The circle of life is amazing, and not just in Disney flicks. It’s breathtakingly odd. Oh, and it has parasites in it.
Every now and then, I marvel at nature’s annoying habit of defying my expectations. No amount of protest seems to work. I’ll tell the universe to stop it and it mocks me – sticks its tongue out and everything.
Anyway
This post is a little trip down some fun tangents (thanks to my Buzz network). The keyword here is agency and the question is: Just how much do we have?
It all started with a comic by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The first frame of which is this:
Click-through to view the comic
The question alluded to in the final frame is the same covered by a few writers. Here’s one: A Blade of Grass, by Tim Pratt.
“You see? Whole cultures could be affected by a parasite. Mass behavioral changes. Insidious. And toxoplasmosis, it’s a parasite that lives in multiple hosts. Starts out in rats and mice. And it changes them — makes them less afraid. Specifically, less afraid of cats. The infected rats don’t run away when they smell cats, so they’re more likely to get eaten by cats, and that’s great for the parasite, because it wants to live inside a cat’s guts, that’s where the parasite can reproduce. They hijack the rats. They just use the rats as a means to an end. Most of the creatures on this planet are just, are just vectors for some parasite.” (Pratt)
This spawned another tangent: a talk that Dan Dennett gave at TED some years back. I had forgotten about it (2004 might as well be the paleolithic era in internet time). Basically, Dan argues that ideas have similar properties. The terminology seems rough – there’s surely room to dispute him – but the concept is so, well, neat.
As I listened (again, but as if the first time), thoughts flew through my head. Plenty of questions were among them, one of which was c’mon, man…
My writing often amounts to some low-rent version of Billy’s Path. The destination often seems to veer toward the nether-zone where human agency butts up against all that we’re powerless to control. It’s not a defeatist pursuit (I think). It’s more a story of me finding fascination in the power and variety of the forces that guide us.
Maybe it’s some parasite’s fault.
Thanks to my Buzz crew for continuing to enlighten and entertain me.
