Evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas Swimme recently hosted an enlightening PBS program called "Journey of the Universe". In it, Swimme postulates that there exists an awareness or sentience to energy "that is more than what takes place in elementary particles but less than (our) human consciousness". There is a
primitive discernment, he says, made by even the simplest cells due to what is suggested to be the "self-organizing dynamics of the universe". When a cell encounters a molecule, the cell must decide whether to incorporate it or not. On a celestial level, our Earth has developed a symbiotic relationship with the sun, "Earth's systems attune to the sun, changing molecular structures to absorb the sun's energy". What motivates life to stay living? Why is existing so important for unconscious energy? 99% of the human body is made up of only 6 chemical elements (oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus), and these elements come from the residue of stars exploded billions of years ago. Somehow, through some natural progression, we've come to exist from the dust of stars. It can almost be suggested from all this that life is the driving force of the universe. That the will to progress, evolve and *live* overcomes any other movitating power.
In "Solaris" (both the film and the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem), mankind encounters a lifeform it cannot comprehend. A "living ocean" on the planet Solaris that seems to cause mysterious hallucinations to the astronauts investigating it. The Solaris Project has spent decades orbiting the planet in a space station, trying to make contact with the alien lifeform, but rather than enlightenment, the project only seems to get further mired in confusion. So, psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent up to the space station to investigate the matter and see if the project might need to be permanently closed. Kelvin is highly skeptical of the supernatural nature of the phenomenon occurring on the station, dismissing them as mere hallucinations, but almost from the moment he arrives there, he's sucked into their existence by the appearance of his dead wife. The scientists believe the alien consciousness ("the ocean") is creating neutrino-based lifeforms from their own repressed memories. Well, the word "lifeforms" might be contested, as some of the scientists believe they are living and others believe them to be just physical hallucinations that exist only as a part of their mind. The manifestation of Kelvin's wife knows she's not the original wife and doesn't share the same memories. She is composed only of what Kelvin believed his wife to be. But given these parameters, she accepts and functions and exists in her "state". By whatever definition you choose for "life", she lives, but is still not human.
Director Andrei Tarkovsky's languidly ponderous film isn't about space aliens or body snatchers, but the nature of life and humanity's fundamentally willful isolation in the universe. We don't understand because we choose not to. We fail to make contact because we don't comprehend what we're looking at or looking for. This explains why the planet Solaris' motivation for creating life from the astronauts memories is never learned or even suggested. As the closing scene of the movie suggests, we grasp at things to understand them, but are left fundamentally alone in the universe.
January 8, 2012
Top Critic
