Existentialism, Martin Heidegger & Sein Und Zeit

By Craig: I am a cynic. I find it hard to believe anything without proof and even then I am dubious. I am currently plugging through Martin Heidegger's Sein Und Zeit. It is a book about 'existence' and 'the state of being.' I can only read so much of it before laying it down and picking up something else, but, nevertheless, it is fascinating. What is time? How does it relate to existence and life? I have been asking myself this question since I was a little boy.

If one turns on the news today, it is fraught with danger, warnings and other unpleasant things. It is mere observation of events that are existing or not existing relative to the temporal state of ones own existence. One own existence is an aberration. A fleeting moment in time. Macbeth said it best and I quote:
              Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and                 then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

This is nihilism in its finest moment. But, thankfully, nihilism in its true, pure, and unfettered form cannot ever exist. Even as I examine the words that I just typed, it dies before it ever has a chance to live. The reason for this, is that existence itself is based on awareness. Without awareness or consciousness nothing can truly exist. Matter itself becomes irrelevant and meaningless just as the words that I just typed and the contradictions that I just found by reading them. Are we not all contradictions? Each day we plod onward toward a future that will one day be swallowed up by time's perpetual and infinite corridor, yet we continue to move along the linear plane as if we had some stake in it. The future, as a term and concept, is meaningless and at the same time isn't. How can this be? Infinity makes time meaningless. It is the one constant, the numerator and the denominator divided by zero.

"Where am I going with this? I do not know. I am still waiting for Godot to meet me at the tree of existence and tell me.

A Lost moment in time: Rudolph Zallinger & the Dumpy Dinosaurs

By Craig: I have always had a fascination with things prehistoric. When I was four years old my parents bought me and my twin brother Jay a Marx Dinosaur playset for Christmas. The dinosaurs came in three colors; mint green, white, and chocolate brown. I can remember memorizing the names of the dinosaurs and setting them up on the coffee table in my grandfather's den. Usually we would split them up, sometimes I would have the green ones and my brother would have the white ones or the brown ones. We would form them up in battle lines as if they were human armies. The anachronistic cavemen that came with the set would never fare well. They would almost always be the first victims of the battle. Sometimes, however, the dinosaurs themselves might speak and instead of fighting would band together to form a civilized society. The Tyrannosaurus Rex would team up with the Hadrosaurus, Stegosaurus and Dimetrodon to form an alliance against the killer canine that would take the form of my grandfather's dog Charlie. One day, the mint green Tyrannosaurus disappeared and my brother and I searched high and wide for him to no avail. Then, one day the following spring we found him in the tall grass in the back yard. He had become the savage victim of Charlie's canines! Or perhaps it was our dog Coco that chewed him up. It must have been an undignified and humiliating experience for T-Rex to be reduced to an unrecognizable mass of plastic by the teeth of an evolved mammal!

One day my father brought home a book Willy Ley's "Worlds of the Past" illustrated by Rudolph F. Zallinger. We must have been 5 or 6 when we received it and my brother and I devoured it. We were enthralled by the illustrations. There was Elasmosaurus with its long neck and sharp serrated teeth looking like the top of the food chain in the ancient Cretaceous sea. Pteranodon's flying like birds over a choppy sea hunting for food while a Mosasaur waits for a chance to snag one within its crocodile like mouth. Two Tyrannosaurs fight over the bloody carcass of a freshly killed Hadrosaur while volcanoes erupt in the background. Then there is the massive Diplodocus that peers behind him, possibly sensing the approaching danger of a pack of Allosaurs. All of these illustrations left vivid imprints in my mind and nearly a half a century after first seeing them they are still there.

My brother Jay also enjoyed the work of Zallinger and even procured a copy of his "The Age of Reptiles." The original is in the Yale Peabody museum in Connecticut. He also was able to somehow acquire a Zallinger autograph which I now have and proudly keep in my library. In the last 75 years since Zallinger was painting his prehistoric murals paleontologists have come a long way in determining what the dinosaurs were really like. Zallinger portrayed them as slow, lumbering creatures that plodded along through the Mesozoic like present day Americans after gorging on cheeseburgers and super sized fries and soft drinks. The thinking now is that they were not at all slow, torpid creatures, but very energetic and even acrobatic!

