Poem: 22
Sunday, 12 February 2017
Ode to Zeno
--
Much is said of Zeno the philosopher,
Zeno the physicist,
Mathematician
But what of Zeno the poet?
Who understood
The joke
That it takes a life
To prepare
For a life
That it takes a journey
To begin a journey
That by the time we are organized
We are disorganized again
That by the time we reach the horizon
The horizon is far beyond us
Receding
That when success lies always within reach
It lies
That I wish to read and read and read
All these glorious books
Which make lists
But I can’t
That by the time I am wealthy
I will be bankrupt
The nonreality of motion
Everything has
Already passed us by
Like a train
Hurtling
Through the void
Everything that can be moved will be moved
Everything that can be said, will be said
These words have already been written
Before the beginning of time
This morning already came
And the dawn
Implies dusk
And we are here
Racing these turtles
In eternal seconds
Were you the original Buddha?
That understood that
Nothing is real
That nothing can be real, that
You don’t even
Exist
Escaping temporal constraints
Did you visit Lao Tzu
As that border guard
And challenge him
To name that
Which cannot be
Named
Asimov and Bonini plagiarized you
When they said
That it takes
Nothing less than the world
To simulate the world
And so we never
Arrive
Surveillance changes behavior
By the time we capture it,
It is
Distorted
By our model.
Fixated by observation,
In time and space.
If there was no one to observe the paradox,
resolving quantum possibilities,
Would this anthropically-principled universe
Even be here?
Our self-swallowing sets, Hofstader says
The model of all things
Must contain the model
Of all things.
Louis quatorze
Was as eloquent as Diogenes
Two of your thiefs
For their tributes
were wordless
Hall of mirrors
Where Achilles races through prisms
Of light, until the end of time
Strange looping
Is solved by walking
By the time I publish
All my drafts
I’ll have more
I will never finish
A strategy cannot be fully planned
A dream cannot be turned into a sequence of steps
Nor a journey of a thousand miles reduced to moments
Neither can all thoughts or actions be recorded
Or all principles, questions, ideas reduced to final form
Believe me, I’ve tried, and found it can only be
Solved by walking.
Assumptions make us stumble, and
There shall be no-end to validation, but
Walking is an experiment in itself.
How I get anything done
That society functions at all
Is a mystery to me
Who is the me that is doing?
Analysis paralysis, again
Solvitur ambulando.
Goals are false constructs
Accomplished by half-distances
I’m halfway there!
Halfway
Stuck.
How many squares does it take to fill a circle?
How many solutions to solve for
The big picture problem called “my life”?
How many apps does it take to be productive?
And how many coordinated workers to fulfill…
This impossible task?
An Invisible army,
And even then
Who knows?
That much desired Invisible
feeling of total control over life,
eludes me.
That is why
Art is never finished, only abandoned
Ars longa, vita brevis
And why no Flood was required
To destroy the Tower of
Babel.
Because
Reaching the heavens,
Is an infinite pursuit
Utopian nowheres
Doomed.
You solved the riddle
Of perpetual motion
With another
You keep this world in motion
That is why music will never end
We will keep making songs
And I will keep writing
Poems
Never to exhaust what may be brought forth in
The Long Now, for the journey’s end is an old beginning made new
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
Living in the past’s future, we can only imagine
Future’s past.
I challenge you to
Look again.
To see what you missed
The last time
You passed by
Ignoring miracles.
Still round the corner there may wait
Another Secret
Hidden in plain
Sight.
Thiel the barrier to entry is so high
I cannot build a monopoly on truth
Would that I could
Span the infinite infinities, shrinking as I go
From Zero to One.
Kevin Kelly asks
Is Civilization making progress,
Or an infinite regression
By which, What Technology Wants
Is to replace one problem with another
With no solution final
And Voltaire stole from you too
When he recognized
That man has infinite wants
That there will be no end
To capitalism
For our capacity to invent
To demand, to supply
increases faster
Than we
fulfill.
Socrates
The more you know the less
How many questions in a question?
Solomon, for this reason
Vanity vanity all is vanity
For all your wealth, for all your imagination,
Despair of the folly of life
Wisdom itself is folly
For the same reason, Blake
The fool who persists in his wisdom will become wise
And the opposite is also true
The wise man who persists in his wisdom is a fool.
For before You,
We are all fools, all broken,
And the proper response
Is surrender.
Peter
Rise to your level of incompetence
And you will accomplish it all.
Oh silly Whitehead,
For all your erudition,
Raphael has tricked you, to focus your gaze
On the center of The School of Athens
When the real hero
Is afar to the left
All of Western Philosophy is
A series of footnotes on Zeno
Of all people Alfred, really,
You should know this
You’re the one
Took 123 pages
To prove
That 1+1
=2
And still failed
Because Homer never reaches the end
Of his path
And therefore,
Eternity
And Blake was just chasing you,
My dear Zeno, but he never caught up
Because he stopped, staring in
Wonder
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Conceived by this Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Plato, Anselm, Liebniz, Godel worshiped the Triune Paradox
That which nothing greater can be conceived —
Beauty, Truth, Love must exist
Ontological Creator,
By definition,
God
In the beginning was The Word,
And from this One, was birthed the definition,
And from the definition, the synonyms,
And from the synonyms,
The antonyms
And so Satan’s rebellion is staged
In that Plank’s Length distance
Between 0.999n and 1
Or as Lewis said
All of hell
In the Grand Canyon of a dust crack
On the grassy floor of hard-leafed heaven
Oh poor Aquinas, in your systematic theology
So deceived, in your attempt to sanitize
Eternal Good from Evil,
Athanasius and
Augustine
Too
For God must contain it all
The Good and The Evil
For these infinite
Distances must
Be bound
By One so omniscient,
Omnipotent, ominipresent
A living Force, that binds all things together
Dark side and Light, strong within me
But Euclid was already there
In that point, which has no part
For he asked that Angel who danced
On the head of a needle
What is your name?
And the Angel responded in a Choir
Of singular plurality
Legion.
I am that I am
Destroyer of prisons
Maker of worlds, escaper of traps
You can’t put me
Into your box
Smaller than small
Bigger than big
What am I?
Breath of the wind
You, Zeno, were the one who confounded
Aristotle, whose bow shot an arrow into the
Edge of space
’Twas Aristotle again whom you tripped
In his Quixotic attempt to systematize, to categorize
All knowledge
In your Satori, did you become a time-traveler?
Coasian coordination costs, limiting the firm
From uncapped growth, stunting our economy
Making us speak in the tongues of Babel
Did you conceive of artificial intelligence?
First to recognize that only zeros and ones
Could comprehend the distance
Between zero and one
And so transcend
All the limits of human experts
Becoming the silicon One
That can simultaneously
“Understand.”
And maybe inspired Columbus, terran astronaut
To see if a further edge
Could be reached
And so the explorers, poets and playwrights arrived in never-arriving
Long before the physicists, at the top
Of Aslan’s topless mountain
Further up, further in!
Perhaps you explained to Rilke
Love’s frustration, that
Even between the closest people infinite distances exist.
But also its magic, for
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
I wonder, did you inspire
Keats’ Grecian Urn — the agony
Between two lovers
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!…
For ever panting, and for ever young
No matter how many little steps you take
Logic will never get you all the way to
Truth.
Leaping leaping headlong into your paradoxes, did
Kierkeegard understand the only way
To span the infinite distance
Was the Mystery of
Faith
Lord, I believe; help me believe
And so we never, never
Arrive.
In memoriam, Dr. Lund
And long may he live, Mr. H.
Recording available:
Listen to me read this aloud.
