Dare the road to discovery

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

Columbus? What more can we say but exclaim: Ay! Santa Maria, La Pinta y La Nina! and also do the chachacha.

Canadians? They must be forgiven if they take some time today to thank the good Lord that they're not thought of as Americans.

Discoverers? Now that makes me say hmm.

Ahoy! Any island out there still waiting yet to be discovered?

I tell you, it isn't fair that Columbus came ahead of us.

Who, these days, imagines going up a tower, a la Newton, to see who falls to the ground faster, Starr or Clinton? Can we try it with Lewinsky and Tripp?

I tell you, if I take the news too seriously, I'd say that the only contexts of discovery left are people's dark closets.

I blame this impasse in discovery on the irrepressible use of the prefix "post" as in post-feminism, postmodernism, post-Cold War, post-Clinton, postman, er, post-etc.

Doesn't it make you ask, "Yeah, really, where are we? In some state of after?"

We're finished. We're just waiting for Armageddon. That explains why in the past year alone we've had to endure two or three movies on asteroids about to end our miseries with hemorrhoids.

Or maybe all that "post" means we are experiencing PMS - pre-millennial syndrome (or is it post-millennial)? We are cranky, depressed, irritable. We are at the end of our wits and there is nothing to do but declare a postmortem on ideas, movements, things and people that have run their course.

Or have they?

I don't know. All I know is that many times I feel that the only motivation left for me to go on studying social science is economic survival.

But then I feel as prosaic as I think most of what I'm studying is.

Whoever gave us the idea that discovery rings with a eureka! a voila! Or, a yabadabadoo!?

Discovery sounds more like an umph, an aargh, a grrr and more umph.

I take my hat off to those who chose the road of discovery that demands tons of patience, discipline and dedication even when passion and enthusiasm threatens to go out the door at times.

I am discovering that the people on Earth with the greatest faith are scientists, especially the social kind. They really believe that they could find hidden treasure in the obvious, a web of meaning among the unruly parts and, finally, God in the total picture.

Well, some do not believe in a "Someone" out there holding the whole picture together, but in some truth, out there about to reveal the puniness of our present knowledge of things.

They're out there and they're here! And the government is covering them up. So Fox Mulder wants to believe and so do we as we lap up out-of-this-world mysteries to give excitement to our ho-hum world.

It's here! Right out of our mouths. So say those who want to find meaning in our discourses.

Discourse! Don't you just love that word. Or hate it, depending on how many times you've heard the word coursing out of every student and professor's mouth.

Words. We have nothing but words. We build our lives, our relationships, our cultures and our societies with words. So we are told these days.

You never imagined while you're learning the ABCs in kindergarten that these are the building blocks of life, did you?

I'm holding on to proteins and atoms, just in case words are not it.

Still there are those who say that syntheses, dialectics, connections, relationships, interactions, interrelations, bridges, triangulations are it.

Lines diverging and converging. Circles overlapping or meshing. Spiders spinning webs.

Hormones and neurons firing

Words and emotions defining

Interactions and relationships building

Bridges and worlds touching

Earth of protons and electrons spinning.

Don't tell me I didn't try.

Still, I plan to wallow longer in the bathtub.

Who knows, there might come a day when the bulb lights up and I can't help but run out naked into the street, a la Archimedes, shouting Eureka! Eureka!

Glenda Buya-ao is an undeclared graduate student and can be reached via e-mail at Glenda.Buya-ao@wildcat.arizona.edu. Her column, Sitting on the Fulcrum, appears weekly.