The Sum of our Parts

Wrote this while reading Alison Clarke in her introduction chapter of Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century - as she describes the "sheer heterogeneity of the processes, practices, and materialities involved in the making of stuff". One might not usually associate the making of stuff as something inspirational or aspirational, especially when our global crises are implicated with the deluge of stuff. But if we allow ourselves to imagine for a moment the immense sacrifice, complex thinking, and ginormous teamwork that makes up a global civilisation - one human is compelled to feel measly. Yet - each individual harbours an extremely rich spectrum of experience that no artist, filmmaker, scientist, journalist, or biographer can seek to reproduce. We are in ourselves rather amazing. Funnily though, as rich and as deep as our being goes, there are always imperfections - banal, irritating, everyday, chore-like. What should I make of humankind?

Also, some terrific images from Hubble to accompany the text below. Courtesy of Nat Geo, I encourage you to visit the site to take in full the expanse of our space, short of becoming an astronaut.

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Maybe we perceive a sum to be larger than its parts because we are blind to the largeness of the parts. That one should indeed be blind to one's own hairy mammoth within, when we must wonder if the dominant discourse of the sum we celebrate - that of perpetual technological advancement and capital accumulation, while essential, have cast a smokescreen over the richness of human experience. Experience that can be independent of those narratives, but without which our bottom lines will be all the poorer. Can we, for example, conceive of the hundred and forty million child births per year, that they each require no small amount of care during gestation, that each child birth then converges a network of communal ties in celebration perhaps replete with fanfare amongst 70 cousins, that the parents then choose to live 70 years of their lives around this child - that this human intelligence capable of artistry, compassion, and curiosity is borne out of two lumps of cells - perhaps the smallest parts of our greatest sum but capable of no small feat. Geewhiz! Maybe the perception of our sum is penurious without first perceiving that the parts are quite infinite.

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The shadowy form at the center of this snapshot from Hubble is an actual hole within a thick cloud of gas and dust 1,500 light-years away in the winter constellation Orion.

The colorful gas cloud 5,000 light-years away represents the remnants of a sunlike star exploding 10,000 years ago.

Located 8,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, blazing stars some hundred times more massive than our sun lie buried within the nebula and are heating up the gas surrounding the cluster, creating the cavernous bubble visible at the bottom of the image.

Considered the most detailed image ever taken of the famous Crab Nebula, this Hubble portrait shows off countless wispy, branchlike filaments of hydrogen gas throughout the supernova explosion remnant. The electric-blue coloring of the interior of the cloud is the naked core of the dead star at the heart of the Crab Nebula.

NGC 4676, are seen colliding into each other 300 million light-years away. Astronomers using supercomputer models show that the two galaxies will eventually merge into one galaxy some 400 million years from now.

Spanning only 30,000 light-years across, NGC 1309 is a compact spiral only one-third the size of our Milky Way.

The cloud of dust and gas is being shaped by a young star called S106 IR. On the cusp of adulthood, the growing star is "rebelling" against its parent cloud, ejecting material at high speeds and creating glowing lobes of hot, turbulent hydrogen gas.