I recently read the poem "Chronic Meanings" by Bob Perelman of UPenn. Reading through it, I couldn't help but come face-to-face with the very arbitrary nature of our existence. I have to tell you, coming face-to-face with something as massively overwhelming as the nature of our existence is something that will mercilessly throw you to the ground, much in the way that an unexpectedly big wave throws you to the ground when you're naively wading knee-deep in the ocean unaware of the sheer power of the waters. I liken reading the poem to the moment when you turn around and see that wave, looming large in the foreground of your vision as it sinks in that something is going to happen.
Perelman's poem consists of lines of five-word statements that are basically sentences that you would hear day in and day out, just cut short at the five word marker. The effect is an incisive reflection of how our lives proceed forward from moment to moment. "The clouds enveloped the tallest." "Standing up to the Empire." "Fans stand up, yelling their." There are some lines that are memorable, but other lines that effectively function as the filler material that makes up the majority of our lives. Think about some memories that you have from the past week. When you do so, you end up making these leaps in spacetime; that is, on Monday you had an interview, on Tuesday in the morning maybe you had a hair cut and at night you went out to dinner, on Wednesday you watched an amazing movie, and so on. But what about the rest of Monday? What about Tuesday in between the hair cut and dinner? Those moments that you function in autopilot, just coasting through existence? You could in effect isolate any of those moments and none of them would really stand out.
Life then becomes this struggle to impart meaning on the moments that stand out and effectively string a narrative through them so it feels like something, well, meaningful was being accomplished while you were coasting through it all. Who knows what all those filler moments were for?
The human genome consists of something like 30,000 genes, which are collectively referred to as the exons (expressed codons) of the genome. However, a striking majority of the genome consists of what are known as introns (interfering codons), which are sequences of DNA that are not incorporated into the functional genes that make us what we are. Their function is not well-categorized. They may be involved in something like alternative splicing, a means of increasing the diversity of expressed genes; this only accounts for a very small portion of the introns however. There are also bits of inactive DNA that are vestiges of virus genomes that have infected us, bacterial DNA left over from billions of years ago as life began to evolve, and a host of other remnants and artifacts. Again, a lot of filler that really doesn't stand out, but we look for meaning from gene to gene.
There's a lot that we don't know and this fact drives us to premature conclusions and rash decisions about what it's all about. But I think the fun in all of it is to step back and try to categorize our categorizations and see what sort of patterns emerge. There's this continuity behind the simple act of finding meaning that transcends the differences in the various approaches to doing so… science, religion, what have you. In the end, we're a collection of thinking animals trying to reason our way through it all and, as such, it's inherently fascinating to just sit and wonder.
My name is Saurabh and I'm here with my friend Kyle on Chronic Meanings to wonder. We are two college students who are absolutely taken aback by existence itself. We're gathering more and more knowledge every day as we progress through our studies and muse about vagaries and try to synthesize ideas that can help us define and capture meaning. The Internet is an incredible network that has made exponential strides in connecting the thoughts and ideas of an info-centric animal and it's about time we started participating.
I invite you to get to know us as we embark on our journey to explore existence and let it take us wherever it may.
