Lyric essays

A Logical Appreciation
by Gregg Miller

Directly beneath our feet are enormous slabs of earth known as the tectonic plates. These plates are constantly in motion, moving infinitesimally slowly. When two plates collide, and continue colliding along their magnetically pre-ordained track, they form physical protrusions of earth. Millions of years pass, the plates shift and overlap more and more, snow falls and wind blows and erodes, and you wake up one day and see mountains out your bedroom window.

//////-//////_|

The romantics call it the Miracle of Life. Scientists call it human conception. Two hundred years ago, the one way of explaining it was as one of God's greatest blessings. Now, the story goes that two people have sex, sperm hits an egg, and bull's eye: a zygote. Nine and a half months pass on average and a young human being is sticking its head out and crying at the top of its breath. Two hundred years pass, and a miracle has become seventy pages to be pored over by a pre-med major at Harvard. Some say the conversion to a textbook subject for the service of the Harvard student is perverse.

///?/...//-//////_|

Millennia ago when it rained it wasn't the reaction of two pressure systems colliding. No, for nature-worshipping pagans, such a proposition would be blasphemous. The wind gusting across a mountain-face was a divine beauty to ponder. Seeing the ocean was a mentally challenging feat; how did one greet the end of the world? People knelt down in prayer before the first and last rays of the sun on its inevitable, endless circuit. They weren't as crazy or foolish as some say.

///?/.../+/-/// (/;*//_|

Once I was younger, and much more capable of unquestioning appreciation. I climbed Mt. Adams as part of a camp trip. We slept in a hut at the summit on the Presidential Trail, and when we awoke we were in a different place entirely. None could describe it better than Rick Bass: "So high up in the mountains, and in such heavy woods is like a step up to heaven, the last place you go before the real thing" (Winter,61). We, at the peak, were transported onto an island above a white, milky ocean. Looking out across the cloud layer, we could have been the only people on the planet. For all we knew, there was nothing else out there. For all I know now, there isn't.

75/__)()/< \|!@/?/.&^&../+/-/=-0// (/;*/$#/_|p

Recently I went out winter camping. Standing, toes going numb, fingers numb days ago, a spatula in my hand, cooking breakfast for the group. Blizzards had raged through our humble quinzhee camp for six days straight, and I was reaching my limit. As I pressed the SPAM down, trying to determine the precise pressure to make it squeal most loudly (a pig's disenfranchised call from beyond the grave), I came out of my semi-despondent trance long enough to be startled by the fact that I was squinting. I looked up and out, over the wind-wall, to the view behind. It was the first time we could see it, the beautiful Mosquito range with Lake County sprawling underneath. It was more than a group of rocks ultimately derived from the Big Bang and millions of years. In actuality, it was nothing like that. The beauty I beheld held my gaze. I could see for miles and miles, and saw not one thing not worth studying for hours. It was a postcard. I was so entangled in enormity's embrace, able to leave only when I smelled the acrid smoke of burning pork.

Logic:

and of a different sort. An analytic mind is both a blessing and a curse. You see the world in a different light, but at times this light is so bright you can't see what matters beneath it. Sometimes you just need to accept things at face value. In nature, there isn't much else you can do. A tree, when considered in depth, really isn't so compelling. A snow flake's thermal index is, in fact, quite dull. Seeing the monotonously beautiful harmony between nothing but lodge-pole pines and a white blanket of new snow, though, is something else entirely. If one turns to science, when it comes down to it we are all just protons, neutrons, and electrons. Depressing or what. I am more than atoms, but I can't prove that with a textbook. There is a fascination with mountains and nature that I can't define by finding facts and trends in an encyclopedia. Inexplicable beauty is in new life, despite the scientific discoveries and definitions attempting to rob it of such. Once again, Bass describes my situation perfectly: "It can be so wonderful, finding out you were wrong, that you are ignorant, that you know nothing, not squat. You get to start over" (Winter,20). It's not that I know nothing, just that what I know isn't squat. Knowing implies ownership, and you can't own what's worthwhile. You can't own your world, your life.