Cosmic Writ
There is No End - Cosmic Writ (+ Commentary)
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There is No End
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas, 1947)
I will go gently, I will go smilingly into that good night
Because railing doesn’t get us much
Except a sore throat from wailing at the infinite space
We’ll be one with in any case
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Cosmic Writ
[Because this poem has many allusions, I follow it with a commentary.]
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.
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
In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet finds the skull of the court jester, and cries out, Alas, poor Yorick! In a comic yet tender 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? 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 — eventually 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 may no longer exist, or may no longer have the meaning we ascribe to them today. Even our most elegant expressions may become weak / the glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak (from stanza 52 of Shelley’s Adonais, 1821). Human language and human life may 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.
Our grandest thoughts about life and religion will most likely 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. 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 early human 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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