Ashes to Ashes ...
Dec 24 2013


There is give and take
a little play
no hard-and-fast ending.

In the grey
inexactitude,
where before-and-after
intersect.

Where you can still imagine
agency, meaning
transcendence
over contingency, fate, surrender.
Where even death
seems inconclusive,
because effects outlive
and memory persists
in recollection's pleasant blur.

At least until
friends have forgotten, descendants moved on
the telling of stories stopped,
your digital self
got lost
in the electronic babble.
Until your granite slab
weathered, tilted, toppled,
a supernova
blotted out the sun.

In a thinning cosmos,
when posterity has had its run
and at last, there is nothing but
cinders, atoms, dust.

And you
the stuff of stars.

"Give and take" was seasonally inspired: by the time of year most people give and receive presents. When I started to write this poem, I was thinking in particular about the truth behind the cliché that it's better to give than to receive. Brain science has shown that giving -- material generosity, acts of altruism -- evokes a big response in our reward centres; an addictive rush of feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine. (The elegant rationale offered by evolutionary biology I'll leave for another time.) Aside from that, I'm not a very gracious gift-reveiver. Probably because I really don't like stuff: there is nothing I need or want. So another bit of stuff becomes not only a dust collector, but also a remorseless little eye staring me down with guilt for not using it well, for letting something go to waste, for dishonouring the gesture as well as the giver. Stuff becomes clutter, a burden that complicates our lives and requires work. Not to mention the implied obligation to reciprocate, or the guilt for having reciprocated less well. And not to mention the guilt of having too much, when most people in the world are impoverished. And not to mention the guilt that our material greed is destroying the environment. ...And yet despite all this, the most generous thing one can do is to receive graciously, allowing someone else the joy of giving!

All of which got me as far as the opening line, after which I let my stream of consciousness take me by the hand and have its way. And as it turned out, the poem took a far more philosophical direction. But not before I ignored another inviting cue, the one offered by "play". There is something very mechanical in this idea of "play", of a mushy ending -- like a well-worn toggle switch. And lots of possibility in setting that against its other meaning -- the idea of play as unstructured recreation, child-like and impractical. Of course, the word is still there, and at the end of the 2nd line does offer a mischievous bit of misdirection.

...But so much for what the poem is not! What the poem does do is move from hope to nihilism to a kind of new age mysticism. I have no idea why I went this way (or why I seem to have more of an idea on what I might have written than what I actually did write!)

Although to call this poem mystical is wrong; it's actually physics. We are all star dust, and an ever-expanding universe may very well thin to nothing. And in this cancelling out, there is the perfect symmetry to the Big Bang: a paradoxical proof that something actually can come out of nothing, without violating basic physical law. (I won't elaborate on this idea of something being equivalent to nothing, and only say that the proof involves concepts like dark matter and dark energy, and might seem more like metaphysics that hard science.)

For those who wish to believe in an after-life, this physics offers little hope. Because while our matter may never be destroyed, the complexity of organization -- the singularity that gives rise to consciousness and then self-consciousness -- is destroyed when we die. And while we may live on for a short time in the memories of others and in the acts we have done (" ...the telling of stories ..." etc) this is the briefest of after-lives, and hardly a consolation. I often hear the phrase that something on the internet ("your digital self") will last "forever". Hardly! That we could have any access at all to something called "forever" is an absurd human conceit, considering that in a few billion years a supernova is absolutely certain to end all of everything we are and know. Not to mention the technological hubris of "forever", considering that the internet -- the cloud; the array of servers and cables and the power plants that keep them alive -- will not last even a fraction of that. And even if it does, the deafening noise of so much data renders the "needle in the haystack" analogy laughingly inadequate: what better protection for personal privacy than to be a drop in an ocean of data? This is what's behind my "electronic babble" (which might just as well have been "Babel"). No need to worry abut the NSA listening in. They must be so overwhelmed by such volumes of data all I see are vast stadiums filled with listeners huddling over desks, all covering their ears and crying for it to stop! (I know, I know; there are sophisticated algorithms and bunkers full of light-speed computers ...but still!)

The title is the beginning of the iconic Biblical phrase, which is left suspended in ellipses until the penultimate stanza, when "dust" finally completes it. I think this is where the power of the ending comes: there is the call-back of "dust", the release of tension; and immediately after that there is "the stuff of stars", wrenching the reader in a completely different direction.