If we live a thousand more years from this moment of no understanding we still will not finally understand what makes these strange hunks of skin and bones and teeth and excrement that we are move and think and see.  A thousand years of living will only add to a thousand years of not knowing and no matter if we with machines examine ourselves cell by cell and with history fossil by fossil and with satellites moment by moment simultaneously throughout the world and with lover's hand hair by hair will there ever by anything, finally, than this unknowing we have called life.  A hand reaches out in the dark for . . . another hand, a cigarette, a knife . . . the edge of the precipice in the dream of falling, falling into the terrifying infinite void before waking and reaching a trembling hand for the hand of the lover who may be there but cannot, finally, ever be there.  A dream cannot be shared.  A hand reaches out and touches . . . another hand, the button at the cross-walk, an ignition key, the lock on a suitcase, a book, a pen, the on switch of a computer and if questioned we can speak to any length about why we reached with our hand to touch . . . another hand out of the need for the comfort of love or from lust of a quick blind rut or to guide someone across a busy street and we can and do discuss the arcana of the internal combustion engine and we packed our suitcase to go on a trip to this destination for this reason and will travel by plane or boat or pogo stick.

 

 

 

We mark the page we have just read and look up from the rows of words someone wrote about what they knew or thought they knew and we can talk about if we liked what was written or not, if we believed it or not or were informed by it or not and maybe the reading of it adds to a kind of wisdom; we know more about Patagonia than we did or how to speak Estonian or can recite the fourteenth sonnet of Shakespeare and we tick off one more page of what we describe as knowledge, we feel one moment closer to understanding.  In the Kalahari a few of the bushmen sitll live in the old ways in technological harmony with a forbidding landscape hunting and gathering their sustenance with methods older than history.  They hide ostrich eggs full of precious water in palces safe from the desert sun marked by signs so minute that a person not of the desert could die from lack of water lying right on top of the cache.  They are technologically native and in their own circumstances are as sophisticated as the mind that conceived silicon chips and optic fibres but the bushman, the scientist, like us all, face the great unknowing which is life and the bushman, the scientist both awake terrified from the dream of falling and reach out a trembling hand.

 

 

 

Look at your hand.  It is a miracle of nerves and sinew and bones and skin forming the most complex tool in the human universe.  It, more than anything else makes humans what they are and it solely is what makes us different from the other warm-blooded species.  Dolphins, whales and primates speak, all of them from gopher to giraffe love their young, their mate, feel fear, obey soical rules, play games, dream . . . but only humans hold the wild card, the evoluntionary accident of the opposing thumb and for three million years since we stood with our back straight freeing our hands to grasp tools we have been pushing and pulling and scraping away at this old planet in our ageless attempt to get the final understanding, to remove fate or doubt or fear or blind luck form the human equation so we push and pull this planet and each other trying to know what will never be known.  Daily we become more machine reliant, more technologically native and still we awake from the dream of falling, afraid of the unkonwn and reach out a trembling hand.