Time's Arrow

When conceived, I had energized ambition for this title. It involved the idea that dinosaurs are relatively new. Not in reality (they are ancient, pre-human beasts), but in our reality. Until about 175 years ago, nobody had any idea what a dinosaur was, or how important they could be to our symbolic understanding of the Earth’s history. Reading about 19th century geology (again…) reminded me how central the question of the age of the Earth and the origin of life was to this time, and how inaccurate most speculations of the period were. This had to do with a lack of knowledge about the basic building blocks of our physical world. When physicists started figuring out these nuts and bolts in the early 20th century, the Earth (and the universe) became a whole lot older. Suddenly dinosaurs, initially confusing and controversial, were tools. They became iconographic symbols of our brief history here…Saint T. Rex of the church of science.

But they were always there, long before found. Dragons, we used to call them. Ancient and always chasing their own tail. Evocative of the mandala and the ouroboros — symbols of the cycle of life. They existed across cultures; the Chinese (or Oriental) dragons — long, sleek and whimsical — tied symbolically to aspects of nature (wind, water, etc..). Amazing this. Jungian. Our collective unconscious has a memory of these ancient ancestors. They are no longer seen as simple lizards, either, thanks to books like Robert T. Bakker‘s The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction (1986), which helped inspire Jurrasic Park (1990), the popular novel by Michael Crichton.

I remember being young and curious reading Bakker around 1990. I thought his fascinating revelations (about the idea, for example, that many dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded) weren’t even remotely reflected in the hackneyed pulp-matinee movie versions of the archetype…

Time is like that…Cruel. It wears away at your sense of fantasy and whimsy. If you let it.

But, of course, only if you let it, forgetting the amazement that is the world, its constantly evolving nature, and the never ending sense of discovery that comes along with living. Rather I recall — as I did recently reading about the discovery of dinosaurs in the early 19th century — that science can be a source of new and transformative ideas. Like technology, which we shape to our purposes but which also shapes us, science is a feedback mechanism of knowledge. It spawns new mindsets and perspectives, stimulating some of our deepest reflections on life’s meaning. Science is also ever-changing and transitory, and engenders unstable mindsets as a collective neurosis. This is why it’s a poor interlocutor for belief, which it comes into conflict with. Reflecting on how relatively “new” some of these notions are gives us an illuminating (if oblique) way to understand the disparities (even within us — for, surprise, Bakker is also a Pentecostal preacher…).

And yet, to find a balance between “facts” and a sense of wonder is essential in our time. It may be the only thing that keeps us from winding up on the pointy end of time’s arrow. Like the dinosaurs…

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