Plague Journal, On A Positive Note
Yes, most of the posts have been rather dark. There’s the second law of thermodynamics, the fall toward entropy, which is unpleasant and irresistible to contemplate. Things come apart, the center does not hold. That is only part of the story as many of us know.
A year represents a sliver of time,
a mere one hundred-fifty-thousandth of the life-span of our species,
one ten-thousandth of the epoch of our civilization,
one five-hundredth of the age of science,
and one-hundredth of the age of Einstein,
who discovered that space and time are indivisible.
Our species is one among hundreds of millions of species…
that evolved over the course of 3.5 billion years on Earth,
itself around 4.6 billion years old,
and accounting for only a third of the age
of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.
If you lived for a century,
that would amount to a mere 0.0000000073 percent
of the cosmic life-span.
Is it really possible that this entire cosmological multiverse
was designed for and exists for one tiny subgroup
of a single species
on one planet
in a lone galaxy
in that solitary bubble universe?
[Yet,]
Our sentience –
yours, mine, everyone’s,
— is ours alone and like no other
anywhere in the cosmos.
We are given this one chance to live,
some four score trips around the sun,
a brief but glorious moment in the cosmic drama unfolding
on this provisional proscenium.
…that is the most any of us can reasonably
hope for.
Fortunately it is enough.
It is the soul of life.
It is heaven on earth.
— excerpt, Imagine There’s No Heaven by Salman Rushdie, 1999
Perchance did you hear in your imagination The Hallelujah Chorus break out in rhapsody as you read the last three lines?
On Monday of this week, November 30th, our granddaughter walked. She is 13 months old and has not experienced movement without assistance until Monday evening. She transversed the carpeted living room, a distance of about 15 feet on her own two feet, unassisted. She looked back at the four adults in the room, with a smile of unadulterated pleasure.
Today the living room, — tomorrow the moon….
Not long ago I had occasion to walk along the Fox River shortly after dusk. In the course of my walk on the pathway I felt a pebble under my sneaker. I picked up a rock the size and shape of an egg. In the dim light I could tell it was limestone, the type of material found in the river bed. The rough surface and mottled gray color of the rock are not visually attractive. I can see the fossilized minute remains of living things that were before me. We are not alone.
The rock rests as a reminder on my desk.
3 thoughts on “Plague Journal, On A Positive Note”
You appear to have entered a new phase of blogging, my friend. There is a contemplative nature in your last few offerings that goes beyond commenting on the visible world and into a realm of something deeper, an almost intangible and poetic plea for our species to transcend our current plight. Thank you.
If I may add a bit: As much as our individual lives make up a minuscule moment in the vast arc of time, we are much closer to our past than we realize. Mr. Rushdie is certainly correct in his assessment of our place in the universe, yet if we look at the bulk of humanity, the distance between us and the flash of creation is narrow. If we were to take but two years of each living human’s life and place them back to back, we would find ourselves in the void of a non-existent and yet to be born universe. On a similar note, if one were to combine the years of those who might attend a Chicago Bears game at Soldier Field (during a non-Covid season) and stretch them back to back, you would find yourself exploring the earth before Homo Erectus or even Homo Habilis roamed our planet.
The point being that we are closer to our past than we think. We are all tied together by the string of our mutual existence. I’ve always felt that if we could truly grasp this concept, perhaps we would not be as willing to blow each other into bits and pieces.
I agree wholeheartedly with your observation. My sense of our proximity with those who preceded us, has come as a physical sensation in certain places and times that I clearly remember. In Japan, I remember standing at the base of the foundation ruins of an old castle wall. I touched the massive blocks that interlocked to form the massive defensive fortification, — it was as if I felt the generations of men and women from peasants, to retainers, to the daimyo who lived within and around these walls. The earth itself speaks.
Another occasion was when I visited the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago. Those who fought and died there, lived not very long ago.
I really like these words by T. S. Eliot from the poem East Coker.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,…
I cannot possible match Mr. Eliots’ wonderful verse, but perhaps an addendum of my own making can be viewed as an adjunct to his words:
Dust
This structure, born
in ‘52, made of bricks
wood, nails and concrete,
walls, ceilings, floors all built
by my father’s hands, to make a home.
Yet on this evening,
I imagine its final day.
Leveled by crushing jaws,
some unknown machine
mashing this once solid structure
into bits and pieces of what had been.
The image is not
a prediction of an
untimely end, as much
a notion of the inexorable;
a parade of future moments,
waiting to be swept into the past.
Inevitability
is not the point,
no doubt exists,
but more is what I did
within that house while I was there
for the days of my youth happen but once.