Have You Ascended?

In many ways, Man has ascended. Let’s look at one line of ascension…architecture. 2500 years ago, in the Old World, the Greeks were building large structures. Those structures had poor interior spaces, as their roofs were supported by row after row of columns. Not long after, in the New World, in the oldest continually inhabited place in North America, Canyon de Chelly (pronounced ‘de shay’), the Hisatsinom...ancestors to Hopi (now inhabited by the Navajo)… began making “great houses” by stacking stones…one on top of another. They “ascended” through the generations by learning how to strengthen their structures by tapering the thickness of the walls. By the time that they got to Chaco Canyon, they were building massive structures, up to 5 stories high with 800 rooms. These structures are now crumbling back to the Earth.

Around 500 years later, in the middle of the second millennium, the Inca had completed Machu Picchu. Their stonework was over the top, but they did ascend past their Pueblo neighbors to the north. They employed finely crafted blocks of stone, but the ascension came in the form of the “beam”; large, long stones that were shaped and fitted across openings, thus creating the strength that allowed them to add greater weight from above. The Inca’s work, with their beamed structures, will outlive the Pueblo structures, which had wood beams and, at best, scant stone beams.

1500 years earlier, the Romans had built their aqueducts, which are still standing. These impressive structures were only made possible by the “arch”…a vast improvement over the beam, which had long been employed in the Old World, but not yet conceived in the New World. Adding great strength and beauty to a structure, the arch allowed builders to go where no builders had gone before. Man was ascending.

There were limitations to the arch, which was conceived around an arc in a circle. When the Muslims invaded Spain, however, everything changed. They made a minor adjustment to the Roman arch: instead of modeling it after a circle, they modeled it after an oval, which evolved into the "pointed arch". This seemingly minor adjustment allowed builders to create massive, unobstructed interior spaces. It led to the development of flying buttresses, which in effect, moved all of the support from inside of the structure, to the outside. Cathedrals with massive interiors were born.

(As an aside, I don’t know how you feel when you walk through an old church, cathedral, or castle, but I am far less impressed by the capacity of a single person, or group of people to have been able to afford such a thing, as I am by the legions of anonymous men who actually built them. These traveling journeymen, who called themselves Free Masons, must have felt like the most highly evolved people on Earth. They took stone, which was not a cathedral and turned it into a cathedral. Their only knowledge of structural stress was amassed when a structure collapsed, or when it didn’t. But, they figured it out, didn’t they? They tamed the largest and heaviest beasts yet known to European Man. Ascension.)

Once, what must have been a long time ago, a very primitive precursor to modern man dropped a smooth rock. It landed on another rock and broke it into pieces.

Hmmm...sharp edges.

Now this guy had no preconceived notion that inside of that large rock were lots of little rocks, some with sharp edges. He cuts his finger while exploring it and begins to learn different uses for the sharp edge. One day, Barney snatches Fred’s sharp stone. Well, eventually, Fred needs a sharp edge, so he smacks two rocks together and…Voila!… more… sharp stones! This was a preconceived notion. Ascent!

Now, take a quantum leap into Fred and Barney’s future, to the Renaissance in Italy, where Michelangelo is in the quarry, studying a large stone. He doesn’t see shards and stone chips in there. He sees “David”. He sees “The Pieta”. He sees “Moses”. He sees “Battle of the Centaurs”. What seemed so matter-of-fact to Mike was what he taught all future sculptors: Merely remove the unnecessary parts. Man ascending.

Take another leap…to our present. In the above picture are nine Coke bottles. One row of five… one row of four. Can you close your eyes and do something as simple as imagine that tenth bottle, making two rows of five? That’s pretty easy. Now, can you close your eyes and imagine a third row, making fifteen bottles, in all? Probably. How about four rows? Five rows? Ten rows? I’m there, but it takes some concentration. When you compare it to the size of the Universe, it’s nothing, but it takes a lot of discipline and time that you could probably be using to surf other areas of the Internet.

Michelangelo could look at a block of stone and see “The Pieta”. A mason could walk through a quarry and see a cathedral. We can barely envision 100 coke bottles with our eyes closed. (Good thing it wasn't 37 Coke bottles, 28 Rock Stars, 21 Mountain Dews and 14 cups of Starbuck's Half-Caf Mocha Latte.) Can the average human today conceive of anything more complicated than a plate of nachos? Are we done ascending?

(Of course, this was a trick question. Not even Michelangelo could have gotten that tenth bottle with that background image of Monica Bellucci in a tight sweater.)

Trick question?

Yah… trick question. Don’t tax yourself. Forgetaboutit…

(BTW… if you are one of the hundreds who have recently visited Wiseguy’s RIA page to spend a moment or two with Monica Bellucci, don’t panic… all you have to do is scroll down a bit. Don’t forget to read Wiseguy’s reviews while you’re there. This guy has something to say…)