PRISMATIST

                How did you come to be looking at this particular blade of grass, this many paces down the path, in this field, in this town, on this planet? Among the infinity of possible meanings in that blade of grass, why do you begin with its vitality rather than its green-ness, or how it clusters near other blades of grass in the same plant, or how it flutters in the breeze? Some combination of words and actions by those who shaped you led you to this happy obsession about what it means to be alive.

            Fifty years ago, wandering the galleries of the Barnes Foundation, you turned a corner and faced a painting that thrilled you and left you weak in the knees. To you then, that feeling was the essence of being alive. Where did that come from? Was it some special property of your chemistry? Was the quickening of your heart that made you feel so alive in that gallery somehow related to what motivates a one-celled amoeba in a drop of pond water? Whatever it was, that was the ingredient you wanted to put into a painting.

            So you quit art school and returned to science, with a plan to stay only long enough to figure out what it means to be alive, and then to return to the business of making art that’s alive. It took you a long time to shake your prejudice that the key ingredient was some special vital force, outside of the realm of scientific explanation. But, by and by, you accepted your elders’ insistence that the essence of being alive was to be found looking into a microscope and thinking in terms of chemistry and physics.

            You can now explain to someone who wants to know that a living cell is an elaborate kinetic device. Powered by the sun or the sugars that come from plants in the sun, the thousands of molecular machines inside a cell whir and beat and make useful other molecules. Electrical gradients across cell membranes power cellular desires to eat, to drink and to grow. The cytoplasm inside a cell is an ensemble of kinetic gadgetry that is continually burning sugar and replenishing the supply. And each of the many thousands of cells in that blade of grass is one of these kinetic gadgets. Each has some autonomy and some obligation to the other cells in the same plant. Any one of them may be required to die for the greater good. But each cell is alive and running its own kinetic device. 

            What charmed you about cells, aside from their microscopic beauty, was their autonomy. In the right lab setting you could get them to perform any of the essential tricks of being alive. By now, the kinetic gadgetry concept – chemistry and physics - has answered your question about the secret ingredient of vitality. But the explanation feels incomplete. What about those thrills that came from seeing art, the thrills that leave you so happy to be alive? Are they just spasms of a network of cells that have more important things to do? Is there something about the community of those cells that makes them more alive?

            Philosophers of science distinguish three kinds of reality. Material reality is the physical world; the chair you are sitting on and the table in front of you. Mental reality is the world as you picture it; your understanding of how you should get to where you will sleep tonight, or what a slip knot looks like. Noetic reality is the consensus understanding of Nature. It is the agreed upon reality defined by a community of scholars, a shared matrix of understanding. Noetic reality is a social structure. To become a scientist, you had to learn the canon: the matrix of understanding about cell biology, according to the experts. To revise that reality, you had to demonstrate to their satisfaction why another matrix design should be preferred.

If instead of this field of grass you were contemplating a blade of grass in Equador, China or Chad, having arrived by a different long route, would you be thinking about what makes that blade of grass alive? And if you were still thinking about that, would you have made different choices about where to look for the answers? Did your emphasis on autonomy, for cells and for yourself, blind you to essential roles of community in Life and in being alive? 

          Your autonomy in these discoveries was an illusion. You needed help thinking this stuff up and your experiments needed the acceptance of others for admittance into the matrix of understanding. The ideas in your head before that acceptance were thrilling and inspiring, like a great painting in some ways, but were valuable only as substrate for more thinking about possible realities swirling around inside your head. Unproven, those ideas are just sketches, precious to you but worthless as noetic knowledge. 

            What else have you learned? What’s outside the cell has a lot to do with what goes on inside. Cells need neighbors. They need to distinguish friend from foe. A blade of grass grows at its base; it lengthens again after mowing. It connects to the roots by tubes of cells. It cannot become a flower. It uses little holes on one face to breathe in carbon dioxide for sugar-making and to breathe out oxygen for the planet. It feeds cows. 

            This would be a good time to begin again with another blade of grass, maybe in a different field.