Am I a man or a violin? When my archaic ancestors finally became rational and began to become interested in the problem of accounting for their own behavior, they chose to see themselves as well-tuned instruments—machines, in fact. When we are in good working order, we happily hum away at the melody. Our pacemakers sustain and sing out every one of nature's vibrations. They sense the downbeat, capture it, and make it fit with the other beats already encoded into the body instrument.
As I have noted, the language used to describe the way we in the West think the coupled circadian oscillation works consists of neural networks, transducers, pacemakers, command posts, control mechanisms, cues, signals, and oscillators—that familiar language of information retrieval and processing in which the twentieth century is embedded. At least since the Industrial Revolution, if not from the Renaissance, when we first began to manipulate and experiment with nature, we have come to have faith in the machine, to believe in mechanism as a way of understanding. Machinery is, for us, the power tool of metaphor. After all, machine technology has helped the Western world prosper. Why not stick with a good thing and use its principles to create new ideas about how all things function? And so we try to account for natural events by inventing mental models that parallel the way things behave: the brain as a sponge, the nervous system as a public transit network, the atom as a miniature solar system, the solar system as a set of revolving spheres all linked together hy a gear train—as in a planetarium.
Of course, the physicist will say that the atom is not really made up of little round halls in orhits, and the biologist that the computer is just a contemporary body metaphor. Certainly neither scientist has any intention of portraying these mental fabrications as reality. The body is really not a machine—no more than do atoms have a "glue" that bonds them together as molecules. The tenuous relationship between metaphor and reality arises again in the next chapter on how natural time sensing led, in the higher forms of life, to deliberate time reckoning; that is, the conscious attempts by rational human beings to mark time, to remove it from its natural rhythmic casing, to mold and fashion it, to develop and use it. Let me, then, turn to how, when, and why the very time we as humans—along with the corals, the oysters, and the potatoes—had been feeling within ourselves throughout evolutionary history, whether by internal or external impulses, became metamorphosed in the West into something outside ourselves, an entity so strange and novel that today we must strain our senses even to recognize it.
World History
