Manipulating Environments, Physical & Otherwise

They are doing a major gut renovation of the large condo building next door to our office, which this week meant that, Cambridge being the way Cambridge is, with precious little room to spare, they had to use our parking lot to get the proper angle on the area they needed to work on, which meant that all week long there were giant cranes and backhoes doing their thing right outside my window. I say giant because one of the main tasks was lifting and then lowering two immense concrete basins into place beneath ground level. The basins easily weighed a ton, maybe two, so I watched with fascination as the guy attached the wire cords and clamps that would safely and securely hold these things as they were being moved. And I thought, this is what engineering is. They master knowledge of the world's physical properties so they can do what needs to be done to safely and effectively manipulate our world in service of social aims. Dare I say in service of "civilization"? Sure, a certain kind of civilization. Like ours. Not like the animals, who live in civilizations of scent, the complexities of which are utterly incomprehensible to us. But us, we have different concerns, and so we manipulate and change the physical environment on a huge scale. In this case, the engineers had mastered gravity and torque and tension and the intricacies of countervailing forces. I guess the reason this was fascinating to me is because it so outside my understanding and expertise. Outside my purposes, is perhaps the best way to put it. All those guys involved with every level of this simple yet intricate engineering process came to this planet precisely to do this, to understand how the physical aspects of our incarnation work, to see what the various effects are, and to learn to harness them toward specific goals. 

Me, well, I can't fix anything to save my life. I can't even make sense of instructions on how to put something together. My wife laughs at me and takes over once I have failed. Machines and explosions bore me. No, I'm here to understand how ideas work and how language works. Or perhaps I should say languages, plural. We speak in music, in words, in motion, in visual representation. This is why the arts are the highest form of communication. They also are manipulating aspects of the physical world, but the more subtle ones -- the ones that conjure emotions and intuitive complexities in ways no other form or method of expression can. And I'm interested in spirituality, in how mystics and theologians and everyday people try to make sense of the ineffable aspects of existence, and to do so in the most elevated, illuminating, and useful manner possible. It's all good, as they say. The machine guys are under no compulsion to ponder Walt Whitman. And I am under no compulsion to join the gang that's huddled around the hood of the car as some guy tinkers with things in there. Pistons, maybe. All we need to do, each of us, is to fulfill our respective missions. I've got mine and you've got yours.