Blog

The universe exists, if by creation or by chance,

The planets turn, the moons revolve, the stars themselves all dance,

New suns are born, and live long lives, and then explode and die,

All this goes on, yet there’s no one to see, and wonder why.

Through years measured in billions, these events slowly unwind,

The cosmos is unconscious, and the stars are deaf and blind,

Supernovas happen all the time, and they are able

To make new elements, and fill the periodic table,

Three billion years ago, on Earth, life finally appeared,

And went on to evolve over a vast number of years,

At last humans are here, and they can see and think and love,

They study all that’s on the Earth, and all that’s high above,

It’s like the universe made us to be its eyes and ears,

So consciousness can wonder about how it all appears,

And through the minds of women, and the thoughts of every man,

The universe itself can say, “You think, therefore I am.”

On every day of every life another page is turned,

The sun has set, the day is done, those hours have been burned,

And in the darkest time of night, when you are all alone,

The quiet sinks into your flesh, and seeps into your bones.

The next page of life’s diary turns over. It is blank.

Then when it’s full, you’ll only have free will and chance to thank,

And then another night with lonely hours, hard to bear,

And then another day, another page, you feel them wear.

Then suddenly you realise you have few pages left,

You feel hollow, like the victim of some dreadful theft,

You treasure every moment now, each breath and every feeling,

An hour is a minute now, and this sets your mind reeling.

It is the lot of mortal man, the curse that we were born for,

It has been said before, that all of this is what we mourn for,

From ancient times to modern day, from poverty to gentry,

Do not dismiss one precious moment of each diary entry.

