Unaccounted For - Feb 1 2021

 

Unaccounted For

Feb 1 2021

Too big and too small

is where imagination fails us.

That there were not just stars, but other planets,

than even atoms are divisible.

If seeing is believing

then how small and mean is the world

to which we've confined ourselves?

Because what if you could see

in microwave, or ultraviolet?

If you could close your eyes

and inhabit lucid dreams

of flight and transformation?

Of course, everything is virtual,

entering into our heads

through long tracts of perception,

then projected onto a screen

in that sealed black box;

a small simulacrum

we have no choice but accept.

And then the gargantuan things

that can neither be measured nor weighed,

unaccounted for

in the physics that rules us;

even less real

than dark energy and anti-matter,

than quantum atoms

and parallel planets

and the infinite sands of time.

So I ask where, in the zero sum

of energy and matter

reside all the pain and anguish?

The ecstasy and agony of touch,

the giddy exaltation of love,

and the heat of hate and lust

that rise up from the world

in a deafening din

of caterwaul and cacophony

without dimension or weight?

To small for the physicists.

But as big as the universe

to feel.

I guess a dispassionate physicist would answer that emotion and sensation are accounted for by the chemical chemical changes and electrical discharges in the brain. Because, after all, everything is both measurable, conserved, and zero-sum: the universe emerged from the nothingness of the big bang, and it all still cancels out.

But if emotions and sensation have no mass or weight, then where do we place them in this universal accounting?

And what if your brain consumes the same number of calories, but you feel more intensely?

And how do you measure the sum total of feeling of every living thing when you can look at the impassive person in front of you and have no idea what how they seethe underneath, how they are seared by pain or about to explode with pent-up frustration?

And how could a God, who feels all our pain, possibly bear the crushing cumulative weight of it all, rising incessantly up from this living beating planet?

Too small to imagine. Too big to ignore.

(I feel compelled to add that when canvassing lucid dreamers, the two most common reveries are flying and sex! I thought the latter would be a bit too much of a distraction at that point in the poem!)