Chapter 27

Another fun one: try to image what the world and the universe is really like.

We feel it by rubbing our skin against it and the friction and temperature is translated into electrochemical impulses that are analyzed by our brain. We taste it based on chemical reactions in our mouth. The same with smell. More troubling, we only see it by perceiving the way a certain spectrum of radiation is reflected, refracted, and absorbed by it.

Try to imagine the world the way it is.

Color (and light itself) is artificial. So imagine grey matter in utter darkness. Think of objects down to an atomic and sub-atomic level – at a certain point, there is no “matter” – it’s just a kind of standing wave of energy. What is the energy? Who knows, because we can’t perceive it. Even at the atomic level, all but some infinitesimal fraction of “matter” is really just a vacuum. Tastes and smells are just invisible chemicals, rubbing off and floating through a soup of air molecules. Sounds are three dimensional ripples in the soup. Radiation across the spectrum zips through the universe, changing everything it touches. Everything is different – there are no “classes” of objects, that is just an artifact of understanding and language. Think of a field of a million flowers. Every one is a unique configuration of matter, dark and buzzing and distinguishable from the air and ground only by density and pattern. Think yourself into the deepest layer of reality, where weird quantum effects cause matter to be created and destroyed on an un-understandable whim. Then, move back up the chain until you get to people. Moving, growing, miraculously thinking collections of nothingness, creating a world we share purely by the mechanism of perceiving it and simplifying it to an understandable level.

Note: When I was researching some links for my cross-over post about books, I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Douglas Hofstadter, which led to an article about Daniel Dennett, where I found a link to an article about qualia, which was a term I had never heard before, but, as it turns out, it was something that the last entry (and this one a bit) touched upon (the sensations of seeing colors and how our senses relate to the real world). Weird serendipity.

Chapter 26

I am inside my head, as far as I know. Am I my head? I’m not inside my feet, although I feel that they too are a part of me. I can’t see my eyes or my ears. I can sort of see my tongue, but it just looks like a pink blur. My teeth feel bigger if I feel them with my tongue. I had a fold in my ear that I didn’t notice until about two years ago. I feel sleepy often, probably because I am. I wonder sometimes if I perceive the world the same as everyone else. Is the green that I see the same as everyone else? If what I see as green is the same as someone else’s red, could anyone tell the difference? There is no way to describe green except in the context of greenness or it’s relation to other colors, but if other people’s color perception is completely different, all of the relations would be consistent also. There is no way of knowing. We may all be only a few minutes old, or existing in a discrete, quantum moment, being created, destroyed, and recreated in quantum time. I may only exist in the instant and never have existed in my past. Reality could also be fragmenting in a many worlds scheme. At any given instant, other me’s could be dying, visited by time travelers, abducted by aliens, or an infinitude of other experiences (not to mention an infinitude of realities in which I never existed). If our universe in a non-linear set of quantum states in an infinity of dust, all of these things could be true simultaneously. To someone (impossibly) “outside”, ten minutes ago may have been 10,000,000 years ago and one minute ago may have been 5,000 years in the future. All in all, it doesn’t matter, but it is good for creating a headache. The me who is writing this is the continuity of multiple experiences who survived, wasn’t visited by time travelers, wasn’t abandoned in a dead end universe, and hasn’t been swallowed by a dragon. Other me’s were unluckier (or more lucky, depending on your point of view).

Note: This is one of my favorite entries. I had obviously been reading too much Gödel, Escher, Bach, Metamagical Themas, The Mind's I and Greg Egan before I wrote this. It is a semi-random exploration of existence and consciousness and, to me, contains a lot of fun contemplations.

Chapter 25

     My staples bent the wrong way, until I turned the staple anvil around. It had a little spring-loaded knob, but I never looked at it too closely. I just cursed my splayed staples. The splayed ones are easier to remove, but they tend to hang and scratch too much.

Chapter 24

Frogs scared her, but she didn’t mind blackberries.

Chapter 23

     Even high up in the frosty mountains, he couldn’t escape the feeling that the dolphins were watching him. He knew that they rarely flew around, because it was too hard for them to maintain their invisibility, but their high technology (based on kelp, fish bones, and underwater lava flows) enabled them to make sophisticated telepresence tracking devices.
    He knew they were after him because he was the only one who knew the two dolphin-kind secrets: where they came from, and what they did with squid.

