Warm Relations
What is our origin? It's a question that philosophers and scientists from Darwin to Plato have pondered for millennia. "Where is the birthplace of civilization?" asks Carl Sagan. "How did we come to be?" asks Aquinas. "Where did you come from? Where do you go?" asks Swedish techno band Rednex. The truth is that we don't know, not really.
My brother the scientist is an empiricist of the highest order and such nagging unknowables spurn him on. When we watch ambiguous movies, it rankles him when things cannot be explained (it may rankle him just as much that such ambiguity doesn't bother me). He could be a champion Rubik's cuber should he decide to waste time getting better at solving that puzzle than he already is. We used to challenge him with a Rubik's cube by putting the thing out of sorts during TV shows and daring him to solve it during the commercial breaks, which he almost always did. If you'd like me to date myself further, we were probably watching Dinosaurs on TGiF or watching a videocassette from Blockbuster. Permeations of a Rubik's cube are so vast that if you started turning it once a second starting at the Big Bang, you still would not have gotten all of them. Ben will tell you that there is trick to knowing how to solve a Rubik's cube but I could never understand it or have it taught to me. What I do understand is that it is perfectly suited to my brother's estimable brain—infinite opportunity but governed by learnable rules.
Sticking with cubes for a second, it would probably bother Ben that there are no cubes in Cubism. Cezanne, one of the founders of that movement, believed that everything could be broken down into cylinders, spheres and cones, not cubes. Why did it get that name? Just one of those things. I was always a year behind my brother in school (I probably still am) and when a teacher would realize there was another Renkoski in her class (and in grade school all of our teachers were women), she would get very excited at the prospect of an easy semester. Ben is a model student, hardworking and creative, able to absorb information while adding a great deal to the classroom experience. By the time parent teacher conferences came along, those teachers were always sure to inquire of my parents how two boys brought up in the same house could be quite so different. When wondering where we come from, it's important to remember that being related doesn't mean being the same.
Human beings, homo sapiens sapiens (we have the arrogance to call ourselves the Latin for "wise man"), most likely come from Africa. We do not evolve from apes or monkeys but a mysterious ancestor that both humans and apes share on our family trees. This creature—let's call him Jeff—lived five million years ago and evolved from tree-shrews, which in turn evolved from hedgehogs, who were once, evolutionarily, starfish.
One of the oldest civilizations in the world, truly one of the first people to leave Africa, are the Andamanese, islanders off the coast of India, who have lived in isolation for sixty thousand years, ten thousand years longer than the Australian aborigines. There are four hundred of them left and their language has no known relatives. Despite having twelve words to describe the different stages of ripeness of fruit, they have only five numbers—one, two, one more, some more and all. To me, this is kind of beautiful, especially as someone who struggled at math but I can nearly hear Ben asking "Well, exactly how many is 'some more?" As unfamiliar as that type of existence may seem to us, they believe in a god that even agnostics should be able to recognize. His name is Puluga and he is invisible, eternal, immortal and all knowing. He offers comfort for those who need it but punishes the wicked, which he did years ago by sending a great flood.
Since we're in India, I'm going to share an observation from Stephen Fry, the British raconteur whose wonderful quiz show Quite Interesting (and the books it has produced) has been the research team for this newsletter (read: I've stolen everything I know from them). An Indian mogul emperor was bored with the available games in existence and demanded that his subjects create a game of intellect, that avoided luck altogether. One of his subjects brought him chess, a Persian game (the Farsi for "the king is dead," phonetically "shahk mat" is where we get the word "checkmate"). The emperor was overjoyed and agreed to offer the inventor an award. The humble man said he needed little but would happily take a grain of rice on the first square of his eight-by-eight chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on until the 64th square. "Wonderful!" said the emperor and had his granaries get to work. A little while later, an advisor came sheepishly to the emperor to inform him that the inventor had asked for more rice than had ever existed. Just by doubling sixty-four times.
One of humanity's unfortunate evolutionary traits is division. It can keep us safe, of course, but it keeps us small minded (and it must be said, the emperor had the inventor's head removed for his insolence). But during divided times, when we build walls on borders and within our minds, when we kill each other over intolerable differences like the color of our skins and when we convince ourselves that we come from a tiny box labeled "Polish" or "Irish" which are wholly different form other tiny boxes labeled "Chinese" or "Sudanese," I remind myself that I am a grain of rice, brought together by two grains of rice, who exist because of four grains of rice and so forth. It doesn't take a geneticist to realize we are all related, every one of us is a descendent of Charlemagne or Genghis Kahn or Cleopatra and certainly Jeff. We are related but we aren't the same, which is wonderful. How else can you explain that the eighth cousin, four times removed of Gustav Mahler, the great post-Wagnerian Romantic composer, is Beyoncé Knowles?