I still have my copy of Worlds of the Past and every now and again open it up and get almost as much enjoyment looking at it today as I did 45 years ago. The crayon marks are still visible from when either me or my brother decided that it was a good idea to scribble in the book. One day I will pass it on to my son, who will hopefully pass it on to his kids and eventually the original owner along with the memories will be long forgotten in the dark recess' of time.

A Lost moment in time: Lepidodendron & the Hubbardston Library.

By Craig: I say the word often. Sometimes I might go a few months without it rolling off my tongue, but it always comes back. It has always been like that. At least since I first saw the word when I was about 8 years old. I must have struggled with it at first. L-e-p-i-d-o-d-e-n-d-r-o-n. Numerous syllables and not a word that an average adult would know, never mind an 8 year old. But I was different. I had an obsession with certain things that I found interesting. I had to know all about something, or learn as much as I could about the subject that interested me. In this case it wasn't so much the word Lepidodendron as the artists rendition of what Lepidodendron was.

When I was in third grade our class would walk to the library next to the school in Hubbardston Massachusetts. I would immediately gravitate to the science or history section. There were a number of books that interested me and I would find myself flipping the pages of these books and immersing myself in the pictures and captions below them. I was particularly intrigued with one book in particular. It was called The Forest. It was one of the books in the Life Nature Library, a series of books written for young adults, or merely any lay person interested in a subject and wanting to get a better understanding of it without diving into too much technical jargon. Perfect for me. I am not a scholar and never will be. I get bored with one subject and eventually turn to something else. However, I always find myself going back to the same things. Case in point...Lepidodendron.

So, what is Lepidodendron? The casual reader probably doesn't have the foggiest notion what it is. I bet if my 8 year old self could return to his classroom of 1976 or 1977 and ask any of the teachers if they knew what Lepidodendron was I would get some puzzled looks. In the golden days of fossil hunting, strange stones were found in the coal beds that appeared to show the fossilized skin of an ancient reptile. However, it wasn't long before it was determined that the scale like fossils were not anything from the animal kingdom. They were the fossilized impressions of ancient trees that lived in the Carboniferous Era some 300 million years ago. Hence the name Lepidodendron. Literally meaning "scale tree." These trees were prolific and dominated the ancient swampy forests of the Carboniferous sharing their world with giant dragonflies and other primitive life. Lepidodendron trees rose to heights of nearly 100 feet and though prolific for millions of years, they eventually died out and became extinct sometime during the Triassic.

I must have checked The Forest out of the Hubbardston town library dozens of times in the 6 years that I attended elementary school. One of the images that I clearly remembered from this book was an artists depiction of a Permian forest with the scale like fallen trunks of Lepidodendron in the foreground and a rainbow arcing across the ancient sky. I must have studied that image every time that I borrowed that book. I left grade school in 1980 and forgot about the book. However, over the next 35 years or so I would occasionally find myself saying the word Lepidodendron. Sometimes it would just roll off my tongue for no apparent reason, and I wondered why it would just pop into my head at random times. Walking across a muddy Okinawan field with the Marines in 1987...Lepidodendron. A few years later in 1993 working on a train signal...Lepidodendron. In Paris on my honeymoon in 1997...Lepidodendron. The birth of my son in 2003...Lepidodendron. At the bedside of my terminally ill twin brother Jay in 2018...Lepidodendron. Just now...Lepidodendron. Am I the only one who does this?

A few years ago Jay received a box of books from someone, and in it there just happened to be a few of the old Nature Library books including The Forest!! I had not seen this book in nearly 35 years and suddenly here it was again. It brought back a flood of memories and when I opened it up I was 8 again. I found myself sitting alone at one of the tables in the Hubbardston town library. It was then that I realized what it was about Lepidodendron that caused it to stick in my head. It was extinct! For millions of years it had been forgotten as if it never existed. Then one day the fossils that were found brought it back to life. One day Lepidodendron will disappear again. This time for good, just as humankind. the earth, the sun and the whole galaxy will one day vanish into the recesses of time's lonely corridor. It is an unsettling thought, but I must have imagined something like it when I first stared at its lonely and forgotten life in the pages of  a book some 40 years ago. Now I remember. One day I too, like Lepidodendron, will be forgotten. I find myself looking up from the page at a blank space on the wall and then casually looking back at the fallen trunks. Lepidodendron... Lepidodendron...Lepidodendron...