Where To Find A Catalyst For My Curiosity

First post in a long time, even more so when you consider that I'm not even sure my last post is true anymore.

Last night I lay in my bed having more than mild gas pains. I don't know what I ate to get me there, all I had was a Vietnamese salad, it's really not important. I was lying in bed with pain; I couldn't lie on my stomach, even lying on my back was rough, but I was trying to force the gas, you know, out. (Needless to say that my fiancee was not there with me; no amount of spousal pain relief would, for her, be worth turning the precious heat sealed under the covers into a brimming-over dutch oven of flatulence.) When this didn't immediately happen, I started thinking about fantastic situations in which I would be relieved of my pain, e.g. my abdomen being pierced with a large needle and blown open such that the gas would freely escape into the air through my intestinal wall and skin, all while causing me no pain or injury, and while making the pleasing "thhbbbbt" sound that a balloon makes when you inflate it, and then let go if it so that it flies around the room as it deflates.

As I thought about the balloon, and as I was in pre-sleep imagination mode, I naturally gravitated to thoughts of whether the outlandish solution of piercing my belly would lead to the outlandish situation of making me fly around the room backwards as well. I knew, of course, that I was too heavy for this to be possible, but what about other beings? An ant can lift several times its own weight; now, I know an ant fart would not send it flying in figure eights through the air, but I begin to wonder about whether it at least be slightly displaced.

I have no idea how the digestive system of an ant works. So there was that obstacle. But I also could not imagine that an ant's tiny body could hold enough air to create a flatulence powerful enough to move it. I started thinking of other small but rounder animals; a mouse maybe? My brain touched the tip of some memory of my Dad telling me about an animal that was relatively large, but when you held it in your hand you could not feel that it was there. My inner projector went from scenes of my Dad to trees to sunlight to a porch with Adirondack chairs... childhood vacations to the Adirondacks. During childhood vacations to the Adirondacks my Dad (because it's the kind of thing he would do) and I (because who knows) would sit on the porch in Adirondack chairs with sunflower seeds in our hands, attempting to sit perfectly still in an effort to entice the corporeal feeding of a bird species more trusting in the state park than it was in our backyard: the chickadee.

And it was true: I did get to hold a chickadee in my hand, and it was like holding nothing at all. If I closed my eyes I could feel the seeds being picked off my hand as though from a hovering bird, but without the air displacement I would feel in that case. The chickadee felt like nothing, but was much larger than an ant, and I began to wonder what effect flatulence might have on a chickadee.

More to the point: in arriving at a species capable of flight I had arrived at another factor which helped the idea of an animal being displaced by farts. If a bird were in flight, there would be significantly less friction, perhaps enough less that a fart could move it.

At this point, when imagining a bird in flight, my mental slide show came up with a blue jay or something similar. I don't know why, but the question was obviously not about weight anymore. I had a few seconds (or nanoseconds; who knows in pre-sleep imagination time) of simply picturing a blue jay in flight, gliding, wings outstretched, suddenly encountering a little bump in its trajectory (turbulence?) as it let out a little puff of gas. Not being inconvenienced or surprised, and certainly not embarrassed, but simply encountering a normal little puff-bump during a routine airborne errand.

It occurred to me that, much like with the ant, I know precious little about the digestive system of birds. Frankly, I don't even know if birds fart, although since my intuition was that birds resemble humans more than ants do, it seemed at least more likely. Birds, I do know, subsist mostly on seeds (or similar roughage) and insects, and it occurred to the fifth-grade biology student in me that birds, while living in the same world that humans do and dealing with a lot of the same issues, have a digestive system that is built totally differently, designed to better suit their needs, which include eating seeds and insects and not necessarily getting five servings of fruits and vegetables as well as requisite protein and carbohydrates every day.

And this, I think, is what drives passion in biologists. Birds are very cool and obviously very different; these are not things a biologist is meant to catalog. I suddenly realized very clearly how fascinating it would be for someone predisposed to the life sciences to learn as much specific information about a bird's digestive system as possible. How do these similarly functional but dissimilarly functioning machines work? What led them to work like this? Why do we never see a bird rip open an orange and enjoy the whole thing? A biologist, driven by an enviable curiosity about the way animals work, about fundamental (and I mean fundamental) difference something as basic as lifestyle, would want to know everything about these things, as thoroughly and expeditiously as possible.

I began to think of myself as an artist, partially because of a comment a colleague had made to me earlier that day about my process and work. He told me, very honestly, "You're not lazy, but you do need something to get you going. You are often in need not of incentive, but of a catalyst." He was referring to a person: a teacher, my aforementioned fiancee, or perhaps the administrator of a deadline. But there's something more to it for me, because he's right; as curious as I am and as desperate for knowledge as I am, I often lack the spark to really get into something, to really explore. I find myself, frustratingly, content with ruminating on the subject of my curiosity rather than investigating it.

I imagined a biologist faced with a bird. I don't know if the bird is alive or dead, it doesn't really matter because it's a fantasy, and you'll soon see that for my purposes it helps for it to be both. A biologist is faced with a bird and needs to know how its body works and why it works the way it does. The bird is floating there in front of them and they can only spend so much time examining it from the outside before they have to dissect it. They have to open it up and look inside it at every little piece of innard, every individual bone and organ and investigate what role each tiny thing plays.

I imagined myself faced with the same bird, faced with the same task of finding out everything about it, needing to dissect it. My position as a vegetarian notwithstanding, I know that in order to really find out what's going on with this bird I need to cut it open. I don't need to kill it, the bird is neither alive nor dead. But I need to get inside it. But--and remember this is my imagination here, with supposedly limitless bounds--I was unable to force myself, my imaginary self, to do anything but stroke the feathers. To look up close at and pet the soft, blue feathers on this bird. Faced with the task of investigating, all I wanted to do, all night, was pet that damn bird. Gently and carefully, for the foreseeable future.

Now, there is a lot to be learned about a bird by petting it, or by feeling its feathers. An awful lot, and also an awful lot that a biologist would likely miss by moving to dissection too soon, especially taking into consideration the stereotypical scientific personality. There is not a lot of Zen involved in cutting open a bird and sorting its organs, and I maintain that placid reflection is as much a key to my (or anyone's) intelligence as dedicated research.

But I also know, that I'm missing something. I know so much about what it means to be "with" the bird, to experience the bird, to enjoy a bird for the sake of the bird and nothing else--and that is incredibly valuable. But I need to force myself to sort organs. I need to be aware that although it's tedious, although it's often hard to see the value in it, although it's gooey, there is a certain understanding that can only come from complete, procedural dissection, classification, and disfigurement. To attain a greater understanding based on an unchallengeable and vast bed of information can be as much a "higher plane" as attaining the literally indescribable understanding of an empirical experience. I'm hoping that my convoluted fart-chain of thought last night will act as a catalyst in this way for a bit, for me.