Dichotomy

The Wonder and the Horror

The microcosm and the macrocosm, happening simultaneously. Let me explain.

I didn’t want to miss the party.

I’m gobsmacked that I’m comin’ up on 69. Not “oh, isn’t that something” surprised. More like I woke up in somebody else’s life and discovered “newsflash!” I’m old. I can’t jump up with a band behind me and sing lead anymore. Not without embarrassing myself. Not the way I used to. The brain no longer files those memos under “optional.”

And I just had liver cancer.

Past tense, thank God.

The tumor was removed surgically, and the result was curative. I was truly witness to a miracle. I mean it. The kind you don’t argue with. The kind you don’t explain away. The kind that doesn’t care if you’re sophisticated.

But the ride to get there was definitely not fun.

I was informally misdiagnosed. A young and aggressive oncologist told me it was “malignant, and malignancy means stage four.” I suppose if you’re going to have an oncologist, you want the one who’s aggressive. In my case, though—fuck me—it was an emotional roller coaster with no seatbelt, no attendant, and a guy in a lab coat shouting worst-case scenarios through a megaphone.

Even the MRI overcalled things. It saw a shadowy second tumor and it wasn’t until the surgeons went in laparoscopically—until they literally entered the computerized, space-adjusted cavern of my body that anyone could say for sure what was what.

And that’s where the microcosm comes in.

When they go in, what they’re seeing—they are peeking into a 3D computerized AI hologram bubble—is a microcosm. A narrow tunnel of reality, magnified. They’re constantly orienting themselves with landmarks, ultrasound, vessel patterns, the line of resection. They’re navigating like explorers, except the jungle is you, and the map is glowing, every wrong turn is permanent and there is no popcorn.

Little teeny tiny surgeons walking around inside me like some sci-fi movie about being in the body.

Only for real.

Picture it: flying through a bright red cave with a teeny-weeny flashlight, a razor-knife 100th the size of a grain of salt and an x-ray laser microscope. Mapping terrain with ultrasound. An entire portable lab on the head of a pin. Just strolling along looking for the bad guys. Doot-de-doot-de-doo. Making one careful, miraculous, irreversible decision after another. Just five feet away in ordinary human scale, I’m lying there. But several orders of magnitude down, my liver fills their entire world. A vein can suddenly become the whole universe.

The wonder of that… what human beings can do, what minds and hands can accomplish when they refuse to accept the crude ending, is overwhelming.

This is participation in divinity, you can be sure.

The Wonder.

And while all this was happening, I’m in a prayer that felt both petty and cosmic, which is how most honest prayers feel if you really look at them.

I prayed not to die. Not now when my kids are blossoming. Not now, right when AI is on the cusp of solving medicine and solving science. All of it. I didn’t want that irony. I didn’t want to miss the next chapter by a page. It would be too ironic. Too ridiculous.

Maybe it was the prayers of so many of my friends. Maybe it was timing. Maybe it was grace. Maybe it was just the competence of good people who spent their lives learning how to do impossible things in bright red caves.

Whatever it was, it worked.

I’m not out of the woods. I’ve a separate prostate cancer needing attention. Obviously, each breath is still a gift. I just wish I could remember that all the time. But I am cured of liver cancer, thank you very much. And I am living proof that one can walk into a hospital and amazing people can wheel you to the door and send you home the next day with a miracle in your pouch.

That’s humanity.

The Mystery

I’ve spent a lot of time in meditation these past few years. Every day, at least once, ten minutes minimum. I’ve missed very few days and when I do, no worries,. I just let go and get right back to it. This is part of the Eleventh Step of the Twelve Step program I’ve been working for years.

So yes: this whole consciousness thing, the nature-of-mind thing, the what-are-we-doing-here thing… this is a huge chunk of where I live.

Which brings me to astronauts…

Are astronauts, traveling to the moon using the inarguable laws of physics (thank you, Dr. Einstein) and the laws of orbital mechanics (Newton/Keppler and which may be the great mystery that will finally enable us off this rock), having a spiritual experience?

I sure hope so.

Because orbital mechanics is not a theory in the everyday sense of “one opinion among others.” If you launch a body at a certain speed, mass, and angle in a gravitational field, it will follow a path whether you approve of it or not. You don’t get a vote. Miss by a tiny amount and your spacecraft misses the moon. You don’t get partial credit for intention.

That’s what makes it feel almost metaphysical.

And here’s the deeper mystery underneath the math:

Why should the universe be structured at all?

Why should matter behave lawfully?

Why should gravity fall off with distance in a way that can be described mathematically?

Why should mathematics map onto reality so uncannily?

That is profound. Science describes the pattern with increasing precision, but it doesn’t finally answer why reality is intelligible in the first place—why the universe is the kind of place where a mind can discover rules.

And that’s where the split happens.

The unknown can produce horror.

The unknown can produce wonder.

That’s a real poetic and psychological divide.

But in actual life, they don’t stay politely separated, do they?

The deepest experiences often contain both. Awe itself often has both flavors. The sublime is exactly that territory: terror and beauty meeting in the same moment, shaking hands, sharing a cup of tea, and then staring at you like you’re the strange one for wanting them to pick a side.

This is so beautifully rendered by Marlon Brando in Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now:

“The horror. The horror.”

The mystery of existence can evoke both.

And then there’s this line, this headline-feeling sentence that drops like a stone into the modern mind:

“Human beings have left Earth’s orbit, for the first time since 1972.”

Snap. There it is: the overlap. The Wonder and the Horror, holding hands.

Being a parent is another place that happens—where love opens the ceiling and fear opens the floor, and you live in the narrow band between them trying to act normal.

In 1972, Joseph Campbell cites Giuseppe Ungaretti’s short poem, written in response to the Earth seen from space during the Apollo era, published in the Italian magazine Epoca.

The lines Campbell gives are:

“What are you doing, Earth, in heaven?

Tell me, what are you doing, Silent Earth?”

Campbell uses it to make the larger point that after the moon mission, the old split between “earth below” and “heaven above” no longer holds in the same way. The Earth itself is now seen as a heavenly body.

And here’s the modern collision:

Seeing the Earth as a heavenly body while war plays out, authoritarian leaders get rich, the death of what is true accelerates, social media pays obscene money for attention weaponized into spectacle, and AI is about to hand powerful tools to every shmuck with twenty bucks and a laptop.

Wonderful, and it scares the bejeezus outta me.

That’s where The Wonder and The Horror overlap.

Ungaretti issued the first verse of the new world’s poetry: the Earth was now a heavenly body.

But we have been stuck in the horror.

And yet—this week, it overlaps with wonder again. Like God taking a front seat in the Shakespearean dichotomy, watching the human drama with that expression that is either compassion or disbelief, depending on your mood.

You can choose, hopefully, where to place your attention.

Horror.

Beauty.

Both.

To ignore the horror is denial. To ignore the beauty is starvation.

And somewhere in the middle—somewhere in the feedback loop between the flashlight in the red cave and the blue marble hanging in black space—is the point Jimi Hendrix showed me when I was just a teen:

Even the horror is beautiful, if you can bear to really see it.

All you’ve got to do is love.