Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape; he IS the shape of the landscape. This is the Pacific Ocean. The California indians used to say that at full moon, the fish came and danced on these beaches, and it is true that there is a local variety of fish called grunion that comes up out of the water and lays its eggs above the high tide mark. The females bury themselves tail-first in the sand, and the males gyrate or dance around them and fertilize the eggs as they are being laid. The full moon is important because it gives nine or ten days between these very high tides, and the next ones that will wash the hatched fish out to sea again. Every landscape in the world is full of these exact and beautiful adaptations by which an animal feats its way into its environment like one cog-wheel into another through millions of years of evolution. Millions of years of evolution have shaped the grunion to feat and sit exactly with the tides. But nature that is evolution has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, by comparison with the grunion, he has a rather crude survival kit, and yet it is the paradox of the human condition; one that fits him to all environments. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and daftness make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it; and that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has re-made his environment is a different kind of evolution. Not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks....The Ascent of Man. - John Bronowski My status? Well I pulled the pocket trumpet out last night and played most of the night with Joe and Tony of Dueling Pianos in front of a fun audience. Took many a bow. https://youtube/watch?v=ioiP47bJ5d4&list=PLxPmwaGMOAvuSyGXijKuh5sVnIXPK4fIa
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 04:46:47 +0000
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