Monday, December 28, 2009

Reflections: Let There Be


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Being on vacation, this week and last, I’ve been boxing backwards like a man on a mission from God. This morning I extracted the following bit of writing from a folder of miscellaneous musings for which I had no use at the time of their composition: no blog yet, then.

In this piece, I made use of images from some several pre-existent poems. It is not dated. The run-on sentences are deliberate:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxMind Under Matter

Imagine the Genesis, the instant of the living cell, the simple datum of now, the primordial (!) of being, the impact of is, scant effervescence of flesh, more sea than surface, out of eternal silence made manifest, out of the dreamless sleep of cool minerality cast into a steeping, screaming cauldron of chaotic light, temporal and temporary, unendurable.

Regress to a notion of what that first cell had to endure, Eros at outset, want without will, need without knowing, attracted, perhaps, to light, more eye than I, repulsed, perhaps, by motion, ontology of need, epistemology of hunger.

The immensity of that miniscule event persists, incommensurate, this thing so tiny, so huge, revealing across fathomless seas of space-time the gnosis of the Big Bang, which, paradoxically, impossibly, it outweighs on the scale of significance, hoisting the whole starry explosion out of the depths of endlessly contingent night, to reveal the slight, human light of prophecy, hope, aspiration.

That improbable spark of I am, predicting complex permutations of sentient mass in motion, all material striving, from the thunderous rut of Brontosaurus to the chalkboard ponderings of alchemist Einstein, or the emotionally teleological aural alembic of a Bach chorale.

That single cell that gave birth to the mind which calculates and comprehends the massive fecundity of the rosy receding lights of a billion-billion galaxies.

And the Whole is patterned, the Essence is informed.

Had we the information to connect all the dots, would we fall flat in awe before the face of the Holy Spirit, or would we roll up our sleeves in resignation, perpetually to tend the Big Machine?

What provides the light that lights our dreams?

Are we circus folk or angels?

Listen now—even as the big tent collapses in tatters around us, we hear the tigers being rolled away in their cages.

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