Sometimes an everyday event and…
A massive flood of thoughts!
From my balcony I watch, every morning, or almost every morning, around 9:30, five fishermen, there in front of me, begin the task of preparing two boats for work.
A companion takes two others in a red canoe (on the left, among coconut trees) to one of the boats; rows to the bow, with only one oar: it goes in zigzag. He leaves the two of them in the smaller boat up ahead, goes back to get two more; all three board in the back of the blue roof, a little bigger.
While they are arranging things, they take off the little water left over from the night’s rain, and here comes the boat from the Ilhabela Yacht Club, the pilot touches his boat to the larger boat, delivers a pile of ice in bags, placed in boxes, by the sailors on the big one, the Yacht Club’s boat part.
They will cast their nets between the two boats, collect zillions of fish, squid, and shrimp that, dying, will be thrown into boxes, between layers of ice…. They have better luck than those who, hooked by pitiless hooks, fight desperately for themselves let go, save their little lives and they will also die agonizing on the concrete of the “Fishers’ Wharf”.
Then, from this small and routine step, my soul, pained by the fate of these fellow underwater travellers, remembers Steven Weinberg’s phrase: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”.
And we pluck a stalk of lettuce and it cries, agonizes, it’s also like plucking the fruit from the tree, picking the flower, stealing the chicken’s egg…
Some time ago, I believe that in 2011, I wrote, “Ex Vegetarian, or Neo Omnivore”, one of the chapters of my book “And there was no storm in Tokyo” in an e-book by Amazon Brasil.
After all, why so much malice and punishment? Is this the purpose of the universe?
Killing in order not to die may be necessary, ethically correct, at least acceptable in doubtful cases; killing more than necessary, killing needlessly, without meaning, killing for pleasure, is incomprehensible. However… that’s how the universe seems to act.
I went to review what exists about Earth’s history; there’s a video from National Geographic that I had already seen: it’s good, but it fails and tramples on the way from the dinosaurs’ heirs to the first ones who were classified as Homo Sapiens that, pretentiously, we called ourselves “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”! And, in this end, the video comes down to what happened and the fossils found in North America, leaving aside important events in the rest of the world.
I researched many other sources, I chose the ones that I think are better supported, with proven or more accepted theories, more plausible.
I decided to produce a text that I hope can be criticized, commented on, corrected and complemented by my many scientific friends. I will write it.
A very interesting story, full of horrors, violence, the carnage of animals and species, which after all had a purpose, Darwinian and materialistic as it were: the evolution of the survivors.
Since the first colonies of bacteria, it is endless to annihilate or kill; it is not “Eros and Thanatos”, it is “Rem and Thanatos”. Out of its first interest in survival, then in growing, dominating, species and groups have been killing their own and others throughout the entire journey of this little planet.
The Bible tells a cute, shorter fable of the creation of the universe, animals and men (and women as its appendages); so far-fetched that there are groups of fanatics who say they believe the only truth is in the Bible (maybe they even believe it, go there and find out how an extremist’s brain works!).
Then the fable becomes a long story of ambitions, betrayals, murders, wars against what some understand as enemies, killings for pride or vanity, the conquest of peoples and spaces.
Written recently (some even date it to at most a few four or five thousand years), it better reflects the truth about humanity as we understand it today: “Rem et Thanatos”.
Eros? Well, it seems that love for children already existed in the first mammals; love for another from the same family or clan,
Today, out of interest, there is love in eastern religions, spiritualism, Judaism, Christian religions, for its Karma or growing in it, to gain Heaven, to ascend to it in Elijah’s chariot, and not to reincarnate in an earthworm, lizard or dog, and never as one of our abominable politicians…
The one from the New Fable says that Jesus preached and practised… I was going to write that this generic and pure bramble had died with him, but I remembered that “Love one another as I have loved you” was already part of the interest of sitting beside the Father, to conquer a little place in Heaven, to compensate and forget the hardness of life in the place below.
Human love for the environment, for rivers and waterfalls, forests, the sea, and their animals… constructive love, but totally self-interested, isn’t it?
Do you love a cause? Very few that do not is originate in self-interest, directly or indirectly, through the interest of a group, by ambition to gain power, to rise to high positions; or even to feel good. But there are, I believe.
Wait for a second! I’m not totally skeptical: yes there is unselfish, intense love between us humans, with which you and I have certainly been blessed, for receiving and giving, without limits, even giving life when necessary. It is an ecstatic experience in so many moments and episodes of love.
There is, perhaps, self-love, the most difficult to understand and achieve.
And there is kindness, innate, spontaneous, with no reason for being other than itself, whose examples we see everywhere, rarely reported by the media, as it is not of its interest. Every gesture, every action of these does not create ecstasies, little or nothing is noticed by those who have it: it is natural, of their nature.
Anyway, here we are, part of this story, with unsatisfied curiosities, perplexity in the face of unacceptable and unexplained events and tragedies.
We know almost everything in its details, bits and pieces that we don’t know how to mend.
All that remains is the happiness of simply living, enjoying this wonderful little planet, looking at the whole, letting the Eros flow so that Thanatos will only be a consequence and an act of understanding and kindness.