Saturday, September 16, 2023
I used to live in the foothills of South Carolina, and all the roads were crisscrossed, curvy, and weird. Nobody used cardinal directions because the roads always changed directions. Infrastructure followed the curvaceousness of the rivers and mountains. When I lived in Oklahoma, it was quite different. Everybody had a sense of direction. In the flattened Midwest, the roads are straight and grid-like. There is something rather sterile about grids. Those types of patterns don’t seem to appear in nature, so we tend to think of them as artificial.
What an interesting paradox – man’s straightened out symmetry and nature’s twisted, bubbling surprises. This duality makes it seem like humans are in conflict with nature. But humans are natural, so what gives? The key is to understand that there is no conflict, but a perfect, blind-sighted union.
Insides have outsides and fronts have backs. You can’t have a world with only outsides and backs or only insides and fronts. Humans try to arrange infrastructure or objects in grids and lines. Nature arranges them in scattered formations, randomly, and haphazardly. You might say nature’s way is circuitous and flows like water or an inkblot; and man’s ways are rigid and artificial and flow in straight lines. But that implies that humans are artificial. Without the twists and turns and surprises of “nature,” there could be no straight, orderly, and symmetrical. It’s not man versus nature. It’s man and nature needing each other, connected in their secret, paradoxical bond. So to my friends in the Midwest, your straight, symmetrical and grid-like roads are every bit as wonderful and inspiring as the complementary curliness of the rivers and mountains. Reality is duality. Man and nature are essentially the same thing seeing itself through a blind spot. How weird – everything that seems polar is perfectly unified. (And everything that seems unified is imperfectly polarized.)