Chapter 22

Fossils

Dusty yellow stone
Permeated with stems and fronds.
Exposed to air, sun, and water
After two hundred million years

When a dusty yellow backhoe
Ripped open the folded strata
Atop a living mountain
Which used to be a seashore.

I picked it up from dirt and mud,
Wiped it clean and smiled.
I was the first to touch these bones of coral.
The first mammal to see them.

I dream of finding dinosaurs
But I know these creatures are older:
Crinoids and corals that sifted warm seas
Before anything walked on earth.



Note: Another literal poem that I dashed off one afternoon and, for some reason, was slightly embarassed by. When I ran across it months later, I really liked it. On a shelf in my office, I have several fossil encrustred rocks that I found on the mountain above our old house on a road cut where they were building a new subdivision. This part of North Alabama used to be under the sea, and there are millions of crinoids, corals, shells, and other Pre-Cambrian sea creatures. When I first found them, I was excited because I knew that people had found mesosaur and plesiosaur fossils in Birmingham, but when I did some research, I found that it would be unlikely to find such fossils in this same area, because this strata was over 200 million years old and pre-dated the dinosaurs, or actually any vertibrates.

Chapter 21

PM ramblings

If this is Post-Modernism

Give me Pre-Modernism

If rambling, disjoint (oxymoron) T E X T

That flows (*b*u*r*p*s*) like staccato bursts of machine gun fyre (dam the speling) (or paint

splatters) Is the soul of the

M O D E R N A G E , And words are a psych-test emotional tone response monkey wired

Gimmick -- and coherency out the window is

(e e cummings did it better but hes dead)

simply the mirrored light of high albedo dust and the dying fire of distant suns

Then

s o m e t i m e s

I think i prefer traditionalism and staid cascades of logic

Because some (most) times, If the medium is the message

The message is as empty as a mirror (i n a n e m p t y r o o m ?)

And don't even mention hypertext...




Note: This is, strangely enough, one of my favorite poems. I wrote it both out of frustration against some modern literary theory and as a protest/parody/homage to the some of the bizarrely formatted poems that I would find on the web about 10 years ago when I first put some of my poems online. It got a bit of "fan mail" over the years and one of my wife's students ran across it, printed it out, and put it on her bulletin board in her classroom. He claimed that he liked it, but he may have just been trying to embarass her by showing everyone how weird her husband is...

Chapter 20

Cheap Sunglasses

I don't want to see the world through rose-colored glasses -

I prefer the yellowed tint

Of cheap amber sunglasses

Which color the world

With the faded tones of old Polaroids.


Of the beach when I was young...

Of birthday parties with people I don't remember...

Of pictures of my family...


A memory on the edge of my mind

With every glance.


Note: This is a very literal poem, but I like the imagery. Back when I wore contacts, I picked up a really cheap pair of Blu-Blocker type sunglasses at a gas station. They really screwed with the colors of everything and made everything I looked at look like faded, yellowed photographs. My car at that time had a gray tint at the top of the windshield and I remember telling Renee that everything I saw when I drove around wearing those sunglasses looked the Life in a Northern Town video. This poem was written as a commentary on that.

Chapter 19

     Naked fliers hang silhouetted against the red sunrise, risking life and skin by floating unprotected against the fiery radiation of the nearest star. As the first pure rays of light stream through the clouds like lasers, the fliers tuck and dive into the ocean, their splashwake indistinguishable in the surf. Underneath, in the bluedark, the fliers smile silently as they swim toward the underwater caves to wait again for night.

Chapter 18

Leaves, leaves, and leaves that store
The summer sunlight of a hundred years
In the vault of wood that seizes them

Until the Fall

Then begs them to return each Spring
To feed the greed of the gnarled old tree
Until time or spark forces the selfish hoarder
To share with others
That sunlight of a hundred years.

Chapter 17

A Visit From Mars

On the red cratered plains
Of dust and ice,
No Burroughsian cities
With spires of steel and glass
Rise to meet the welcoming sky.
Only rocky crags,
Dark, eroded, crumbling.

In the deep valleys and canyons,
No oasis jungles of exotic plants
Line the banks of mighty waterways,
Home of wonderful sights and sounds.
Only dry graves
Of rivers long boiled.

