See that line across the road just about in the middle of the photo to the left?  That's an ant trail.  It was there when I was a little girl visiting my grandparents.  It was there when my mother was a little girl and my grandmother told me it was there when she was a little girl and her mother told her it was there when she was a little girl.  So that ant trail has been in the same spot for more than a century and a quarter, and very probably a lot longer than that. 

 How much longer? Who can say, but probably a lot longer than that road has existed, centuries maybe, maybe thousands of years.  Maybe it was there before the Indians came.  If I learned that it had been there since the glaciers retreated 11,000 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised. And if, somehow, I was to learn that that ant trail would still be there when the glaciers come grinding down from the north again, as by and by they surely will, whether that's a hundred years from now or 10,000, I wouldn't be surprised, either. What is time to an ant colony anyway? We humans are like mayflies compared to colonial creatures, whether ants and termites or coral polyps.

Then there are plants.  Some years ago I came across a study of the flora of the Mojave Desert.  It mentioned that the author had found a creosote bush that was 12,000 years old.  The plant grows by spreading out in an ever-widening circle.  Underground the roots spread from the central, original plant, the above-surface parts of which may die, but beneath the surface, it lives on, essentially indefinitely.  Even a fire, which may burn off the above-ground parts of it, won't kill it because the root structure is untouched.  It can, of course, be killed.  In this case, the bush was bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a housing development.  Alive since the beginning of the Holocene, a grassland ape destroyed it to create another one of its ever-proliferating nest heaps.

Do plants think, are they sentient?  Define sentience. Is there only one type?  Is your definition valid for any life form other than hominids? How do you know?  

How about fungi? I once listened to a very -- very --  smart guy proposing and defending convincingly the hypothesis that all fungi on the planet are really just one life form that has been continuously alive since the first fungi evolved.  What about the oceans separating continents, and continents moving around via plate tectonics.  He had an answer to that, but I forget what it was.  

Fungi and vascular plants interact intimately with each other.  Fungi act as a communications pathway between trees, conveying information about their health, telling a tree that it is time to die -- yes! that's true -- among many other things including, no doubt, things we, as animals, could never understand, or even be aware of.

Are fungi sentient?  How about the combined symbiotic creature that is a forest/fungi symbiote?   

I recall reading, maybe in The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, speculation about social insects having a group mind, rather like that of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched that with my dad when I was a kid and remember him saying, "Borg, Borg, okay Borg.  But where's Warner, that's what I want to know.  What did Borg do with Warner?"  I had no idea what he was talking about but my brothers laughed.

I digress.  Where was I?  Hmm.  I forget.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
―Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

 

I thought about you today

I was thinking about this old guy I knew when I was in college, just some guy I met while sitting on a park bench. We got to talking and became friends, although, as has been not unknown to happen, he believed my cordiality implied romantic interest, which it did not. That put the kibosh on our friendship.  The fact that he was three times my age did not suggest to  him that...well, you know. I liked him, but not that way. And it had never occurred to me that he would like me that way.

Oh, really?

Anyway, for some reason after heaven knows how long not thinking about him suddenly I did, remembering that he had spent decades writing a book, a novel based around the character of his girlfriend, who had died during the summer of love, 1967, the year he quit high school and joined the hippies in Haight-Ashbury.

He couldn't get over her death, and what I came to realize was that he was keeping her alive in his novel. That's why he worked on writing it every day of his life, writing, re-writing, editing, "polishing"  it, as he said. I wondered why he didn't submit it to a literary agent, who would advise him on shaping it for publication.  He said he had and that the agent said it was a very promising first novel but that, at 700 pages, it was too long for a publisher to accept as a first novel by an unknown.  He suggested cutting it down to 300 pages.  That my friend would not do. After that he didn't bother with agents or publishers. He just kept writing and re-writing, reliving the magical year  of 1967, the pinnacle of his life, when he was in love as only a teenager can be. 

Some time after I had lost contact with him, while browsing Amazon I ran across an author by his name and I wondered if it could be the same person and checked out his author's page and, yes, it was him and he had finally published his book, self-published it. 

Well, today I tried to find his book on Amazon.  I decided I should read it, wanted to read it.  But I could not find it.  I'd forgotten the title, and, honestly, even his name.  I had to think hard to recall it.  His first name, of course, I remembered, but not his last name.  Finally it came to me and I searched Amazon for him.  I found authors with the same name, but not him. I didn't understand that. I thought an Amazon listing was forever.  

I tried to find e-mails from him, but I only found some that didn't mention the title of his book.  Maybe we only talked about it. But I did find his obituary. It was in an e-mail from a someone I didn't know that I had never opened, presumably a friend of his who sent the obituary to those who had known him. Probably at the time I didn't want to be reminded of him, the end of our friendship still fresh in my mind, so I ignored it, the heading not mentioning the content, merely "About ---."

Died after a long illness.  Cancer, I suppose.  I wonder if, when he knew his life was over, he decided to publish his novel, letting "her" go to live on in the life he gave her in his mind so that she would live in the minds of others who might read his novel.

I don't know.  But I would like to think so. Rest in peace, Robbie, and long may your Lily live.