Bigfoot

Bigfoot!!

According to various reports, he is currently wandering around the remote BC island of Alert Bay, howling at the moon as if he’d just had his massive, mythical heart broken.

The news stations that deliver such stories do so with a smirk, as if it was on par with a Dachshund Super Bowl, a little bit of fun to indulge in at the end of a tough new cycle. Santa Claus stories packaged for children.

And yes, of course, unhinged obsessives touched with a kind of religious fervour and pranksters, make up the undying core of Bigfoot promoters. The sober mainstream asserts that Bigfoot does not exist because there is no proof or evidence that he does, and to believe anything else is to indulge in fantasy.

However, I would argue that this is a position of arrogance. We are inconceivably small in this universe. It’s impossible for us to process how small this pale blue dot is in the vast darkness of infinity.

There is more that is unknown than known in this world and beyond, and more that is invisible than visible. Our tools for perceiving the universe (sight, sound, smell) are pitiful. As humans, everything we know and sense, is created and processed by the mystical chemistry of our brain. It is literally true that the universe exists inside of our head, and it is worth keeping in mind that a different universe exists inside the brain of a spider. As a species, we apply our technology to expand our tools of perception so that we might better understand some of the things that lie beyond our natural ability. In short, we see very, very little.

Imagine you were a lobster living on the bottom of the oceans floors.

If you could be imbued with a consciousness like a human, there is simply no way that you could conceive of living on the same world as a creature like a human being. Physically, you could hardly be more dissimilar.

Your skeletal structure exists on the outside not the inside, you shuffle along in the bottomless dark of the cold seas. Humans, bipedal giants. You cannot imagine a world beyond water. You cannot imagine air, this transitional plain, or that there is a world yet beyond that, a terrestrial land where humans live in palaces, farming and managing your species and then devouring them as a delicacy. Such a thing would seem ludicrous and completely beyond your imagination, but we know that it is true. Perhaps, in the great expanse of time, distance and dimension, a similar analogy can be made, only with us as existing as the lobster and something else as humans.

In searching for Bigfoot we seek his proof on our terms, not his.

He must exist as we understand things to exist, not as he may exist. He must be visible to our eyes. But what if like radiation, or the wind, he’s not visible to to us? What if he’s not quite of this world we live in, just as we, are not quite of the world the lobster lives in?
The older I get, the weirder the universe becomes, and the more ridiculous it seems that we profess anything with certainty. The people who believe in Bigfoot are no more flawed in their methodology than those who claim his existence an impossibility, and so I am content to imagine his howls at night, a reminder of the limitless mystery both inside of us, and beyond.