An Inquiring Mind

I have always had an inquiring mind. My Mom told me that, when I was a little kid, I would watch our mechanical clock for many minutes at a time, watching to see if the minute hand moved, and looking at the gears and cogs inside. I did not understand how it worked, but I understood that there was a mechanism that made the clock run. I do not actually remember this myself.

When I was in junior high school, I wanted to understand photosynthesis. I read what I could about it, from the imperfect references that our small school had. I really wanted to understand how it worked, not just have a black-box understanding that sunlight and carbon dioxide went in and sugar and oxygen came out of the process. Little did I suspect that the process was too complex for anyone to understand, even to this day.

I wanted to understand how the entire ecosystem worked. I watched birds and thought about the role of each species in the food webs of nature. I knew that some lived and some died, but I did not fully understand it until I watched a blue jay destroy a robin’s nest right outside my bedroom window. It was a very inefficient destruction, to boot: most of the egg fell on the ground, the jay getting only a beakful or so of nutriment. I watched some pond water with mud in a jar, and saw the tubifex worms wiggling their red selves from out of the mud, absorbing what little oxygen they could get. I was learning that, in the words of the writer Michael Crichton, whom I do not admire very much, life will find a way.

I wanted to understand music. I was not contented just to let music give me pleasure, whether it was classical music or the country music (especially Jimmie Rodgers) that my Dad listened to. I wanted to understand key signatures and time signatures, and how composers created the experience that most people encounter as simply a mystery. I bought or copied orchestral scores. I learned to compose. Had I stayed with it, I could have been the twenty first century equivalent of Johann Ditters von Dittersdorf, no great genius but passably competent. Only later did I realize how Jimmie Rodgers was one of the creators of an unlikely, but splendidly workable, form of music: the blue yodel, which combined country yodeling with black blues. Hybrids don’t always work; they usually end up looking like ugly medieval drawings of chimeras. But the blue yodel worked. That’s what I liked about it.

And I wanted to understand languages. I wanted to understand how Spanish worked, not just how to speak a little of it. Later, in high school and college, I studied Japanese, which is very difficult. But I was drawn by the way the language worked: how it was a hybrid of aboriginal Japanese polysyllabic words and grammar with imported monosyllabic Chinese words and symbols, just as Jimmie Rodgers had blended yodeling and blues.

Finally, at long last, I came to understand religion. No longer do I see it as a revelation out of heaven, communicated to my spirit. I see it as a set of ideas that sometimes facilitates and sometimes parasitizes instincts that we all have. I can look back and see how religion took hold of my mind and made me do “its” bidding. And that is why, in this blog, I do not see religion as a good or bad thing, but as a process that operates within a fascinating world of processes, as much a part of the cosmos as clocks, organisms, music, or languages. I am only happy that (as I will tell you later) I was able to escape from the parasitic form of religion.