Sunday, December 21, 2008

sublime



"LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe.
Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end."


Dear Emmanuel,

I claim no expertise in either loop quantum cosmology or Kantian study. I claim nothing but this figment letter to you. On a lazy Sunday morning, wrapped under my goose down, watching from the bedroom window, front seat centre to the stage of my private universe, the blowing snow from my roof as it tunnels itself in cyclone fashion, I get to pontificate as detached observer such things as the meaning of life.


As I look at the sinuous tufts of snow I consider wouldn’t it naturally make sense that life is infinite? That everything recycles? And I smile as I consider this a strangely religious way to look at the ‘origins’ of the universe. Simultaneously I think what an existential joke this is then, that there is no genesis, that each time we point to a dot, the original dot, another one forms from the haze of the first; from the negative space; the void; the trace. Think inside the box. Think outside the box. As long as we think in relation to borders there will always be a frame to break. (yes yes; turtles all the way down) Is life without frame? If life had thought would it be laughing its brain off at our funny little measuring apparatuses and contraptions? Who wouldn’t? Who in the know, alas, we are out of The Know. What we know comforts us, even if it may be unpleasant. But the unknow is the most powerful. The Unknow. The attempt to understand The Unknow is maybe our biggest compulsion. Is searching for meaning our collective unconscious addiction? Are rulers and scales and mathematical equations vice: Kindred to cars and technological toys and the bottle and the syringe and the laboratorium and the bag of chips and the frantic shopping list and the cigarette and the pick pocketing and the shoes and the corset and the books and boxes and boxes of rare and special things?

Emmanuel, is this not, to date, the finest exemplary example of the sublime: The notion that the big bang was not the beginning but just another notch in the infinite line of life?

yours truly,

s


1 comment:

  1. I one had a psilocybin epiphany that everything was cyclical. It was just a matter of finding the right scale of time to observe the cycle.

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