Tuesday, July 15, 2014

A story of two terraces



Some trees hang upside-down flowers at head’s height. To walk under their boughs with uplifted chin, is to lean into knowing embrace.  

There is a fragile band of space that separates mountain and sky, for months it would mimic immutability, until the next landslide, the next earthquake. In this harsh quasi-flatland, the Ifugao rice farmers eke, they have learnt to hug the mountains just so, their homes are fortified tetris leaning on rocky contours. Theirs is a deceptively easy gait, steady and unassuming, but their walking feet have learnt to curl over rock and never let go.

To challenge a mountain for space is to breed stoicism. They work in pairs, with bandanas over their faces. Patiently they drill into the mountain face to carve a road, with rudimentary tools. Rock dust spurts into the air as a toxic mist. They take a break from their work to stare at me through floating fragments, unreadable.

What space their claim is on loan. With alarming regularity, gravel and car-sized boulders descend in entropic fury – road clearing can be a lifetime occupation. Iron-corrugated towns sprout alongside mountain roads. Theirs are curvilinear lives, their daily commute is one dimensional. Without warning, school children running-leap onto passing jeepneys, their destination is always just down the road. 

Two thousand years ago, the Ifugao molded giant curvilinear steps to trap water for rice cultivation, they transform formless mud and stone into delicate lines that flow horizontally in equicontours. Ripening rice stand to attention in flooded basins, their long, wind-skirted blades scatter green. Glutinous rice is black-tipped to indicate royalty.

I pity the firstborn of rice farmers. Their lives have been mapped out, to tend the rice terraces that they inherit. Such possessive pride they have over their rice, they refuse to sell it for profit. The produce is too meagre to entirely feed a family over a year. Only childless firstborns have rice to spare.  

There was Irene, fettered by three children, who has started a tourist business with one such childless firstborn, Raymond. She fashions tables by gluing empty gin bottles, her bricks are coke bottles stuffed with gravel. Chickens descend apprehensively to feed on remnant rice husks scattered over the ground. Fish grow in the cool waters of the terraces, they too feed on husks. 

My sisters and I hiked along the edge of the terraces, balancing on stones a hand’s width. A familiar ache flared, where the tendons that attach to my knee began to unravel. At the end, a waterfall unlike any I’ve experienced, fed to bursting by rains. As I descend into fast-flowing waters at its base, my feet barely maintain their grip. The sheer weight of water rushing down is annihilating. I have never been afraid of a waterfall. 

In their own zigzag ways, Yismuth terraces have atomically straight edges. Theirs is a multi-directional beauty born from simplicity of constituents,  tetris with a single-shape building block. Their crystalline rigidity is enforced by strict minimization of energy, by laws which converge to finite possibilities.

Curvilinear beauty arises from multiple species of weakly-interacting constituents, from dirt and gravel and rock of all sizes, from patient hands and centuries of industry. With our patient hands, we’ve left behind giant fingerprints on earth’s face. A beauty not completely disordered, it is infused with practicality, with flexible laws that allow for semidivergent possibilities. I wonder anew at biological life, at the curvilinear contours on my fingertips, I ache to dive into them and wander around.

Complete divergence is as tasteless as complete convergence, but biology and physics seem to me near opposite ends of this spectrum, with enough wiggle for thoughtful appeal.

Monday, July 07, 2014

Inescapable horizons

I sympathize with Herman. It's hard to give very specific advice, because that often entails much more responsibility, it calls into question many personal biases. For some years, believing this has made me refrain from giving specific advice. Nowadays I have developed a strong enough opinion that I don't care that I am biasing others to become more like me.

With this warning in mind, and perhaps some of this is the wine speaking through me, I suggest the following. My experience with you suggests to me that you like thinking about abstract ideas, that philosophy is important to you. While experimental physics also involves thinking abstractly, and you will find yourself in intimate contact with nature, it is very limiting in the scope of ideas you will explore, you will develop a very personal relationship with a smidgen of reality. Theoretical physics trades practical intimacy with breadth of appreciation, both of physics and of philosophy. I somehow imagine it will suit you better. I am offering you extremes in interpretation, they are admittedly broad generalizations, and I know excellent exceptions who straddle both realms. A rare species, whose company I inestimably value. 

I suggest instead of doing a thesis in both experimental and theoretical physics, you might consider other fields in theoretical physics. I imagine undergraduate education as a chance to unabashedly explore all curiosities, where specialization may even be frowned upon. Certainly I frown upon it, as I frown upon inescapable horizons which I can only delay in meeting.