't claim to actually understand the science of it (or anything) but I know that much: The conceptual tools we have to determine the precise difference between Potato and Man are not absolute. At the most basic levels of physical existence, and even well above that, those boundaries fall apart.
And it's so beautiful. Slick fluid on your skin and we can't even know how much is water or spittle or sweat or sexual secretions. It's all mixed. Your foot with and an old band-aid on it, adding glue and blood and mud and ooze to the blend, even as the river water washes it all away. Mixed. We don't have time to stop and sort it out. Time to stop and smell the dirt, sure, for a little bit. But we're always in motion. Always bumping into the world. That's life also. It's not fair or right or good, but it is beautiful.
Goo. Primordial soup. If you were to grow a human being in your belly, that's how it would begin. A couple of fertilized cells, or a couple of hundred, or a couple of thousand, aren't going to look like a cluster of discrete, neat little balls like in the biology textbooks. They'll look like a smear, a haze, a pulsing, twitching pile of snot. We couldn't even study its ferocious cellular division up close without hurting it terribly. It'll grow into a whole human being, yes, and that is a miracle all of its own, but consider for a moment that pile. That chaotic, amorphous, protean mess growing in the dark folds of your body in some future-possible timeline, following only the imperatives of hunger and reproduction that ruled the first forms of life that ever swam on this planet.
Consider the fast line of your jaw, running into the taut sinews of your neck, shivering witch each heartbeat. For a moment I grasp how it all runs together. For a moment I glimpse all of you, the forest, not just the trees. And it's so beautiful. You're so beautiful.
But I break apart. Things break apart. Time moves on, without mercy or moderation. And it hurts and we grasp for platitudes, like how beauty is fleeting, how we would only know to value it because it goes away. And the words make sense in our head. It's not just science, but poetry. Parting is all we know of Heaven, et cetera, et cetera.
But it still hurts.
