Since January, when the people of Tunisia and Egypt took to the streets, we’re seeing what it looks like when bodies move against the weight of expectation. Years of pent up frustration found release in a massive tide of demonstrators from Tunis to Madison, Wisconsin. Not all these tides were tsunamis; the shoreline sometimes held. Bills were passed through legislative sleight of hand and brutal dictators unleashed their own forms of fury. Still, the very fact that bodies did spill into squares and surge into capital buildings reminds us that everything we see, taste, touch, smell, hear and are governed by is composed of very small things.
As if some great teacher in the sky was eager to drive this lesson home, the sea just east of Tokyo no longer conformed to our expectations about its sodden mass. Decades of pent-up energy found release in the movement of tectonic plates, and the sea broke its routine, creating havoc to the west. All the stuff of modern life – roads, electricity, high-speed trains, fishing piers – was wiped out by water molecules swimming out of bounds.
Long before electron microscopes and lab coats, a school of ancient philosophers argued that the road to enlightenment was paved with atoms. Once you see that everything of this world is nothing but a swirl of small, small things, forming now a human body and now a coastal city, you won’t be so surprised when these atoms break apart to form something new. Don’t place your bets on what these atoms have wrought, counseled Epictetus and Lucretius. Place your money on what they can do.
Lucretius laid out his treatise on atoms in his lengthy poem “On the Nature of Things.” Atoms fall out of the sky and form seas and sailing ships, Roman empires and terrible wars. They also form spider webs and motes of dust swirling in a shaft of light. On a molecular level, the spider web and the imperial palace are operating under the same law of motion and rest, composition and dissolution. In every bit of matter, tiny atoms move through space forming composite beings and then going their separate ways.
“Lucretius,” wrote the Italian essayist, Italo Calvino, “is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance.” But just because substance itself is permanent and immutable doesn’t mean that material is not shot through with void. The first thing Lucretius wants us to realize, explains Calvino, “is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.” Substance, by which we mean the sum total of all atoms and the space they move through, may be permanent, but the configurations formed within are incredibly mobile.
Tsunamis and uprisings dissolve the known in favor of something unknown. We might be tempted to hold them at arm’s length, to call a tsunami an act of nature and an uprising an act of will, but these recent events suggest otherwise. Pent up energy finds its way out of some hidden chamber. The more energy is pent up the more it dissolves established channels on its way out. The energy will be released, no effort of the human will can stem its flow. If we’re lucky enough to survive the eruption, we can learn about a lot about this world.
But what, you wonder, is the takeaway lesson from the North shore of Japan, where thousands of people are dead and, as I write, several reactors are on the verge of melting down. The Prime Minister says his country hasn’t felt this bad since American bomber planes dropped hydrogen bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. News reporters try to reassure the viewing public, telling us we’re probably looking at a Three Mile Island, not a Chernobyl. That thing we can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell might be governing our lives for generations to come. What can we garner from this disaster except that life is suffering and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying?
Lucretius saw all sorts of salvation in the movement of small, small things. A poet, he was particularly interested in how the alphabet might be rearranged to create the right line, the words that had to be spoken. He carefully built his poem with disaster firmly in place in the frontal cortex. Like a Tokyo architect, he weighed and considered the sound and substance of each word, imagining how well it might absorb life’s aftershocks. With crushing precision, he rendered the heaviness of the world. And yet, he reminds us, all these dense and determined things are filled with space. “Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event,” writes Calvo, Lucretius “feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and human beings.”
What we’ve been seeing, then, is the freedom of human beings to make demands on their government and the freedom of waves to make demands upon the shore. But in all that crashing and banging there is still the possibility to set down the right line, to rebuild a skyscraper lithe as a palm tree in a hurricane. There is still the worthy effort of working with these small, small things to build something beautiful until the next crash of the unexpected takes our breath away.
Living on a major earthquake fault and having survived atomic weapons, Japan is a leader of rebuilding out of rubble. Like Lucretius, the Japanese put disaster in the frontal cortex before sitting down at the drawing board. They calculate lightness into the beams, litheness into the weight-bearing posts. There is a useful analog here for these nascent democratic movements. Destroying the weight of expectations need not lead to chaos. Indeed, according to Lucretius, even chaos’s destruction is but a momentary configuration of atoms, ever on to something else.
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