Gospel & Universe 🔭 The Sum of All Space

Alas, Poor Yorick

Species - Tinnitus - Final Frontiers - Cosmic Writ (+ commentary)

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Species

The hammer of inevitability
Breaks the hardest backs,
From ankylosaurus to the cockroach.
And we're far more fragile than these.

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Tinnitus

When he heard the story it reminded him of an ancient myth, something so old it had to be true. And with it came the deep swell of the ocean, where Leviathans and sea monsters battled in the Waters of Life. Tiamat and Marduk, angels falling from the sky. The Chaos Monster vs. the Sun God, something you'd find in an Assyrian bas-relief from three thousand years ago:

When he heard the epilogue he heard more than ancient myth. This wasn't just Tiamat and Marduk. These were real live living beings. A squadron of angels ascended back into the sky. One took singular shape, and slithered into a garden.

What were once a rumble of words, deep swells from the abyss of time, were now sentences. The voice that spoke to him was ever more specific. 

Gabriel spoke to me in the bright afternoon. 

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Final Frontiers

We have no reliable way of saying what happens after death. Heavenly light may beam us up like angels into a fluorescent Garden of Eden. Alien laser-beams may shred us like pigs in a slaughterhouse. Or we might just decay, slowly, six feet under.

We hope it'll be Dante's rosy Paradise, or Shelley's neoplatonic One, taking us with It past flowers and tomb, beyond the words and music that are weak / the glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. We fear it'll be Macbeth's tale told by an idiot, his monotony of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, his absurd drama full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

As I try to suggest in the following poem, “Cosmic Writ,” one thing is certain: sooner or later we will become food for worms. And as we lie quietly in our graves, our life force seeping into the earth or zooming into the heavens, what we now recognize as our lives will be superseded by the millions, perhaps billions, of rotations of planet Earth. As our bodies decompose and slowly return to the dust and ashes from whence they came, and as our souls go wherever they might go, our planet will continue its journey around the sun. Our sun will continue its journey around the centre of the Milky Way, which will continue its journey toward Andromeda. Together, this enormous phalanx of stars (which is only a fraction of the universe) will travel toward the cluster of galaxies called the Great Attractor. (I supply a more detailed commentary on the poem at the bottom of this page).

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Cosmic Writ

At death, the English words that rolled through your brain and off your lips

will cease, even at their point of origin: in time

the neurons which held the lofty sentiments — Science, Truth, Art —

will flow like dirty worms beyond the hollowed skull.

Alas, poor Yorick may remain as inky words or bits of code,

but will no longer find its expression in human clay,

nor yet as muffled plaint beneath the grave,

and all our differences won’t make a difference,

what with all the tomorrows that we won't see hereafter.

Language, culture, music, words, indeed, are weak.

Belief itself — Pascal’s to bet or not to bet —

mean nothing to the giant rocks that drift and spin, like a billion circus tops on fire

at hundreds of kilometres a second toward the Norma Cluster,

toward the mysterious anomaly, ominously called the Great Attractor.

If ever our Phoebus arrives within a hundred light years

of that Charybdis and Scylla waiting in the stars,

what cities will we have constructed by then?

What gravitronic mechanisms to reverse galactic pull and cluster fuck?

What ancient pluck will lift us from our gopher tunnels to become as ants?

When black and red, as aliens, we meet beyond our sun,

what worlds of light and air will we have then to make him run?

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Commentary

The poem “Cosmic Writ” looks at life, death, & history in light of astronomical time.

One of the most famous literary references to life, death, & time occurs when Hamlet finds the skull of the court jester, and cries out, Alas, poor Yorick! In an almost comic, personal manner, Hamlet asks the skull,Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont [accustomed] to set the table on a roar? (Hamlet 5.1). Like the words of Hamlet, our words will eventually end up like Yorick: still and silent in the earth. And the Earth itself will, in astronomical time, move on — to the Great Attractor, which is near the centre of the Norma Supercluster of galaxies, toward which our local group of galaxies are moving (the Norma Supercluster in turn seems to be moving toward the Shapley Supercluster). 

All the things we value in art and culture will no longer exist, or will no longer have the meaning we ascribe to them today. Even our most elegant expressions will become weak / the glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak (from stanza 52 of Shelley’s Adonais, 1821). Human language and human life will become an insignificant nothing, much like the life Macbeth creates for himself, where tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time, and where life becomes an absurd drama, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (Macbeth 5.5).

Our grandest thoughts about life and religion will be superseded by other realities. One of the most famous debates about religion and belief occurs in Pascal’s Pensées (1670), in which he argues that we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing in (or betting on) God (I look at this argument in Pascal’s Wager). Pascal’s wager is here conflated with Hamlet’s famous to be or not to be, so that it becomes to bet or not to bet. What will such wagers matter, ten million years from now?

Shakespeare and other thinkers help us get at deep thoughts, yet their ideas and languages will pass. The modes of their rhetoric will fall out of favour, and then get buried in the sands of time. The line, “nor yet as muffled plaint [complaint] beneath the grave” is meant to imitate an older courtly vocabulary, and to contrast with a more Modern, blunt, stark expression. Time changes language, and language reflects the changes in time. “Human clay” refers to the mythic notion that we’re made from clay, which is also the medium of the cuneiform script — the first to contain a number and language system as well as records of trade, law, literature, religion, etc.

Our deepest thoughts about myth and heroism are seen in terms of the sun (Phoebus) and in terms of Odysseus, who sails between the sea monsters Charybdis and Scylla. If humanity doesn’t prepare for this epic journey — if we can’t find a way to act more like ants, who cooperate instinctively — then we’re doomed. We’ll become prey to Time, like the lovers in Andrew Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress." The speaker in this 17th century seduction poem tells his reluctant lady, But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity. If, however, his lady follows his advice, then they can instead control Time: Let us tear our pleasures through rough strife / Through the iron gates of life. / Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still / Yet we will make him run. While the poet is a scoundrel, his advice to take control of reality (instead of waiting for some larger cosmic Rapture or Grace), can be applied to the human race at large. Otherwise, when we have to steer Earth — metaphorically between two galactic monsters — we won’t have evolved the wherewithal to survive.

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