Who are you, and how did you become that?
Arrive from outside the orbit of dreams,
And take these uncertain steps, ask
For directions from trees that lean
Into the wind, guided by all failings. Then,
And only then, answer our question.

It would seem we all have these habits,
And deny them at every turn, We awake
Each day and face ourselves with dread:
What if we are discovered, called out
By the world we try to fool with our lies?
The answer is not so simple now, is it?

How can you know who you are if you cannot say
How you are formed? Nature, nurture,
Its too simple an explanation,
It fails to take into account the rain of fear
We walk through each day. Why do you insist
There is a central truth?

You pretend that your religion will
Infallibly guide you, and then demand
It do the same for us. Oh please
Leave us behind, free from your certainty,
And from the fear your faith excretes.

Once you had faith in the grass and the air,
And the water that cooled your young body
In summer’s sweet embrace. Now the wind
Is fouled by greed, and faith a false cover.
How can you believe when you have to keep saying
You believe? You would drag us into the same pit.

Leave us with our doubt, rise up to heaven,
Be free of the world. It no longer wants you
And your religions. Go where your god calls you,
While the rest of us spend eternity trying
To put this place right, to dream a world into being,
Without the weight of your fear.

5/7/05 - NB

Israel, Palestine

There are, I think
Two possibilities:

I am good, and you are bad;

Or,

You are good, and I am bad.

This is what we call, history.

If I am good, it is my history
That will be your grave.

If you are good,
My name will not be remembered.

What if the floods know whose history is true?

Or the Earth, quaking in anger, were the final judge?

The old man said “Watch out for the thorns,
As you taste the sweetness inside”.

Why is it so hard to heed such wisdom?

Not good, not bad,

Only endless sorrow.

1/10/05

Notty Bumbo

Why, What a Silly Question!

What if underneath all our secrets, there are only more secrets? The depth of our knowledge is always bested by the breadth of our ignorance. So it is with the art of investigation, and so it is with life. Even as physicists are delving deeper into the heart of matter, they too keep finding new particles within even newer particles – turtles all the way down*. So why should we, as pseudo-intelligent beings, be any different? As we are made up entirely of those same turtles, our own complexity, while it may become simpler and more essential the farther in we explore, is nonetheless a true fractal infinity.

What if we are asking the wrong questions (which I strongly suspect to be the case), and therefore can only keep getting the wrong, or at least inadequate, answers? Consider the relatively simple question, why are we here? It is clear this question is ultimately unanswerable, in the form it is asked. But consider changing the form of the question: How can I find out why we are here? This question, by its very nature, leads to considerable further inquiry, and therefore holds the chance it may one day, at least for the individual questioner, lead to an answer. “Why are we here” is itself a paradox – that we, as far as we can tell, are the only beings able to ask such a question, it stands to reason we are not equipped to answer it in a way that is free of subjective bias. Hence philosophy, religion, art, and politics – all try to answer not the question as much as set the boundaries around any possible answer, and therefore make the simple asking of the question pointless.

Consider the alternative question again: How can I find out why we are here? This question requires I explore all forms of (current and past – leaving open the possibilities of future) knowledge and inquiry. This of course forces the serious questioner into a life-long pursuit of ever more knowledge, if an answer is to be found. It could be the answer, as such, is simply to keep learning, which is no more than an acknowledgement that there is no end to knowledge, and we are both its generator and its recipient, its vehicle, if you will.

And perhaps vehicle is the most apt metaphor for who and why we are. By holding that life, and thus knowledge, are journeys we embark upon, it becomes harder to buy the notion that either explanation is valid – that we either go to some afterlife, or we simply cease. Both seem antithetical to what we have learned about both matter and energy. It seems more reasonable that we simply change form, in some way we are not yet equipped to understand. That we are beings who are composed of patterns, and both use and exist within patterns suggests we cannot escape the patterns that hold us, and we participate in continuously. It implies, in fact, there are more layers to reality, as we are able to perceive it, than we have even begun to entertain.

If we look honestly at all the previous assumptions, or paradigms we have held about life and the nature of reality, we will see all of those assumptions eventually fell apart, to be replaced by a newer level of understanding (actually, just a newer set of assumptions), until understanding eventually gave way again to yet another layer. Like the onion, there is no center point, only layer upon layer.

And yet, we humans continue to pursue knowledge, not merely for its own sake, but for the mistaken purpose of arriving at some form of ultimate, final knowledge. I would argue the goal is both absurd, and should one feel they have truly arrived at such a place ( a fundamental mistake of reason and judgment), the only real form of death. I believe (clearly my own current assumption) the real reason to pursue knowledge is to discover the next layer of the mystery. It is the quest itself that brings meaning to life, is in fact its true purpose – we are here to aid the universe in growing ever more infinite, through knowledge, through desire, through the always-evolving nature of our understanding, through the one thing we bring into reality that was not here before we came into being – the ability to wonder, the very act of imagination. No fundamental particle, no planetary mass, no galactic spin can do that.

Only we can do that. Only we can dream, and in dreaming, keep making the world.

· Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

Copyright by Notty Bumbo, 2004