Penny For Your Paradigm
In my memory I see only your hands, in front of your brown coat, and your cold winter
hands around a soft flopping blank book
summer tangerine light drinking through the windows and then your question and then
the room is dark, the flicker of an AEA reel at the back coughing and spitting out
spinning planets and sounds of deep and serious end of the universe bass and tympani
asteroid thunder drum roll caught up in my chest
and then 900 days later the night is deep as the snow and so far away so far to fall into a
forever fall of far away foreverness, all against a backdrop of Brahms and blinking
starlight eyes
open close open close open
one and zero
on and off
yes and no
and yes - no, I cannot sleep at night because my quantum reality is stitched into a continuum
from a continuum, uncut waves of light collapsed into bundles by my attention and caught one at a time by my retina and in each second 500 parcels of information sent to my brain in a train of electrical potential cascading in sucession of sodium and potassium. And after a commentary of memory Christmas lights of perception are hung at the back of my brain blinking
on and off and on and off and on and off
lending to me my experience 500 time a second
and between the paused moments, the darkness and silence and emptiness of the whole
universe, full only with the potential of the next moment
and the question of calculus - of measuring instantaneous velocity - but the problem of velocity as a rate and a rate as a distance over some time, separation is elemental to movement and in an ideal instant a span of no time of t = 0 where can you go?
nowhere, in practicality and the mathematical operation of dividing distance by zero
yields only infinity
so that if life were a reel of AEA film flickering at the back of the classroom, and you were able to slow the roll to examine the most minute change from frame to frame
eventually you would only find that there are just single frames of still moments, strung together with only a moment of blank between, but in that moment bound between the bounded, boundlessness
and back to the flicker of my experience built of photons and psycho-physiological tricks
between each of those 500 clicks of electrochemical violin string picking, non-experience nivartadhvam, a nano-nirvana , a sub-momentary loss of ego, a sense of eternity in the
smallest human unit measurement of time, and yet not a complete loss of self because
otherwise how would we ever come back to the same experience? It is the power of some memory in that “off” that allows us to string each “on” to the next in a continuous meaningful strand and tie it around our wrist so we don’t lose ourselves in that vast white sea of hospital baby bed boats, or forget that we can have another beer in the dark smoky vibrating concert hall. It is this Smriti in the gap which lends us an identity for instants so extremely non-existent that their sum is nearly zero relative to the infinitum of the zero between
And I remember being late in junior high and laying awake till late watching the ocean of consciousness split into subject and object and remembering its unity becoming one
once again and then by its very nature to be conscious of itself separation occurs and because of the separation a potential for something to flow, heat , energy, electricity, consciousness, and from the paradoxical greatest potential at the state of least excitation
The movement of one to three, unity to diversity, and from this movement a vibration, the primordial pulse, the chocolate vanilla twist of the super heterotic string singing out in
Sanskrit the de Broglie wavelength of each atom according to the workings of all-mighty algorithms combining with others under the gravity of glowing gas
then spreading in a super stellar explosion that happened millions of years before we
view it through a long tube of mirrors and convex lenses
and as fingers of gold and magenta reach out in an intergalactic high five, matter is
spread apart and left to mix and mingle to the jingling beat of the cool kid basement
clubhouse quasars
on off on off on off on off on off
And then there are 118 unique chemical elements and within moments molecules and then
centuries of cell growth, and in the instant between this line and the one above
the transition from cold consciousness construction to hot living intelligence?
And then everything begins to become
was it all set to happen in that first instant if there
was one somewhere where “where” only was right there?
but then the statistical mechanics
Pause
for effect
And inform us for the time being that it is all happening because eventually in the context
of forever the universe will visit every possible microstate, just as books on library
shelves will eventually rest in every possible configuration (assuming there exists no librarian to re-shelve them)
and so it turns out that you find Besis and Ramona where you do because it is the most
likely that you will and likewise the universe is the way it is and you exist because of
random chance
and the entropy just keeps increasing
and between each line I write a fractal of commentary exists and between paper and ink a commentary and between the paper and ink and you the reader a commentary and on ad-infinitum (because of the second law of thermodynamics so that the universe of possibilities over time, which might exist and not exist simultaneously (I had meant time, but I suppose the universe too) could be best modeled as a tree unfolding branch upon branch
toward heaven, or further from it?
but the point is moot, and it is a very sacred tree so I should like nothing better than to just sit at its base and catch its ripened fruit and close my eyes as I lick the juices running and wrapping around my wrists.
©2008 Hillary Swanson. All rights reserved.