Trip Wire

"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." - Albert Einstein

We sit in the muted half-light of a Manhattan office,

its Industrial-design quickly fading from fashion.

We're taking time to bond as coworkers, he new,

me struggling with depression and burnout

with work after 4 years. He loves science, this tech writer

and former philosophy student, and he wants me to know

that the universe is different from what we see.

The mystery unfolds right now, he says, the Higgs Boson

on the verge of discovery, the cosmos decoded,

unwrapped, open to minds with knowledge, complete.

He wants me - me - to know there's nothing beyond now.

He wants me to know that I can know what he knows.

Not that the universe is ordered, no, but chaos

pure and simple, chaos birthing chaos,

the real world that appears to those who can see.

...they're colliding heavy lead ions

to explore the creation of matter itself

and the nature of the strong nuclear force

in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

After I snap the photo of the rock den

and the park path leading to it along the stream,

five white tail deer run by and cross

downstream nearby. I follow flat-footed

on the rubber soles of my shoes, not

to alert them. The twin fawns drink

clear water rippling over shallow stones.

The does see or smell me watch,

and the herd skirts away along the yard of a home

at the park's edge. But the buck backtracks

down the path and climbs the hill alongside

the den. It stands sentry at the peak of the den,

in clear view of the world (as in a Medieval tapestry;

hunters, dogs and horses closing in).

He stands motionless, trembling I think,

and in that moment I imagine I see the code

in his genes, bulwark against all instinct for flight

and diverting attack from the does and fawns.

"We're recreating, in a sub-atomic fireball,

the conditions that existed a millionth

of a second after the Big Bang...

I find peace in bridges and imagine floating beneath

rock arches on gentle streams, constantly changing,

seeking form, finding none but stubbornly sure there's

a source of my meanders along muddy banks that I carve

and shape to no pattern, no blueprint but necessity.

I'm happy with the thought that fish hide in my weeds

that wave dreamily in the shade of willow and oak.

"It's so hot and so dense that

even protons and neutrons melt,

At the tail end of the friendly discussion, I

mention religion, and he pegs me to rights,

and knots and binds me to who I am:

one of those, one of those who believes what

they all - all religious types - believe....

He cites with slight sarcasm Pascal*, the gambler

with God, convinced the bet is a gambit

of despair, sacrifice on a board whose end game

leaves no hope of doubt. He suspects I'm wrong

about Pascal discovering probability theory, and he seems

disturbed to think that a scientist could solve

the cosmic numbers game, yet believe still that God

exists, that a choice for now beyond now makes sense.

and we end up with a sort

of primordial soup known

as the quark-gluon plasma."

I stand in the rain after the deer disappear,

alive in the moment and the chance order

of nature that guided them into my presence,

then ashamed that I could not become invisible

to them so they'd stay and graze without fear.

Ashamed that I wanted to capture them in ones

and zeroes and twitter the image across the globe.

I tell him that humans need to believe that their lives mean

something, beyond this here and now; that the universe

must harbor some glue with words and things that tells what

humans must do to each other and how they can stave

off anarchy and build shelter against ruin, captive outside time.

That societies crumble and die when meaning disappears.

The mother steals her child's food, abandoned children

die on the road, or they are cast out of home at three

to fend for themselves and subsist as best they can.

We find silence then, he mulling I do not know what,

I wondering what life might mean in a universe

in constant change, reality outside the reach of humans

to understand, at least by us without the tools to see.

I walk to the car in the rain, smoke a cigarette, turn

on the game and drive home. Rain and mud soak my jeans.

Ablaze with eternal fire, doubt denudes reason

and its infinite desire for certitude behind appearance,

zero sum game of truth or dare, faith or doubt,

un coup de dés baffling surety.

The altars erode. Weeds crumble the paths

that go nowhere without feet to wear them down.

* Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), French physicist, scientist, philosopher and Catholic mystic. Famous for Pascal's Wager, which says that given that if God's existence is equally possible or not possible, the best choice is to wager on God's existence and thereby gain eternal happiness. In essence, we have nothing to lose; if God does not exist then we will gain the same thing as we will if He doesn't. On the other hand, if God does exist and we choose not to believe in the transcendent reality, then we will not gain eternal happiness.

(c) copyright 2012 Charles David Miller. All rights reserved.