Unglued - Dec 14 2024

 

Unglued

Dec 14 2024

As the universe expands

are we pulled apart as well?

Does matter thin

do our cells become unglued?

No way to prove this, of course;

life is too short,

and what to measure with

when everything is relative?

So much space, I can’t imagine

the bottomless black

unthinkable cold.

Light without heat

and nothing to see it with.

But expanding into what?

You don’t understand, they say

that’s not how it works.

And anyway

we’ve never seen the end

and never will;

the distant horizon

too far and too fast

for light to catch up.

So I no longer look up.

No longer care

for riddles

mind games

blackboards of equations,

when instead

I can look down

look inside

close my eyes.

Smaller, instead of bigger,

in instead of out.

My mind wanders

and I must pull it back

lest it weakens, thins, attenuates

then altogether drifts away.

Lest its interstitium

teases apart

and I become unglued;

reduced

to absolute zero

in a black bottomless void.

Where there’s no here or there.

Nowhere to go

not even down.

And no point

in keeping time

when nothing ever happens,

there’s nothing to keep track of,

and no one left to care.

Hard to explain this one. Just kind of noodling.

Perhaps it’s a twisted synthesis of a couple of things I recently read: one about out-of-body near-death experiences (that is, does the mind reside in the brain, or is it separate; and are these similarly reported experiences mystical, or more credibly explained by the neurophysiology of a dying brain); and the other about how the rate of expansion of the universe is faster than we thought.

Or perhaps, because cosmology is so counter-intuitive and impenetrable to us mere mortals — esoteric physics just hurts my brain — it’s a plea to come back down to earth, where things make at least a little sense and Newtonian physics works well enough!

Or perhaps it has to do with nothing at all. Just a stream of consciousness riff!