Cosmography Is Destiny
Troubled Lives of the Young and the Restless

                         Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust…
                         (Two souls, alas, live in my breast…)
                                                                           --Goethe, Faust, Part I.

Crowd a lot of people speaking different tongues onto a small peninsula and you get more or less habitual bloodshed (cf. Europe, Southeast Asia, Florida). Oxygen-deprive people and you get various forms of mystical religions (cf. Tibet, Macchu Picchu, and—who knows—perhaps even Boulder).

Freud (thinking penises and vaginas) said that biology is destiny. The belligerence of Europe and the mysticism of Tibet are enough to make you think that maybe geography is destiny.

A fun idea to play with but finally meaningless.

Habitual warfare is a problem wherever humans live. Historically, mystical experiences have happened at all elevations.

Trying to figure our belligerent behavior from a different angle, you get various anthropomorphisms based not directly on geography but mainly on climate. Cultures of a more matriarchal, pacific, vegetarian bent arise in gentler, tropical climes, while patriarchal hunter types fonder of warfare appear the farther north you go and the colder you get.

Concepts that, again, are entertaining to contemplate but clearly do not tell the whole story. Belligerence abounds in the south; and over time plenty of patient tolerance appears in the north.

Expanding the scale again, we have to think about memory, its persistence, and the enduring vividness of its content.

Art Bell et al. to the contrary notwithstanding, we are children of the earth—in most times and most places a generally patient and even nurturing mother. Storms and tremors of varying intensity come and go, discombobulating us for a while, then everything returns to "normal."

Thinking of the larger canvas, what deep memories might such events trigger? Do we possess (are we in the possession of) some kind of genetic memory, and if so how far back into the past would its information extend?

At most given moments, including the present, we can consider the world around us and be struck by its seeming permanence. The 2,000-year-old trees, the millions-of-years-old canyons, and so on.

Yet with our improving analytical abilities and, with them, the extension of our instrument-based sensory knowledge, we dredge up—repeatedly—reminders of not only a slowly accretive world but of a world whose easeful slumber is intermittently disturbed in the most massive, violent, and destructive ways.

A young race on an extremely restless world, but one whose outbursts of real restlessness come with random infrequency.

The more closely we examine the records the clearer it becomes that we are products of a placidly Neptunist earth whose long, slow sedimentary slumber is sporadically interrupted by Vulcanist outbursts on a global scale.

Looking outward, we begin to see that not only are we children of a violent mother but she in turn is the offspring of a universe that is on occasion violent beyond imagining.

Not geography, then, but cosmography is destiny?

Myopically, in a given 70-year lifespan, or for that matter, a 10,000-year civilizational lifespan, if the inhabitants of Earth are lucky, they perceive, enjoy, reflect on, and reflect a generally peaceful world and universe, constructing systems of belief and social organizations that mirror such a world.

If we are unlucky, we inhabit a world or even a universe in upheaval. A salient question then becomes: How much do we remember and how long do we remember it?