The first variation
The words of each new language are rapidly burdened by meaning, utility, and experience; what wouldn’t one give to hear them as if for the first time? And the world provides. Through cognates and analogous structures it is revealed that we are all the same, promised / 약속 / 約束 the same future / 미래 / 未来.1
The coast, where I live, is the territory of Sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood. Once you learn how to see, wherever you look, you see the touch of the redwoods. You find their leaves, a little darker and slightly curled, adorning the yew; their fibrous bark, less its reddish hue, clothing the cypress. If you’ve ever smelled a redwood, really inhaled it, you’ll notice its musty scent lurking in the aroma of the eucalyptus, and more subtly in the slightly noxious vapors of tequila; all contain the compounds called terpenes. Even in death—even in the darkened, knotted, and stained telephone poles2 lining the streets of San Francisco—those organic forms are renewed in the mind: the sweeping curves of the great tree’s boughs, the rustling of the mottled green foliage, an ochre pillar soaring indefatigably into the eternal California blue. The epithet sempervirens comes from the Latin: always living. Always.
Sago is a kind of flour made from the starchy trunks of palm trees, a staple food throughout the islands of southeast Asia. Cycads—at first glance indistinguishable from palms, though taxonomically distant and allied only through convergent evolution—are sometimes also used in the production of sago. However, cycads secrete multiple potent neurotoxins, and their flour must be soaked thoroughly before consumption, or one wanders into a domain governed by words whose horror is so self-evident that it precedes definition, words like demyelination and palsy. Just remember that if it looks like this, it’s a cycad, and you have to soak the flour… how much suffering is summarized by that pathetic scrap of knowledge? How much, because nature twice cast in a single mold?
To me the striking feature of ethnically-homogenous places, like south India or Japan, is at first the immense variety in the faces, and then each one’s familiarity. I never properly realized this while growing up in diverse California, but in a place where everyone has the same skin and hair and eye color one immediately notices the differences, and, after visiting many such places, the underlying uniformity. I think the world has only around thirty faces, thirty fundamental forms, which are called to new life by each unique physiology in the same way that the subtle dexterity of a cellist may raise long-dead Bach once more, both wonderfully familiar and thrillingly original.
Every day I rode my bike past the immense vents that form the exhaust of the largest wind tunnel in the world. One of my teachers told me that when he was young he would often hear the roar of its turbines echo across the valley. I would always slow for just a second, right across the river from the immense steel frame, listening for the wind. At that time I didn’t know that the turbines had been shut down; computers imagine the wind now. I fear that all of life will soon be shut down and imagined. It’s all the same, isn’t it, whether a voice is synthesized, packaged, transported, demodulated; or whether it finds a way from lips to ears through the honest air?
The two superpowers of the Cold War each wrote in a script descended from one of the two great Western civilizations, the Soviets in Greek-derived Cyrillic and the Americans in Latin script. Our heme protein, our precious oxygen carrier, shares its entire structure with chlorophyll—with one exception, the central atom: we use iron where the trees prefer magnesium, so we bleed red. And, speaking of atoms, fourteenth column, first row of the periodic table; carbon; us. Same column, second row; silicon; computers. Do you understand? Do you see the grand diagrams on which we stand? Do you feel the waters that surge within us?3
promise / yagsog / yakusoku. future / mirae / mirai
some license here; most telephone poles are pine, but I’ve seen a few scattered redwoods
this question structure lovingly adapted from Nietzsche
the title inspired by the calculus of variations. for a taste, via Wikipedia: the first variation of a functional J(y) is defined as the linear functional δJ(y)…
header image: the citric acid cycle, from the Roche biochemical pathways poster