Saturday, September 8, 2007

Should man become corn?


You know, sometimes I wonder if my brain isn't a little off kilter. The smallest, mundane things often get me thinking about what sometimes feels like crazy shit. This morning it happened to be corn. Yes, corn.

I live in the middle of farmland and every day I pass all of the things one would expect to see when living in this type of area. Sometimes it feels as if there's nothing around for miles. The biggest stretch of nothingness I pass through daily are fields that are used for the annual planting of different crops; there must be hundreds of thousands of acres. This year all of these fields were planted with corn. Over the course of the past few months I've watched the remnants of the old harvest plowed under, the new crop planted, the growth of the plants which included obvious stress from lack of rain and finally this week, the harvest. Each day I passed by, a different section was cleared but it wasn't until today when I saw the huge truck overflowing with the yellowish brown kernels of "feed" that this came to mind.

I thought, "Energy". That's what gives us the ability to walk, talk, bring blood to our organs; but I already knew that, you know it too. "Energy"....that's right, it can neither be created nor destroyed; again I knew that as well. Sounds ridiculous, I told you sometimes I think I'm a little off. My own version of "The farmer in the Dell" starts playing in my head. The sun and rain feed the earth, the earth feeds the plants, the plants feed the cows, the cows feed us, we feed the....wait a minute...no this can't be. And I began to think, who do we feed? Am I, the funeral director, cremating or burying somethings food in sealed containers, preventing the natural transfer of energy from us to the next organism? Am I somehow breaking the natural chain? Shouldn't "we" be the fertilizer that feeds the earth so that it can feed the plants that feed the cows that feed us who then in turn again feed the earth so that the process can begin all over? Is that the eternity that scholars speak of; could the afterlife we've heard of just be a metaphor for this eternal transfer of energy? Every living organism on this earth is dependant on each other to keep it alive. If a certain insect dies off, or stops being a "donating" part of the community, the certain bird that depends on it for it's food is now prone to die off as well. If the kelp in the ocean were to disappear would the mammals and fish that depend on it for life sustaining food disappear as well? If I really tried I could probably name many, many situations of specific dependency. The experts claim that evolution as well as extinction takes eons to completely occur. What is going to become extinct someday because we humans for the most part are not giving of ourselves to the earth? Are we forfeiting our eternity by not going directly into the ground as we were born, naked and unscathed by chemicals, or are we actively contributing to the extinction.......of ourselves?

All of this over corn. Yep. These questions will undoubtedly always remain unanswered and could also very well be the ravings of a lunatic in the making however, all I really know is that from now on, I don't think I'll ever look at plain old corn the same plain old way.

3 comments:

MedStudentWife said...

Hmmmm..good points DS.

I don't think that what you do stops the return of matter to matter.. it just may slow it.

However - the laws of conservation of matter ( or is is mass ?)states that matter cannot be loss.

Bill Bryson wrote a brilliant book about " A Short History About Nearly Everything". The book is somewhere in my heaps of books (I badly need more bookshelves) & I can't quite put my figure on it.

However he makes a wonderful statement along the lines of conservation of matter,is that we all contain at least one atom from Beethoven,or Mozart. Given a couple more hundred years, people will have an atom or two from Elvis.

Now how kwel is that.

But you know, I too have the habit of every now and then looking at something totally "normal" and all of a sudden being hit with thoughts way off on tangents and looking at whatever it is in a totally new way.

Guess I'll be your room mate in the crazy home *lol*

paisley said...

as i have said more times than i care to reiterate... it isn't about what you saw,, or what they said, opr what they intended you to take away ,,, it is about what your brain captures... and what grows once that little captured seed has been planted.... that is the truest color of life...

excellent post

Lisa said...

Just found your blog. Interesting to me, since i was a mortician apprentice breifly a few years back. We take for granted whats going to be done with our remains, and laws dictate it.I think its a waste of land the way we bury our dead in this society ( USA) When I die what I would prefer is to be buried,period. No embalming, no casket, nothing. Just toss me in there and cover me up with dirt, feed the soil. I could make pretty good mulch I think.