chrisbhanlon

“I was breaking the fallen strips of bark as I made my path randomly among the spider webs that caught the filtered sun when something occurred to me. If I had not been an eyewitness on that distant day when I saw the workers in the sun, would I not believe I was standing here in virgin bushland? You would think this forest had been here forever in a wild and natural balance unless you happened to have the ‘privileged’ knowledge of an eyewitness like myself.” from May 16th 2025 ‘Made The Forest’

Fred Hoyle was a towering figure of 20th century physics. He discovered that the heavier elements, such as life giving carbon, were not created at the big bang as previously thought, instead two hundred million years later were fused against all likelihood in the cauldrons of red giant stars.

Atoms inside the core of the red giant stars have what can be called an ‘excitement’ level. Electrons swarm like bees around a nucleus and it this ‘excitement’ or ‘resonance’ level that predisposes them to fuse into other elements such as carbon.

The unlikely resonance level of the carbon-12 atom caused that element to be produced in such quantities that would make possible or even likely the accident of life.

Life long atheist Hoyle said:

“Would you not say to yourself, ‘Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.’”

It was a grey bow shackle closed with a yellow pin, horseshoe shaped about the size of my hand. 

Important part of my recovery gear and as it turned out, provocateur to consider the limits of behaviour of an inanimate object.  

Arriving we were barely able to reach the clearing.

An ancient river gum had toppled, its root ball big and ugly as a truck, claw roots baked with dirt hung in the air just where I was thinking of negotiating the edges of the car.  Worse was it tore up the track itself and left  it hanging in the air, a deep hole where the ruts used to be. The other side was close up against the river. 

Took an hour to pack the hole with branches and dirt. This held the weight of the fully loaded vehicle driven very tentatively in low range. 

Next morning we rode the bikes, had to push them through the flooded anabranch, which explained the water we heard gurgling behind us overnight in broken dreams.

We rode for hours inland past long black lagoons and billabongs using abandoned forestry tracks where goitred river red gums stood rotting slowly and clung to life in suspended animation for centuries, then for centuries more lay big as sheds after they fell with a shuddering jolt to the ground. 

The warmer afternoon was the time to lay low. The river was fifty metres wide and drew most of our thoughts, a quiet and internal power, there were flecks of sharp silver on the current, while I lolled in comfort, and the edges of the waves caught sage green glimpses of trees. Occasionally came a slap which was a fish heard reentering the water but never seen.

Was still a little  worried about getting out next day on that track.

Decided with the balmy afternoon ahead, to lay out my recovery gear across the large circular clearing.

The sort of distracted task that would accompany an aesthetic reverie.

I enjoyed the ordered preparation of safety checks on days like this far more than anxious hours wasted in a remote place throwing wits against an intractable problem.

I stretched the winch out from a black wattle toward the car, the bow shackle in my hand, deciding I would pull the car to the tree as a test.

Dropped it there while I went to the car to attach the hook to the tow point.

When I came back the shackle was gone.

I had a clear image of where I saw it land a few seconds before.

On top of the attenuated yellow leaves. That carpeted our clearing.

Was I shocked? For some reason no.

But I was ready to learn. With eyes and mind suddenly wide open.

This day represented one of my happiest types of situation.

I would embark when I lost the shackle, on a slow step by step tour of the campsite, as I felt anyone should, considering something had been lost. Touch the table, touch the car, touch the trailer.

My reverie replaced by these intrigued sharp thoughts. Fair swap.

The shackle could be easily replaced.

I might have another with my tools. This was not the problem. The disturbed equilibrium of my secure world view was at risk but so be it.

Next minute I was on my knees. Not praying. The ground was as flat as tiles, there was nowhere for a bow shackle to hide here.

Invoking another of the senses. Seek a second opinion. I scraped and touched at the flat leaves on the ground with my fingers barely raising them up verifying that nothing could possibly be concealed underneath.

Then I stood to my full height.

It was there.

Exactly where I left it. Resting now at my feet on top of the carpet of leaves.

Were there rogue atoms I wondered as I held it firmly? 

