Fly Like an Eagle (with apologies to the Steve Miller Band)

When my husband travels on business — as he did this week — there is one upside: we get to discuss whatever we want at the dinner table. When he is at home, he squashes certain topics, or at least tries to. For example, we can’t mention blood. Or diseases, especially the infectious variety. Hospitals may not be mentioned, either, since they are typically associated with blood. We can’t talk about human rituals that are bizarre, cruel, or unusual, or that involve blood. Most medical conditions, excepting of course benign insanity and other forms of mental eccentricity, are definitely not appropriate subjects. It would therefore be unthinkable to ponder the evil turn of mind that would lead anyone to kill more than a dozen bald eagles, simply to cut off their talons in order to sell these on the black market to unscrupulous traders who ply their wares to ignorant superstitious idiots. That’s the kind of subject that’s too much, even for me.

I’m glad he’s back, as he is, too. (He was in Colorado — said his bus to the meeting in Winter Park took him past Buffalo Bill’s grave, and from the rest of his report, that was the last he saw of civilisation. His ears popped from the altitude, it was rustic and cold, the snow was snowy, and outside of the meetings, there wasn’t much to do, since he doesn’t ski.)

The kids and I considered, during our bloodcurdling dinner conversations (just exactly what is it that sickle cell anemia does?), that Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a really eloquent illustration of the universe’s infinity. If, for example, you could infinitely divide a distance in half — say, a centimetre from A to B: divide it in half, divide that in half again, divide again, and so on to the point of infinity, to the point where you hit a continuum similar to what the photon does when scientists try to measure & track it, and everything is folding back upon itself and you never reach the end in time or space — well, if you can infinitely divide a distance in half, then that means that in a time-space dimension, you can infinitely divide time in half (same way as distance), right? This means that the Restaurant at the End of the Universe really is at the “end of time” as well as at the “end of space.” (As it happens, when we first bought the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy dvd set four or so years ago and our kids started watching it, the son initially thought that the restaurant was at the border or margin of the universe — i.e., at “the end” in space. But that’s a legitimate transposition, if time and space are the same: you will forever and for all eternity go to the end, even as your dining experience will never deliver to you that experience of finitude, in the sense of coming through “on the other side.” Well, who wants a good meal to end, anyway? For some of us, the end just means having to clean up the kitchen.

Note that Arthur, Ford, and the others never do eat the cow, and that therefore no blood was shed. [PS: I thought they didn’t eat the cow, but I’m told they do.]

Yet time does run out. As the Guardian reports, in a feat of O-levels chemistry, scientists finally discovered that the carbon dioxide we’ve been pumping into the air has been falling back down to earth, and it furthermore hasn’t taken the eloquent bother of folding the distance in half, again and again and again into infinity. No, it’s fallen straight down, with no sense of poetic appreciation for “What Would Photons Do?” or theories or anything else. It has in fact been falling into the oceans at an alarming rate, where it turns into carbonic acid which busily raises the oceans’ acidity levels. Turns out that the increased acidity is killing off the tiny little sea creatures (including, but not restricted to, the coral reef critters) who for millions of years have seen fit to use carbon in building their shells. Their shell-building activity in turn has had the added benefit of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and oceans, thus keeping our air healthy. The rapid increase in acidity, however, is killing these creatures, and with their demise goes their beneficial cleaning activity.

Well, kids, those eagles killed for their talons, flying to the sea: I wonder if they thought there was a solution…

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Oh, lord, through the revolution

Feed the babies
Who don’t have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin’ in the street
Oh, oh, there’s a solution

I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Fly through the revolution

~~~ Steve Miller, Fly Like an Eagle (for the rest of the lyrics, see here)~~~~~