WHY?

“Why do I exist?,” I asked the universe.
“Don’t ask me,” the universe replied.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked Mother Earth.
“Don’t ask me,” she answered.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked a tree.
“Don’t ask me,” whispered the oak.

“Why do I exist?,” I asked my cat.
“To taste the universe. Why do you ask?,” she purred, her cheek nuzzling mine.

The tiger must hunt
The eagle must fly
Man must ask, why, why, why.

The tiger must eat
The eagle must land
Man must say, I understand.
——Kurt Vonnegut

“Do I exist to understand?,” I asked my self.
“To taste the universe, the meal with infinite courses, each garnished with our own evolving theories like a trail of crumbs, lest we lose our appetite for awe and revelation, embalm our understandings, atrophied into petrified conclusions and relinquish thinking to external authority for protection from the fear of not knowing,” I laboriously concocted my reply.

“I exist to taste?”
“Yeah, a universal taste bud, they come in all sizes from sub atomic to super galactic. Nature evolves by consuming itself. Just as we represent the alchemists stone when the atomic elements in the food we eat transmute into the elements we are and the elements we feed back to nature, our experience of our existence formulates our growing wisdom about life and our thoughts feed new ideas to the evolving universe whether we articulate them to one another or not.”

Cool, I can live with that. The why, the purpose, the intention all begin with the inquirer and need never enter into the travels of curiosity with its journal of imagination into the ways of nature. Penetration of the myth of civilization is what requires an endless tracing of whys because there is always an initial intender in this crude digital mock of the natural world it intends to pave over.

Whenever I attempt to differentiate between nature and artifice, there’s always someone who mentions that it’s all nature. Who am I to argue, I know nothing. It may be a very small nit I pick here, but I find it to be the thread of faith leading to the corner of a mythical rug under which all the natural results of the constantly antagonistic attitude of western civilization have been swept with undeserved authority and establishment by rigorous miseducation and enforcement.

Yes, it is natural to make mistakes. It is natural to benefit from all experience. It is natural to mimic the examples of the natural world in as wide a variety of ways as those who would express themselves. Tribal life of early man was often an expression of a group’s respect for a local plant or animal with which they identify themselves as an unspoken surname. It is a natural mistake to not consume what one kills. Early man thought of it as the ending of the spiritual existence of the plant or animal to fell a tree or a deer and not build a shelter, make clothing nor have a meal of what they killed.

Somewhere along the line the taboo on ignoring man’s intimate connection to the life of the planet was circumvented by the arrogance of assuming ownership rights over everything requiring the first artifice; the invention of a supreme being to grant such rights and duties to conquer the nature to which man had been held in thrall by Pan, that raunchy old, fun loving devil.