In nature do events always flow into other natural events or sometimes not?

Can atoms misbehave, can they hide in their millions? 

Can an object be removed then returned? 

The man from the brothel fixed me with an arched eyebrow on first joining me in the cab then announced he was in personal contact with the supernatural. He sweltered for a while in his penumbral space before deciding to ply his trade on the nearest person at his disposal.

But in fact the hard headed driver was already on high alert. Years later this man would be charged with murdering his solicitor, better him than me, oversized head all gnome all sweltering brain, a small sculpture in my memory that whispered in the lubricious dark. I still remember this profound bearded gaze that tried to frisk the feeble ingenue he thought I was.

Fifty loose envelopes stacked up in the room at home collapsed impossibly when the wind blew, from on top of my wooden filing boxes neatly as if all of a piece into a leather satchel that devoured them, and whose tongue now lolled  with front strap hung open to become in front of me a waking vision of a long tongued ogling satan!

To make this happen the envelopes had been pushed by the gust which I heard slam a door at the far end of the house and which then sped along the corridor to my room. These elemental gusts which instead of dispersing the envelopes like birds now caused the leather satchel to look up directly at me from the floor as though it might attack me with its teeth.

Hand eye coordinated events linked by a power at the back.

Beast the symbol of grief wrong and all error in myself and outside.

Some sort of remote perhaps now dead power.

Protected me when it could over events that happened such as that half hour spent driving through the rain with satan.

I saw them doing the landcare work where the apple orchard had been extirpated decades earlier when the markets failed.

Came back years later and saw a forest growing there.

I could still visualize the coloured hats of the volunteers from that time stooped in the sun fitting plant guards where now was an untidy landscape typical of the manna gums, the tall white barked trees that shed bark in rusty curling straps that drape from forks toward the ground, then further down get caught in wattle and blackwood or finally litter the tussock grass where I was stepping if they make it that far.

I was breaking the fallen strips of bark as I made my path among the spider webs that caught the filtered sun when something occurred to me.

If I had not been an eyewitness on that distant day when I saw the workers in the sun, would I not believe I was standing here in virgin bushland?

You would think this forest had been here forever in a wild and natural balance unless you happened to have the ‘privileged’ knowledge of an eyewitness like myself.

This particular forest had been created piece by piece following a plan then watered and nurtured till it was established and was fit to continue unsupervised.

How would any poor soul tell the difference now from what was in front of them?

So here were the competing models of the universe.

Physicists as eyewitness know enough to tell, if they surpass intellectual cowardice and no longer squib this vital truth that they know, that our universe also was carefully conceived and tended at its beginning.

Who will be brave enough to tell the history of this our widest landscape knowing it is the key to the true nature of reality?

Water is tipped purposefully through fingers which try in the moment to direct it as best they can this way or that as it spills to the ground. It nonetheless then finds its own way trickling here and there, wanders ahead cannot be recaptured.

What exactly did the superintellect that tipped the water think would happen next?

The superintellect’s surge of abstract strength in that moment of creation, was at the limits of its power against an envisaged future that was bound to be chaotic.

In a hundred million years would come a moment that could not afford to fail.

The first coalescing galaxies had begun to adhere and form stars?

There was no carbon yet but the superintellect’s thin line of genius had exquisitely focussed, because events of increasingly exponential unlikelihood began to be caused, such as the triple alpha process in the helium furnace inside a newborn star, combined with an impossible but required resonance of the carbon-12 atom, which was indeed precisely achieved, and which produced suddenly a new element called carbon in massive quantity from helium although it had never before existed.

So what in fact had the superintellect done? In its trembling mind’s eye, it had dreamt of Niles and Amazons flowing from that meagre trickle, and once this happened, one more required miracle where a bald rock would became dislodged one hazy afternoon on the riverbank, but only because events had been prepared and smoothed for this circumstance all along the way.

Had enough been achieved that a tiny heartbeat would start deep within the dislodged rock? Yes it had. The rock proceeded to sit up crookedly, flip its lid begin to talk trying to figure something out, then look around for something to pick up.