In the deserts,
No wise representatives
Of ancient dying races
Sing songs of remembrance and understanding
From their simple, Spartan homes.
Only the piercing wail of frigid, supersonic winds
Born of the eternal dry winter.

And in the heavens,
No hurling moons of Barsoom light the night.
Only a single, silver-bright watcher
Drawing tides of ghost seas.
The harbinger of madness.

Note: This was, I believe, the first poem I ever wrote that wasn't required by an English teacher. It was written back the 80's, during the end of the Cold War, when fears of nuclear war and nuclear winter were commonplace. I liked the juxtoposition of standard science fiction portrayals of Mars and the reality of Mars as shown by the Viking missions with the twist in the title ("from" instead of "to") to equate those conditions with a post nuclear Earth that is only revealed by the last stanza - Luna, of course, being the "harbinger of madness" and Mars being the God of War.

Chapter 16

    Coded messages pass from frond to frontline in the never-ending battle of night. Feathery flyers pass unseen over the hunkering heads of the sleeping soldiery. Come morning, the pellets will fly and the suns will shriek as many die and rise again to fight anew. Blue and green clouds welcome the day, but they burn off by mid-morning, revealing the rusted hulks hanging motionless above in the dark indigo sky. A solder wants to quit – all soldiers want to quit, but someone needs them. It isn’t necessary that they know who, as long as the food arrives on time. Fortnights of fighting have passed and the soldiers do not stir, for to go forward or back is to die a truer death than any of them are prepared to face. The enemy is everywhere, perhaps lying beside them in the concrete trench, or calling them with the voices of their dead wives and children from the snarled razor wire in the no-one land. They release the tunneling mines and pray to St. Agnes that they will go straight. The enemy releases their metal weasels to find them and to convert their sand-minds to return to their home and share their gift of death. It is beyond the other side of fear that the soldiers find calm. Their hopes lie in the saints and the mythical General Scientists who send the new weapons screaming to the front lines on parcel rockets. The army is a field test. Quality engineers who work for no pay and die whimpering from the mistakes of others or the successes of the other side. The battle is decided by those not on the line and, eventually, the roots of trees crumble the trenches and moss covers the sleeping mines. The soldiers will still wait.

Chapter 15

split personality

---

There is a silent partner to our thoughts
Who lives inside our head.

He, or she, or it
Listens to our voice, spoken or unspoken
And winces at our faux pauxs
And argues silently with us.

He, or she, or it
Is afraid of the dark
And of the unknown, and
Is still a child
And walks the tightrope of the corpus callosum,
And is a disbeliever of logic
And occasionally slips in a comment to the
outside world
That startles us.

So we keep him, or her, or it caged
Like a madman in a Victorian asylum
And consult with him, or her, or it when
We are confused

And converse with him, or her, or it in the
Darkness of our mind
When we know
No one ELSE is listening

Note: After publishing this poem on my old web site, I received more e-mails about it than any other that I have written. The strangest was a kid in Canada who was told to find a poem and write an essay on it. I think the teacher meant a "real" poem, but the student found mine and sent me an e-mail asking questions about it. Made me feel weird...

I've also had e-mails asking me if I knew anyone with multiple personality disorder or if I suffered from it myself and relating experiences that they have had with depression and schizophrenia. Actually, the poem isn't about mental disorders at all - it is a comment on how mental subprocesses work within our brains.

Chapter 14

Sweet Potty-Penny gam-gamboled along the stinkriver sidings
selling stone sandals to the inkmen to wear as they sandpolish
the barge bottoms. She has a he who sells as she does,
but he sells heli-hoverers to the hags who paint the aerials
on the triskadectic sails of the Borgie-boats. Together they
love under the rusttinned shack where the stinkwater flows
over the edge of the world.

In springsummer, and only then, fruits are sold at the pens
by the edge, that enable the eaters to see the stars beyond
the mists. Hardly anyone buys them except PP and her
boyfrond, for to see the stars alone is a sin and a shame,
but to share the sour fruit and dangle your barefeets
over the edge of the world
is a pleasure reserved for the young who live,
even if they love in a rustinned shack,
where the stinkwaters flow endlessly
into the black.