Sunday 31 July 2016

Frame of Refence















No more reason any more:
Sense in flux like molten rock,
Magma on what was solid ground;

Old certainties swept away
Like a pyroclastic flow from
The core of the earth;

Cause and effect dislocated,
Reconnected by a web of complication:
The organism supersedes the mechanism.

They tell me God is dead
And all meaning compromised.
How can you believe anything
When everything depends?

Time and space are circumscribed,
In impossible motion while we stand still;
Unpredictability floods around us
Erodes us like beach sand on the tide.

Human hands shaped the order of things;
Human edict regulated understanding;
The chain of causality followed.

Until the rules were changed; when
Nothing added up, when no-one
Could fathom any of this;

Life has no meaning, frail voices
Still cry in their self-selected wilderness.
How can we tell wrong from right?

I tell myself, I tell them, in a silent reply:
Meaning, exactly? Is there no truth
To seek within ourselves, no meaning
If not life itself?
© BH, 2016

I'm thinking about meaning again. I've been reading the Einstein Girl by Philip Sington where, pre WW2, relativity was a thorn in the flesh of the traditions of a mechanistic universe. In the book there was a suggestion that religion and scientific certainty both were rendered void by a relativistic cosmos. I’ve long admired quantum thinking, systems theory and the like. Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty makes sense to me. 

And now this…

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