🐵 “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is being transformed” – Antoine Lavoisier (apocryphal from his Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, 1789)
🙉 Pink Floyd, “Time” (Dark Side of the Moon, 2003)
🙈 Gustave Courbet, L’origine du monde (1866) pixelized–unatural
In between all antagonisms, a third or a middle way exists. What would be the one between origin and end? Perhaps it is what happens between the two, and on either side of them. Life is the U of the A-U-M often heard in buddhist chants: A is the sound initiating from the back of the throat that gives birth to what will follow; U is the sound that fills up the mouth, the existence; M is pronounced by closing the mouth, it is the solution that concludes it all, the end. Silence, the void, is the fourth element of this syllable : whence we come and where we go.
June 2022, Mexico city, streets of the historic center. Phone call from Abel. I pick up and keep walking. I am late for a meeting with a couple of archaeologists that I have to meet with at the Templo Mayor. Just as I turn to the side of the Metropolitan cathedral, built right above the sacred precinct of ancient Tenochtitlan, we start talking about words’ meaning. At this exact moment, under my feet, invisible today, is the zone where people used to walk between sacrificial altars, towers of skulls and forests of severed heads facing the huge temple. We mention the word “to be born” which in French is “naître” and is formed by the negation “n-” and the homophonous “être” (to be) and therefore seem to point out the understanding that we are born in order to not be.
To focus on the origin of things –the beginning of civilisation, the first time societies adopted hierarchy, the first human– demonstrates a linear understanding of time. In this context, time is perceived as a thread stretched between a beginning and an end that will never meet and go further away from each other at every second.
We could think that being born is the moment when you start being your own self, unique, separated from the being who conceived you. But if we play a little bit, being born in French is also “naissance”, literally “n-essence” or “no-essence”. Back to Mesoamerica: in the Popol Vuh, the Maya-Quiché text relating humanity's creation, it is said that at the beginning of everything, before sunrise, when time did not exist, those who were present hid, buried their tutelary gods, the divinities who gave their identity to each one of the people. If we see those stories as models to understanding human existence and the cosmos, my interpretation here is that the essence (the being) of each one of us is hidden so it does not “get caught” –it is precious, unseizable, furtive, the opposite of an identity mask proudly displayed. One of life’s goals might very well be to find again, or to remember, what’s this essence that existed before light.
Linear time is also that of science and of justice. It matches with a way of thinking that understands the world by dividing it in antagonists pairs: 0/1, good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, man/woman, cause/effect, etc. Good cannot be bad and the other way around. We can't be here and there at the same time. Now and another time cannot exist at the same moment.
In Spanish, to be born is “nacer”, as if the word itself was trying to designate the negation “n-” of doing (“hacer”). Would it imply that we are born in order to learn to not do? Humans when they are living the opposite moment to their birth, at the end of their life, are precisely those for whom nothing can be done anymore –those beyond the field of human’s action.
Quantic physics questions the separation principle which conditions modern understanding of reality: it supposes that entangled particles can be here and elsewhere at the same time. The observation of the stars basically suggests the same thing: some are dead and alive at the same time, it is a matter of speed of light and our distance from them. Said differently, reality is undetermined and it is only our way of looking at it that gives it its actual shape.
In English, “to be born” literally means to be brought forth but also to be carried or held which would indicate that as soon as you are not actually carried by your mother you start being held by your own self or by the world. It might be the very cradle of an understanding that scarcity is just an illusion, and that everything is already here, everywhere and all the time. When Hopi people wean their infants, people surrounding the youngsters give them pieces of pre-masticated food –as if it was a way to teach that the external word contains everything they will ever need.
Existence does not obey the rules of space and time: it is simultaneously is both past, present and future, here and elsewhere at the same time. If it is made of transformations, each one of them containing the information of the whole, from the first to the last –change always operates inside the specific set of possibilities of each being. Consequently, each being thus necessarily contains everything that it can become. A human cannot become during the course of his·her lifetime an elephant and an elephant cannot become a flower. The seed of ourselves already contained in itself absolutely everything that it can become; and before that, our parent’s seed contained already half of what our offspring would become. It is known that a female human fetus already contains in her minuscule ovaries all the ovules that it can fecundate during her lifetime –in other words, our mum as a fetus in our grandma’s womb already possessed the ovule that, once fecundated, would become ourselves. An even more illustrative example is in metamorphosis: the larva already contains all the information of the butterfly she will become.
“Being born” in three different languages, could thus be translated as: stopping being, stopping doing and learning how to be hold, and maybe even being One with the rest.
The idea that the part contains the whole can be mathematically explored through self-similar objects like fractals exemplified by snowflakes, the Mandelbrot set (see video above) or the Fibonacci sequence. Perhaps more poetically, the existential and sensual experience of being ourselves a piece containing the whole is associated with pure emotion –this aesthetic osmosis where past, present and future melt together in one moment, where space dissolves, this ecstatic feeling that you could die here and now. Sufi poet Rumi sublimated it in the 13th century: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
In order to study the past, one must know the present who formed and informed what we are becoming. And in order to have a present, you must have a past. But having a past does necessarily imply knowing the absolute “origin” of it all. The research of the exclusive origin of all things belongs to a way of thinking and to an era that fears its ending. It comes from a way of seeing the world as if it was cut in half, divided between opposed halves. This outlook implies that everything has not always been here but that we are ectopic and singular events. In this context, we do not belong to the whole, nor we belong to nature: it is the external “environment” in which we live and we “exploit” its “natural resources“ as if they were outside of ourselves. However, the origin of it all is contained inside each and every cell that composes our bodies–this is what DNA tells us. In this context, the end is programmed and it constitutes a return to the origin –another birth that we could maybe spend our entire lives building.