Advanced Life Forms

When I was a pikkie at school, I remember seeing some x-ray footage of someone eating. You know, the lower jaw like a mandible, chomping off something, grinding it into small mush with our small monkey teeth, and then swallowing it. You see the white pulp, globs of it, dripping like snot down towards our sewer like digestive system (reeking with vaporised meat gas). At the time this simple depiction of the see-thru human jaw was like watching Star War special effects, but the impression it made on me was this: when you step away from being a human being, we're not a very graceful animal. For the most part, we're a vulgar species.

In the movie Venus Peter o' Toole's character interestingly points out that the most beautiful thing a man will see in his whole life is the naked body of a woman. Jessie asks him what the most beautiful thing is that a woman will see. He says: "Her first child." I wonder if that is true, and if it is, should it be true.

What about the beauty of an entire planet, of a mountain standing tall in an icy gale. Or the ocean.

While having lunch I reflected on this thing we do. When we humans eat, it involves finding something that was alive (dead now on our behalf), and we use pieces of metal to first cut it and then we break the dead tissue into smaller fragments and swallow it. That's essentially how we function. We get our energy from biting the bodies of other creatures and digesting them. Spiders do that too.

I suppose nothing is wrong with it, except that I think I prefer the elegance of say, a sunflower that simply absorbes the energy of the sun in its face, and in its fingers. Or moss on a log or tree limb, or a mushroom poking its white head out of chocolate cake soil, sucking nutrients out of bare soil, or even the beauty and power of entire forests. I suppose I admire the beauty and elegance of a form of life that opens its arms and fingers to the sun and absorbes its energy. By pure chemical reaction. Not by some primitive chewing process, where your teeth break the body of some other delicate life form, and in so doing, you're able to live. Imagine the elegance of living where simply breathing and standing in the sun gives life to oneself and energy to the world.

And we think we are advanced life forms.