Meta Incognita

Why explore? What moves human beings to venture into perilous tropical jungles, the Poles, the deep oceans, and even outer space? What births and sustains the explorer’s desire that he/she willingly risks his/her person and fortunes in the face of only tentative rewards of discovery? Here, I focus on scientists and explorers who dreamed to know the Earth and stars for us and went out and did it. This column will let them speak.

Robert Peary, with four Eskimos namely Ooqueah, Ootah, Egingwah and Seegloo, as well as Matthew Henson, Peary’s manservant, were the first humans recorded to reach the North Pole. Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams (Vintage Books, New York 2001), after he himself lived in the cusps of arctic light and gloom in order to know that place on Earth. He believed that the initial perception of Peary, which included prospects of fame and fortune, would have inescapably been "tempered by a mounting sense of consternation and awe. It is as though the land, as it slowly works its way into the man by virtue of its character, eclipses these motives. The land becomes large, alive like an animal; it humbles him in a way he cannot pronounce." Lopez also cited another exploration of an American artist named Rockwell Kent who with other companions, found himself shipwrecked in 1929 at a fiord in Greenland. Finding before them a sight exceptionally beautiful with its deep green water, silvery mist from the falls and the "flowers that fringe the pebbly shore and star the banks," they shelved the urgency of their condition, evident when one of them said: "Maybe we have lived only to be here now." Lopez was also wise to note the dual powers of the land – "the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life" that becomes more real to the explorer than any other.

Deep in rainforests, a scientist treads the floor of nature, lured by its promise. Edward O. Wilson, esteemed biologist and winner of two Pulitzer prizes for his books On Human Nature and The Ants (with co-author Bert Holdobler), braves the rainforests in search of insects and their connections with other life forms. In his book, Diversity of Life, (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, MA, 1992), he refreshes and illuminates our understanding of the nature of exploration by melding human wisdom with scientific determination:

"The unsolved mysteries of the rainforest are formless and seductive. They are like islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of the reef into the abyss. They draw us forward and stir strange apprehensions. The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste. In our hearts, we hope we will never discover everything. We pray there will always be a world like this one at whose edge I sat in darkness. The rainforest in its richness is one of the last repositories on earth of that timeless dream."

But what about exploration beyond our Earth, beyond La Terra Residencia, into outer space?

Last Saturday, the space shuttle Columbia crashed on its way back to Earth. It will again be a feast for superstition as well as the quick-draw remark: Why reach for the stars when we still need to find or build "heaven" on earth? Those who readily do this, I think, forget that we are creatures who can look up as well as down, evolving first from stardust and through evolution on Earth. If we can accept and appreciate the task of a geologist digging up the Earth revealing life’s history, so should we the rocket scientist and his starry probes. We all somehow want to find ourselves and as such, we should not miss out on the journey through our beginnings to look everywhere. The earlier sentiment that keeps our journeys solely Earth-bound defeats the exploratory spirit inherent in man. Humans should be able to reach for the stars, not only in their poetry and music.

So I guess we explore because in our infinitesimal make-up, we are as quantum physics explains, made up of particles constantly in motion. Or maybe we all have to wander looking at the stars in order to find ourselves: "Probing a starry infinitude, I came, like yourselves, through the mesh of my being, in the night, and awoke to my nakedness" as Neruda penned in his poetry called The Enigmas. Or maybe because the answers to life’s complex questions are really found along the journey and not at the destination, that is why we should enjoy and deepen our journeys. Or maybe the way to knowing yourself is really to reach out.

I think the coordinates of learning are scattered like stardust from the shavings of constant creation in the universe. The task and trick is to know where you are first and move from there through reason, experience and imagination.

In Arctic Dreams, Lopez mentioned a term, Meta Incognita, to refer to "Unknown Edge," a peninsula in the arctic region. But he also discovered "metae" to mean the towers in the Colosseum around which the chariots turned before heading back. I like that term. I like the idea of the explorer in a chariot, holding the reins to her own journey but knowing that neither the terrain nor the "metae" are her creations. But journey, she must. It also connotes that she has to turn back at some point; that, as Lopez puts it, "she would eventually make a turn of unknown meaning before coming home."