💡it goes all the way down

[kesbeacon]

In If a tree falls in the woods, I briefly mentioned looking at something really tiny, or up at the stars. And I’m just going to come back to that and bounce it off something I’ve been obsessed with ever since I learned about it: the phrase ‘as above, so below.’

This is a modern paraphrase of a concept within late medieval/early modern Arabic-European esoteric and proto-scientific thought, and I will confess to not understanding all the nuances of the tradition. I’ve always understood it to refer to the strain of thought that produced the idea of the correspondence between the macrocosm (universe) and microcosm (human being). And I switched it around to As Below So Above to title a 13^th Age campaign that ended up with my players in a Pacific Rim-style jaeger made of devils cutting through the floor of Hell to clip through the cosmos.

Because there’s just something about that little phrase that resonates with me. We live in a universe of fractals, of tiny things that comprise big things and big things that work weirdly like small things. Where the mathematical principles that govern things seem, somehow, to agree. Where if you study something hard enough, you’ll find something, and if you study that, there’s something even more beyond that.

So I phrase it as the idea that reality goes all the way down, and all the way up. If I go to the beach – which I just did – I can watch barnacles having whole, entire, fully-realised lives on their rocks, waving their little gills in the water, eating plankton too small for me to see with the naked eye. If I could, I’d see those plankton living their lives, drifting in the current, and if I looked closer I’d see the cells in their bodies, the microorganisms. I could see each individual grain of sand, what rock it was made of, and if I had the time and the patience I could try and figure out where they came from.

But then I can look up, and in the daytime watch the clouds and the endless complexity of weather systems, and beyond it are stars, and stars beyond stars, and galaxies beyond galaxies, all the way out to where we can’t see because even light can’t move that fast.

It makes me want to jump for joy. Everything is like this! Everything is so much bigger than we can know and so much smaller! It’s easy to look out and just see chunks of things – that’s a tree, that’s a rock, that’s a bowl. Partly this is because our brains chunk things up to avoid overwhelming us, and partly it’s because if you don’t know to look for detail, you won’t.

The more you learn about the world, the more you learn to look. I’d never seen a barnacle’s gills before because I didn’t know you could see those! But once I knew to look, there it was. I’m informed birds look like undifferentiated generic birds to the non-bird enthusiast; I can often identify one just from its movement. My version of this is guns: when I draw a gun, it’s a gun-shaped scrawl and it makes gun enthusiasts laugh.¹ When I started to crochet, I didn’t understand why I could never get the same number of stitches on a row, but now I can’t understand how I couldn’t tell what was a stitch and what wasn’t. If you don’t have a telescope, a galaxy will look like just any other star.

I’m deliberately putting human-made items here because we’re a part of this world too. Like it or not, we’re made of a whole pile of little things, some of which have our DNA and some of which don’t. The things that we make are, similarly, formed by the properties and possibilities of the world, which we often harness without understanding, just like so many other organisms do.

I guess my point is, it’s always a good day to fall in love with the world. To look a bit bigger and a bit smaller than you usually would, and fall in love with those bits of the world too. To look again at something familiar and wonder how it changes across time and space.

¹ It’s very rare I just Don’t Care about something to that degree! But at this point it’s a great bit.