Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Still turning pages

We are constantly learning and perfecting ourselves, even if we don't realize it at the time. The idea of Earth as a school in which we go through some purifying experiences that move us closer to total enlightenment is, unfortunately, probably correct. I say "unfortunately" because although the analogy explains a lot, it doesn't really comfort. And it leaves the individual learner ultimately alone on a lonely track.

So maybe the whole thing is a team project. Those of us who find ourselves here must find ways to learn together, solve our mutual problems, and achieve communal goals of knowledge and action that could not be accomplished without group interaction. This also solves the loneliness issue.

Looking at the Earth right now, it would be hard to argue that the whole class has not flunked all together. The polarities and intransigencies have hardened as if the global brain had massively shifted obliquely in its techtonic plates. The axis of communication and understanding is askew and drifting hopelessly off its center of gravity and cohesion. Is this the supreme challenge, or simply the endgame?

My generation, the 1960s, I often refer to as "the most disappointing generation." So much potential was wasted, squelched, drowned in materialistic cares, forgotten by the wayside. Yet there was so much that was brilliant and brave and illuminating. As a result we have left a huge legacy.

To give up hope, to say the game is over, would be premature. It also deprives us of our best tool. Give up the vision and we have nowhere to go. It also ignores the fact that a new generation is arriving with better tools and higher intelligence. We could fail completely and yet the team reserves could still pull off a victory.

But what we have done, what we have witnessed, what we have felt--it hasn't been enough to justify our presence here on this planet at this time in our individual and collective evolution. That is why we find ourselves still here, waiting, struggling, hoping, still turning the pages of our textbook. There is more. What happens next remains to be seen.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Our cosmic address


In James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), young Stephen Dedalus writes his address in his geography book: Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938), a minister sends a letter to one of the characters, with the following address: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God. An echo of Joyce's influence over Wilder and also a resonance elevating the mundane to the cosmic.

Nowadays we would have to include Laniakea in the address: the newly named and mapped supercluster consisting of 100,000 galaxies, of which the Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a very small part. And since many cosmologists are seriously favoring the idea that we live in a multiverse, not merely a universe, we would have to tack the "multi" at the end of the address.
But in any case this addressing very much follows the geocentric plan, starting small and local, progressing to the largest and most universal. "I" is the center, moving out beyond all boundaries and objectivity into pure idea. A mind blowing concept, yes, but a little too simplistic, perhaps. For we must next ask the question, what after all is the spacetime matrix in which all this expanding pool of consciousness sits?

Let us dispense immediately with the notion that we are still in the realm of material creation in addressing this question. We've entered the realm where consciousness itself has to be part of the equation. And consciousness times x equals consciousness, just as an odd number added to an even equals an odd, or a real number times an imaginary number equals an imaginary number.

In conventional physics, space and time do not exist without matter. They are dimensional only in the sense that they are used to measure the material. In this multiversal age we may take the step into multidimensionality and recognize the independent existence of time and space. It is these entities which, together with consciousness, weave the matrix. Then consciousness takes its place like a baby in the "cradle endlessly rocking," lying in the central heart of immeasurable existence. Cosmic address: wherever IT is.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Signal

manifold stars clot the headless sky
drive in the desert till you can't even try
to indulge pursuit of the eternal why
or the reason of what it's concerning

mute punctuations on the walls of space
poems in the raw that the winds may trace
written by the voice with the human face
and the suns of the suns keep on burning

then come echoes from the steely night
lacking the resistance of a fiery bite
just a little early and a little uptight
for the stars are too slow in their turning

deeper and deeper into the maze
some may flicker in and out of phase
some may fade away and some may gaze
and the others are condemned to be yearning

colored curtains and candles with flame
who has the time to remember their name
what's been forgotten is too soon regained
in the cauldron the goddesses are churning

unlikely visions replaced by dream
you never can hold on to what they mean
they sometimes whisper and they sometimes scream
but they all are just a part of what you're learning

sing to the rhythm and  dance the sound
light is the signal in the underground
you're lost on the highway so far from town
no one knows when you'll be returning

Saturday, February 01, 2014

Seed

you wrote a poem today
I didn't
therefore your poem
is better than my poem

and yet since my poem
doesn't exist
who is to say
it will not be better
in some impossible future
where I am a great poet

but no one
will write encomiums
to unplanted flowers
or unconceived realities
ripeness is all
the fruit begets itself
the seed that stays a seed
is no seed at all

what unseen caravans trample the air
beneath my eyes
the same that rattle my undreamt brains
in the early morning hours

where nobody cares
about merit

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Through the rithm

neutrino technology is actuarial and non-binding / limitless
closest thing to infinity programming as you can get

electrons aggregate / except with polarization which leads to digital reductionism
synodrope / a statistical pudding / one whole taste, not individual elements anymore
a heuristical layer cake of high functioning algorithms under one system of control

digital technology has limited adaptive functioning
heuristic program is self-managing
synodropic function is what we're cognizing

(notes from a conversation with Janet Sussman)