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

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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…