Overthinking Erosion

I went to the Grand Canyon over the summer with my family. The assurance of God’s existence is a common reaction to experiencing the ineffable but my reaction was different in that all I could think about was erosion. I wash my hands in running water and (occasionally) shower under it. I fill up little plastic guns and shoot streams of water at friends (or enemies depending on the context). I live under the general assumption that flowing water is benign and poses no threat to me. Obviously the powerful waves of the ocean or the force of a geyser could be hazardous, but a river? A stream? They could carry me away and beat me against stones but in that case it would be the stones which did the damage not the water itself. Short of drowning, a river alone poses no threat to me. But erosion serves as a warning that perhaps I have been lulled into a false sense of security.

Each gallon of flowing water slowly steals away the strength of the stone, eating away at it and creating crevices. These crevices weaken the stone to the point where, at times, it is no longer able to hold its own weight and large chunks fall into the water to be washed away, immediately if they are light enough and very slowly if they are bigger. These large chunks which fall away and into the water are then surrounded on all sides by rushing water as this erosive process begins anew to eat away at them like a very slow acting acid.

Erosion is a team effort however. Water alone cannot rip through rock without its accomplice; time. The Grand Canyon wasn’t formed in a day (or 7) and wasn’t the result of a mythical flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights (calm down Christians, “mythical” doesn’t mean what you think it does); it was carved over millions of years. This line of thought caused me to wonder about time. Time is often referred to as a “thief” but this isn’t accurate. Here we see time playing the role of driver, merely facilitating the work of the water. But time is not called a “thief” by people looking at the Grand Canyon; that moniker comes from people looking back over a life which has gone too quick and are missing the things which have been taken from them. So if time is merely the accomplice, what masked villain has taken from me everything which I have lost over the course of my life?

Is it my own actions which, with time’s help, cause pieces of me to be stripped away? Surely not because even had I taken no action at all from by birth on, my friends and family who have died would have died nonetheless. By this same logic it cannot be the actions of people conglomerately because our bodies begin to die upon birth and bear no mark of possible immortality. But what if it was being itself which caused this ontological erosion? What if being, all being, was not merely transitory but self-mutilating? Evolution, as an originally modernist ideology, is optimistic in its underlying assumption that being is, via natural selection, moving towards perfection. The problem is that complexity is not synonymous with perfection. A simple machine is generally more efficient than a complex one, at least when the propensity toward dysfunction is added in. Perhaps evolution is the ultimate proof of being’s masochistic reality.

Even outside of evolution, human history proves the same thing. Man’s tendency to act selfishly and oppressively is a constant but man’s ability to do so grows exponentially as we learn more. The Enola Gay changed the world August 6, 1945 at 08:15 when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The environmental effects of man’s “progress” are worrying to say the least and the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor is ever-widening. My intention here is not to sound panic stricken or prophesy a coming apocalypse. Honestly we are making improvements and slowing this process greatly in various ways BUT the trend cannot be reversed.

Simple glances at evolutionary changes and human history have supported the theory that being is, in and to itself, what water is to the Grand Canyon. So what can we, as the canyon, say or do? This is a bleak idea indeed because by nature of the fact that we ARE, we are part of the problem. This all makes sense when you think about the universe. Being is abnormal. Just as cold is merely the absence of heat and darkness the absence of light; and just as neither darkness nor cold is an entity in and of itself but merely the natural state of things, perhaps the absence of being is the truest reality (No. I’m not Buddhist.). Some might even wonder if non-being is then something we may call “god” in that it is not tainted by being’s sadistic and self-eroding nature. Non-being therefore has within itself no “bad” and, on the other hand, no “good” (although I would argue that these are the flipsides of a single coin).

So perhaps those people who saw the Grand Canyon and thought to themselves “THIS proves that God exists” weren’t too far from where I have now ended up, though my path here was a little longer. Maybe things like the Grand Canyon should serve as reminders that, as beings, we are constantly eroded into non-being. Time facilitates our erosion and in this way attempts to horn in on the glory, but essentially it is merely the fact that we exist which assures us that we are being worn away little by little. We have the power to expedite or slow this process but in doing so we are thus expediting or slowing the process for all being and not merely ourselves. This is a great responsibility.