James A Rosen

Staff Engineer, AI Systems

James A Rosen, pixelated, wearing a bow tie

The Current

Barns in New England are red because the universe is 14 billion years old.

An old red barn in Hadley, MA, weathered wood siding faded to deep crimson, bare winter trees behind it
Old Red Barn, Hadley, MA by Deborah O'Neill

Direction Without Intention

The “because” there is what I’ve come to call the current.

Not fate. Not God. Not narrative arc — the satisfying sense that things happen for a reason, that suffering is meaningful, that history is building toward something. I’ve never found those frames appealing, though I understand they can be comforting and even inspirational.

The current is something else. It has direction without intention. It is ineluctable without predetermining every detail. It encompasses everything and observes nothing.

The universe has a direction. Toward entropy. Toward complexity. Toward galaxy formation and stellar death, and eventually the iron oxide on the side of a barn next to the bike path in Hadley, Massachussets. This direction doesn’t require anyone to have intended it, any more than water intends to flow downhill. Water just does. The universe just does.

The river has banks — it doesn’t have a plan. The laws of physics constrain what can happen without specifying what will. This is the crucial distinction between constraint and determinism.

There’s no observation deck. The current runs through the thing doing the describing. Nondualism usually arrives wrapped in spiritual language; stripped of that, it’s just this.

We Are In It

I keep noticing the impulse to imagine myself standing outside the current, watching it from a bank. A self that observes reality without being constituted by it. A mind that reasons about the universe from some neutral vantage point.

This is an illusion. A useful one, sometimes. But an illusion.

We are made of the same processes we’re trying to describe. The calcium in your bones was forged in the cores of stars that died before the sun formed. The iron in your blood was scattered across the galaxy by a supernova before it fell into the dust cloud that became our solar system. You are — not metaphorically but literally — made of stars. The atoms that constitute your hand right now have been inside other stars, inside other planets, inside other organisms. They were not made for you. They are passing through.

So are you.

This doesn’t diminish you. It locates you. You are an expression of the same universe you’re trying to understand. The observer and the observed are not separate. We are not watching the current from a bank. We are in it. We’ve always been in it. We couldn’t get out if we tried.

The Physics of Eddies

Here’s the image I keep returning to: a self is a temporary eddy in a flow that long preceded it and will long outlast it.

A snowy egret with all-white plumage and a yellow foot, hunting in the Napa Creek
by James A Rosen in Napa, CA with an iPhone 14

Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for work on what he called dissipative structures — physical systems that maintain organized patterns not despite being open to their environment but because they are. A whirlpool isn’t a thing; it’s a process. It maintains its shape by continuously consuming the river. Stop the flow, the whirlpool disappears.

Order isn’t the opposite of entropy. It’s a local, temporary negotiation with it.

The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela extended this idea to living systems with their concept of autopoiesis — self-making. An organism doesn’t resist its environment, it processes it. The eddy maintains itself by engaging the river, not by being separate from it. Life is not a thing that entropy threatens from outside. Life is a process that entropy runs through.

An eddy lasts as long as conditions sustain it — growing when the current feeds it, shifting when it changes, dissolving back into the river from which it was never truly separate. It doesn’t leave the flow. It was always the flow, briefly organized.

Ikkyu

The monk Ikkyu, 15th-century Japan, wrote:

The moon is a house
In which the mind is master.
Look very closely:
Only impermanence lasts.
This floating world, too, will pass.

Earth's moon, waxing crescent, about 33% full
by James A Rosen in Belmont, CA with a NexStar 5SE and iPhone 8

Only impermanence lasts. This is either devastating or liberating, depending on what you were holding.

Ikkyu says, floating world. Not collapsing world, not empty world — floating. Things move through, drift past, don’t stay. That’s different from not mattering.

Hume saw something like this clearly: strip away the fiction of permanent, intrinsic meaning and what remains isn’t nothing — it’s the only meaning there is. The whirlpool matters to the fish that lives in it. The eddy matters to everything that formed inside it. The self is real — it’s just not permanent, and it’s not separate.

The question isn’t whether you matter. The question is what you’re building your sense of mattering on. If it’s on permanence, you’re in trouble. Permanence isn’t available. But if it’s on continuity — on being part of something that flows — you have something to work with.

The Ethics of Eddies

What I take from this:

Find joy in the eddy. You’re here, in this particular shape, now. The current made you possible and for the moment sustains you. Gratitude for the temporary is still gratitude. The joy available to an eddy is real joy.

Ease the suffering of other eddies where you can. Everyone around you formed under conditions they didn’t choose, and will dissolve when the river moves on. Their suffering is as real as yours, and as transient. Reducing it matters — not because it lasts, but because it’s happening now.

The third is harder to see but I think it’s the most important. Humanity is also a dissipative structure — a collective eddy that maintains itself by processing the world, that can grow more complex or collapse, and that depends on throughput for its coherence. Every person who gets to live inside it long enough to notice the current — to feel the wonder of the barn sentence, to sit with Ikkyu — is a person who might act from that understanding. That, to me, is worth protecting.

The Barn, Up Close

Let us step off the bike path and examine this red barn in detail.

In the early universe, only hydrogen and helium existed. Heavier elements — carbon, oxygen, iron — are forged in the cores of massive stars through nuclear fusion, over millions of years. When those stars exhaust their fuel, they collapse and then explode as supernovae, scattering the heavy elements they made across the galaxy.

Our sun is a third-generation (Population I) star, and our solar system is composed of the cumulative output of the two prior generations. Iron, specifically Fe2O3, is abundant in Earth’s crust and one of the more accessible pigments. It happens to be red.

But rusty metal sitting in the ground makes neither paint nor barn. For the barn to exist, you need a particular kind of land use — and for that, you need a particular kind of economy.

Before European settlement, the Nipmuc and their neighbors had been tending this land for thousands of years. They preserved food through drying, smoking, caching in the earth. They moved with the seasons. Their relationship to livestock was different; their need to concentrate and shelter accumulated capital in a permanent structure was not the same. The barn is not a universal solution to winter. It is the solution of a specific culture with a specific theory of ownership — one in which a farmer’s wealth could be measured in animals and grain, and in which losing them to cold or rot was a financial catastrophe, not just a hardship.

That culture arrived here and imposed its geometry on the land: fields cleared, animals enclosed, structures built to hold what the market economy had made worth holding.

Then came the question of rot. New England winters are not theoretical. Wood exposed to that freeze-thaw cycle degrades fast, and a rotting barn is a ruined investment. Farmers needed something cheap to protect the wood. Iron-rich minerals were cheap — a byproduct of other processes, practically free. They sealed the wood, slowed the rot, and the color they left behind happened to be red.

No one chose red. Red chose itself, at the intersection of stellar physics, glacial geography, colonial land tenure, agricultural capitalism, and the specific cruelty of a Massachusetts February.

The universe had to be this old, and this large, for iron to exist. The continent had to be colonized in a particular way, by people carrying a particular idea of property, for a barn to be worth painting. The winter had to be cold enough to make the cost of paint feel smaller than the cost of losing everything inside it.

Every red barn holds the stories of all of this history. You just have to know how to read it.

The barn is in the current. The farmers were in the current. The Nipmuc before them were in the current. You are in the current. None of it was aimed here. All of it arrived and all of it will dissipate. I rather enjoy looking at it from my little eddy.

References and Further Reading

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