Bharathi - The Poet and The Paradigm

’What is life?’ is a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It is a material process, surfing over matter like a strange slow wave. It is a controlled artistic chaos, a set of chemical reactions so staggeringly complex that more than four billion years ago it began a sojourn that now, in human form, composes love letters and uses silicon computers to calculate the temperature of matter at the birth of the universe.

Life does more than adapt to the earth; it changes it and evolution is a tight-coupled dance with life and the material environment partners and from the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

Oh Life who knows your magnificence
You are a living deity
You set all rules
And you dissolve all rules
Oh life
You are the physical elements
You are the manifesting principle of all things that manifest
You function as the change in all that changes
The flying insect, the killing tiger, the crawling worm
The uncountable forms of all living beings that constitute
the bio-cosmos
That is you – Oh life!
We meditate upon all those forms of life that permeate land, water and air.
Unseen by our naked eyes there exist in a square feet of atmosphere millions of microorganisms.

A macro-organism and in its body are smaller organisms and in each of them still smaller organisms and in them each still smaller organisms and in this way the whole planet thrives with life.

Macro-organism- and containing it a bigger form and containing it is still bigger organism and so on and minute particle and inside still minute and still and so on.

Namaste Vayu thvameva prathyaksham Brahmasi

(Bharathi, Prose-poetry: 15)

Physicists agreed that life is an open system. But like one of those Russian dolls which enclose a series of smaller and still smaller dolls, entities diminish but grow ever intense as the inward progression goes from Gaia to ecosystems, to plants and animals to cells and to DNA. The boundary of the planet then circumscribes a living organism, Gaia, a system made up of all living things and their environment. There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth’s surface between living and non-living matter.

In that little leaf that moves does Life abide?  Yes.
Does that roaring sea-water roar so because of Life?  Yes.
….
This planetary ball rotates unceasingly.
She has life that can never be emptied.
In her body divine everything has life.
The whole planet rotates.
The moon also revolves around.
The sun too whirls.
Millions of miles and beyond Million of miles and beyond
And even far beyond all those million upon millions of miles
Countless stars swirl and continue to swirl.
So, this earth has life.
And what we call air is the breath of the planet.
(Bharathi, Prose-poetry: 13)

The idea of “Gaia” was born in my mind in 1965 while I was at NASA in the Jet Propulsion Labs. It was a personal revelation, an idea that suddenly appeared like a flash of enlightenment. I was talking to Dian Hitchcock, an author-consultant there at the time, about the extreme difference between the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. As I was observing that Earth has such a reactive, unstable atmosphere, it suddenly dawned on me that an extremely unstable atmosphere could not stay constant unless something was regulating it. Somehow life keeps our atmosphere constant and favorable for organisms. Life on Earth not only created our atmosphere; it also regulates it.”