A Walk to Nowhere
Out in the Open
We get back to camp, and I don’t know what to do with myself. The sky is cloudy, and it’s too cold to just sit around.
I decide to walk north, through the dunes, toward the salt lake.
The dunes are low and easy to ascend. The sand is marked by sensual ripples and occasional beetle tracks. In between the dunes, a crusted, saline soil supports evenly spaced clumps of vegetation. There are burros’ hoof-prints and dessicated dung.
To my right, a mile away, the Inyo Mountains shed steep alluvial fans. Although I’m walking briskly, I mark scant progress relative to the snowy peaks above. The scale of this place is both intimate and awesome. How can it be grasped, let alone described?
Last night after we’d eaten and the kids had bedded down, four of us sat in the folding chairs, staring at the stars and the darkened desert. We were talking about String Theory.
Now, as the sun hangs lower in the sky, I’m walking, heading nowhere really, dodging the brush and thinking.
Materialists choose that the material world is prius. Experience, perceptions, and spirit are derived from it. Lenin made the point that any other view—any agnosticism on the subject, as with empiricists from Hume to Mach—leads down the road toward solipsism. If we accept only sensations and from them reason that a world exists outside ourselves, we will ultimately come to hold that reality is but an imagined expression of those sensations.
Our sensations derive from reality. But if all reality is just vibrating strings, just infinite variations of oscillating energy, then what is it that our sensations are derived from?
The crusty, crumbly soil is making white smears on the toes of my boots. It’s tiring to walk in it. I veer toward a nearby dune and, after climbing a few feet, I stop to examine the intricate patterns of black grains in the nearly white sand.
It doesn’t really matter how we believe the universe is structured, so much as how we believe it develops and changes. Do sub-atomic events set the course of that development? And are those events predetermined? Or are events subject to chance, and does that randomness operate at many different scales and levels of organization? Can the universe be reconstructed from a few basic principles or must it be understood as the accumulation of events and interactions, of a mix of chance and predictability?
The materialist view must be that this history is prius and that our efforts to compile and understand it are derived—as opposed to the rationalist view that this history unfolds, and can be understood, as the operation of a few basic laws.
I come to a rutted track. I’ve been walking over an hour. The lake is closer, but from this angle I can’t make out if the trees ahead mark its shoreline. Distances can be deceiving. I turn to follow the track across the flat valley floor, toward the mountains.
Shafts of sunlight, angling below the clouds, play light on the slopes. On the valley floor, the stark landscape turns to velvet.