NIGHT RANT

I plugged my brain into the keyboard of my laptop late Tuesday night and pressed record and discovered that I’d been thinking Monday night thoughts and Tuesday thoughts and the day after Tuesday thoughts and all the other thoughts that happen but have nothing to do with whatever day it might or might not be and I guess everything happens in some kind of day unless it’s the dark half of the day and then most of us agree to call that the night and I prefer the night because it’s quiet and there are fewer Blacktown fools driving cars that exceed the volume of sound that can be tolerated by the normal unprotected human body and I don’t know why they do that because I’m not too sure if I can ascribe it to a diminution of the male genitalia or maybe more appropriately a gross diminution of the tiny collection of neurons that they might have sitting alone somewhere in the otherwise vacant echoing space of their skulls but I should not ascribe it to an inadequacy of only male genitalia because there used to be a young woman who lived in the rental house across the road from me who had stark white bleached hair and a Mitsubishi Lancer and for some reason many people seem to like Mitsubishi Lancers because they are amenable to the installation of exhaust pipes the same size as ten-litre buckets that are then able to make an extraordinary amount of noise especially when the driver decides to get up and go to work or somewhere at five in the morning shattering the dawn and waking up every other poor human being in most of the suburb surrounding that one noisy individual and those living within a 500 metre radius might have to get plastic covers for their pillows to prevent their bleeding ears from staining their bed linen which by the way is not linen these days but usually a cotton blend but she is gone now fortunately and probably living somewhere else in another rental house making so much noise that the mortar between the bricks of the walls of the rental house is beginning to crack and decay under the onslaught of the noise of her Mitsubishi Lancer and she will probably move out of that house too before it collapses completely like the walls of Jericho because of the sheer force of sound but I’m reminiscing about that nasty woman and I need not do that right now because at the moment it is quiet and peaceful and I can hear my own thoughts rather than the exhaust pipes of all of the noisy morons who usually inhabit the roads of Blacktown then I considered the possibility that all of the noisy cars might be operated by a secret government agency whose goal is to prevent the residents of all of the suburbs and cities in the country from being able to think clearly by reducing our IQ with the impact of the sheer volume of traffic noise to the point where we unconsciously accept all of the doctrines that the government has placed into the mass media in a subliminal format in advertising jingles and Internet pop-ups and terms and conditions that we don’t read but to which we all agree and this is designed to make us all into compliant blank-minded zombies but now it’s very late and I’m alone and now I can quietly think various thoughts about fundamental truths and the delicate connections between them and I can think about dreams like the possibility of going for a flight in a glider that will be wonderful for the quiet peaceful experience of sailing in harmony with the wind and the air above the Earth and looking down at the land below ornamented as it is with flourishing populations of trees and plants and the geometrical impositions of human habitation and if I like the glider flight I might even take up the course and see if I can fly a glider solo so that I can again be at some kind of quiet peace above the noisy drivers and away from their malicious sounds and I could even feel as though I was held aloft on the bright light wings that I imagined in a poem the other day and that would be a special achievement to brighten up the otherwise dull drudgery of retirement that is something that many people look forward to having dreams of endless holidays and the absence of any need to submit to the dictatorship of the alarm clock so I wish those people well and I hope that their dreams of retirement work out exactly as they have imagined rather than mine when the night allows me to escape the noise of the day and wonder about strange things like the energy that drives all of the life and existence on the surface of the Earth and the idea that the energy is not just sunlight but that the energy of the sunlight itself exists in a state of low entropy so that there is a great deal that we can do with that energy because even though energy is neither created nor destroyed it is gradually degraded by an inescapable decay into disorder and uselessness which is what we call entropy and so the gift of sunlight itself would be of little use if it already had a high degree of entropy but it does not it is low in entropy and so it can drive photosynthesis and metabolism and weather and various other things and it can be converted from one form to another until it finally degrades away into the completely useless high entropy form of heat loss that is no longer able to provide any useful work and becomes part of the invisible body of used energy wrung dry of any further value and so is absorbed into the quantum vacuum and I wonder whether the vacuum was invented by God or discovered by man or woman and exactly how it works because we now know of the existence of dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe stretching space so that galaxies are becoming further separated from each other and the stars within the galaxies are moving apart and even the planets are gradually moving away from their stars and all of space will continue expanding even the space within each atom so at some stage during the enormous vista of time the universe as we know it will cease to exist entering a state called the heat death when all of the stars and planets and living beings and even the atoms themselves will have been torn apart by the dark energy that still evades our understanding but will have driven the fate of the entire universe and which will eventually lead to the universe consisting of nothing but a thin soup of photons and the remaining black holes and after 10106 years even the black holes will evaporate leaving only the quantum vacuum and I suddenly feel the need to rest from these ponderings momentarily so I fall back into a prosaic mood and I look at my watch to see how long it is before the supermarket across the road opens so that I can go there and buy a bunch of celery or some other disappointing vegetable and bring it home and boil it for so long that it no longer resembles any kind of vegetable at all and then I can put that into a blender and make some kind of soup the main characteristic of which will be that it tastes exactly like a quantum vacuum and soon I will have to unplug my laptop from my brain because the laptop is telling me it only has 11% of battery power left and I wonder whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing if human beings had a battery indicator so that they could see how much they had left as a percentage of their remaining life after which the battery would die and the life would stop and the body would become compost and the mind would return to the quantum vacuum and the perception of time itself would become so tenuous as to feel indefinable and the division of time into days like Tuesday and the day after that would lose all meaning so that for each entity the infinity of existence as a quantum vacuum after death would be indistinguishable from the infinity of existence as a quantum vacuum before life began and the battery would be unnecessary just like the remaining quantum soup in the infinity of particles appearing and disappearing again in the quantum vacuum never stopping but an infinity of time necessitates that every possible thing that can happen must at some stage happen and so the particles in the quantum vacuum must occasionally assemble themselves into a human brain and momentarily think possibly comprehensible thoughts alone in the darkness of a night that no longer has a day and is eternally quiet and then that brain returns again to the random chaos of particles in the vacuum where entropy has completed its mission and vanished and the quantum vacuum continues to bubble away and because every possible thing is necessarily going to happen at some stage in the innumerable trillions of years into the future on a time scale so inconceivable that measurable time itself ceases to exist then all of the virtual particles will again gather and converge into a single point where the diaphanous edges of curved spacetime finally meet each other once more and there will be another big bang and everything will start out again with zero entropy just as it did at the beginning of our own universe and the cycle will continue giving life to hopes and desires and time measurable in days and nights and the tangled web of thoughts and dreams that twist through the mind in the silence of the dark

WINTER

The coldest days are here again, I hope they do not last,

I’ve lived for sixty-nine years now, and each year still seems vast.

I’ve fewer years ahead of me than all those that have passed,

I move quite slowly now, but time still seems to go too fast.

We are all travellers through time, at one second per second,

And that’s the speed of time, or so our scientists have reckoned,

Now, if you fall out of a plane, each second rushes by,

But lie awake all night, and they’re so slow you’ll want to die.

The full expanse of time is something that’s hard to believe,

To speak of years in trillions really cannot be conceived,

And still, the universe expands at an increasing rate,

And we can only wonder now about our final fate.

Eventually each star and planet will be torn apart,

It seems there will not be a big crunch and no big restart.

I read that even atoms will be torn to tiny pieces,

And entropy will be the only thing that still increases.

The last remaining black holes will evaporate away,

I heard that this was something Stephen Hawking had to say.

So then the universe will be a vacant lonely place,

With only quantum vacuum occupying all of space.

But there is energy in quantum vacuum, that’s the thing,

And all those virtual particles will rattle, hum and sing.

And there is an infinity of time still yet to come,

Time for an infinite number of things that might be done.

Those endless particles might just assemble as a brain,

It might be yours, and you will think that you’re alive again,

Your senses could then make you feel just fine in every way,

And you could have your time again, on one more Winter’s day.