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