“Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit”

I watch documentaries. They tell me things like,

“The Universe is 17 billion years old.”

They make vague analogies and models

to support these claims, and fit it all into

an hour format for PBS or whomever.

A cabal of astrophysicists meet in secret

and decide, in presumptive but elaborate and

esoteric equations how it all works so that

that they can publish these findings.

And who will know the difference?

Ex nihilo nihil fit. One of my favorite expressions.

It means, in Latin, “From nothing nothing comes.”

Something cannot come from Nothing. Well, for me

it's a problem. It is the nagging question which pervades

my days and nights. It prompts the question I can not answer.

What is the Universe in?

I'm not disciplined to study thoroughly what may,

without guarantee, lead me to answers or more questions.

I'm also heartbroken. I thought about seeking solace in a wat,

but let's be real. I'm an iconoclastic bastard, not a monk.

Life, with a divine entity or without, breaks my heart.

The selfishness, cruelty, inconsideration of my modern

fellows breaks my heart. I dream of an island, and a muse,

a beautiful girl who wants to have my children and I

do things like fish and hunt wild boars. It's an empty dream.

Gauguin went to Tahiti to paint. Now there are seven billion

people living on this planet. So few places to hide. Call me

a coward, but that is exactly what I want to do: hide. When

the doctors tell me I'm mentally ill, I have to ask, “Isn't that

very much appropriate?” Death would be better than the lives of 95%.

Funafuti 8°31'S 179°13'E … unlikely

Nanumea 05°41'S 176°09'E … unlikely

Nui 07°13'29"S 177°09'37"E... unlikely

Nukufetau 08°00'S 178°22'E … unlikely

Nukulaelae 09°22'52"S 179°51'08"E … unlikely

Vaitupu 07°28'S 178°41'E … unlikely

They found what they believe to be some of Gauguin's teeth

in Tahiti. Like the life preserved as it was stopped by Pompeii in '79.

I can't know if Gauguin was happy, no matter how young

and how preserved the girls were from the institutions of shame.

But he did it. He said it, which often is a curse, and then did it.

My escape from this particular suburb of Dis will have to be different.

I will have to steal away into the night, with a backpack full of socks,

underwear, and some cash. I will require the same faith

that I seem to have lost along the way. I will have to let the judgments

of others slip off me the way rain does down and umbrella, or a raincoat.

So, while I draw up prototypes for tinfoil-lined umbrellas,

(so as to keep them from their mind reading / controlling rays)

in doing so, I keep my head full of broken heart above the water,

the waves which will drown me, I bend time. No, I don't bend it, I bide it.

If I could bend time, I'd be up to much more scintillating endeavors.

It will be me in this 17 billion year old Universe, for a fleeting millionth of a second

seeking that relief, that transcendental drunk from a wine fomented from grapes

grown on the vines of absurdity. In Judaism, there is a tenet that we (humans)

will never know god's face. Einstein, with his shock of hair, antennae for the cosmos,

said prophetically, “I want to know god's thoughts. The rest are details.”

The Devil in me. The Daniel Webster I aspire to be. These are at odds.

17 billion years ago, let's just say they're right. The “Big Bang” happened.

Great. So, please tell me, what was there before that big bang.

And if you say something like it was super-dense compaction blah blah blah, please

tell me it was a super-dense compaction of WHAT? And what before that!?

The stars whisper secrets. They have for longer than we were around to see them.

They whisper about dreams, and wishes, and to astronomers, they whisper about time,

but they mock me in symbol. Their very presence says “We see you, hahaha!”

Like peepholes for the superspatial beings. I know that creatures such as us,

who can't see, for the most part, our hand in front of our faces, can't answer these questions.

However, the questions remain. So, if I go to the Large Hadron Collider, and,

with some silver tongue explain my broken heart,

manage to get them to explain the whole thing to me, I can leave mended.

Perhaps I can get a job at the post office and a mortgage.

Love is in the Large Hadron Collider, baby. But only for a millionth of a second. Then it's gone.

par Giosue ben Dawell

Written on Demand

This is what scares me. The silence of night

it feels like shelter, but it's temporary

and that is never forgone. There is no sanctuary.

There is no lover. There is no family.

There is no cabin or penthouse or basement apartment.

I'm also as lost as any Priest or Rabbi or Seargant at Arms, any Worshipful Master

that I might have met.

There is nothing I believe in that

is worth dying for, and nothing I feel

worth living for.

This scares me.

The bridge outside the window tells me the day and time like

a 720000 ton clock, the machinery of society.

When the traffic starts again,

it will be followed by the sun and a day,

where the world expects me to participate.

How?

How the fuck do people care about any of it?

What's missing in me? What is the antidote?

I consider this: I am similar to other primates.

I have a vestigial tail, opposable thumbs, similar sensory organs.

Indeed, most of me is shared with my brethren

in any shrewdness of apes.

I'm weaker, but my brain is larger.

What good is it doing me?

If I am the 18,000,000^th cousin 10^23^rd removed

from any given cartload of monkeys,

and so, in effect, an animal, which is, to be fair,

more honest and obvious to me

than the rest of human-ness,

where am I left on this gyration

of elements, iron and oxygen, rust and salt, ice and water,

this spinning mass with a gravity that

holds me prisoner?

The mind has captured the heart.

And it imprisons.

To escape!

Like Hermes and Nikes and angels and demons, monkeys with ~wings~,

but still they must move bones to flap them.

The bat flies like I walk;

The bat is also a brother, but it too hides in the night.

So, I sit.

I know to keep shit separate from sleep.

I know simple things,

which will remind you

if you forget them,

like tying my shoes.

When I see they're untied,

or I trip.

I could build, but to what end?

You see, this candle, the sun, which I hide from,

that truly I know with my big monkey brain that I need to live,

for any life to live, will expire.

If, if what I know to be true is true, that is.

If I go any further trying to explain it to myself

I will fall into a solipsistic black hole.

So I sit. I try to deal with simple things. Somehow still I fail.

I can't fight gravity. I can't build anything that will outlast the wind.

I can't carve my being into any stone, any amount of Mt. Rushmore

that will outstand Gamma Ray Bursts and post-stellar nebulousness.

The atoms stuck between my teeth,

in my earwax

are as subject to the vicissitudes of time

as any that made up the first ape-coprography,

the latest columbite-tantalite contraption,

the great texts of the great libraries and great mens' brains.

It's all the same.

In an absolute scale of time,

if such a thing can be considered,

as opposed to a relative one,

none of this for-the-birds bullshit adds up

to anything but the sum of parts.

Maybe, in that absolute scale I am really in that solipsistic hole

but hear me!

If the diaphanous veneer of this aether is weathered over enough time,

matter following that law about entropy will, eventually,

after all the atoms' antics are played out,

present a nice, even, shitty sleep.

Won't it?

Never restful, never fitful.

Never rejuvenating, never haunted by nightmares.

Never anything at all, really. And that is the state that I am in.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I'd say I need sleep,

but I've already tried sleeping.

Maybe the Universe is a fantastic banger of a machine,

and all my whining and wailing

could and should be silent wonder.

This is not how it feels, though.

Humbly.