How the Universe Began - March 2 2024

 

How the Universe Began

March 2 2024

It's not really wilderness.

Not when there's a road.

Not when a city

glows on the horizon

on clear dark nights.

Not when I'm swamped

in the sea of invisible waves

that penetrate walls

and pass through my body.

I may live

in the cool shade of trees.

See no other lights but my own.

Experience a silence

so dense

that instead of an absence

it's a thing in itself.

But still.

So just how far

to get away from it all?

Antarctica?

A mountain top?

The bottom of the sea?

Is nowhere on the planet

far enough?

Or is it as much a matter of time

as it is of space?

Or should I simply retreat

into myself;

imagining fantasy worlds

of my own creation,

and inviting in

whomever I please?

Perhaps, this is how it began.

Not in 6 days

followed by a Sabbath.

Not in a Big Bang

only physicists understand.

And not in a multi-universe

that only makes sense

in bad science fiction.

But rather

in a simulation, a computer game

that would vaporize

should belief fail

and we lose faith in ourselves.

As if we were all minor gods

and bad animators;

conjuring and destroying,

whimsical and bored.

And, like the Old Testament God

a seemingly absent one,

often ignoring their prayers

and leaving pleas unanswered.

I live in a simulacrum of wilderness.

I look out the window at a Potemkin forest.

It gets dark enough at night to see all the stars.

And there are times when the silence seems to have a weight of its own.

Still, I know it's a comforting illusion. “Comforting” because I crave solitude. Which leads me to wonder if true wilderness is even possible anymore.

Which is as far as I got in this poem before stream of consciousness took my hand, and I let it lead me.

Odd where it ended up. Because I'm scientific, rigorous, data-driven, not the mystical sort at all. But then, I do retreat into imagination when I write, and do create my own worlds. Not to mention that serious philosophers have even debated this: could reality be just a computer game, and all of us mere avatars?

Not odd, though, that I ended it by taking took a cheap shot at religion! Really, God was absent during the Holocaust because He gave us free will, so it would have been unsporting to intervene?!!