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“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.
Simian Solipsism
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 18,000,000th cousin 10^23rd 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.
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