February 16, 2010

The Absoluteness Of Truth

There is an extensive blue sky stretching out above you. You have been taught to believe it is the atmosphere that wraps the earth protectively, cradling it in its arms. You look at the sky and see clouds drifting by, a few birds flit across. You see dust motes floating in the air before they drop away from that one beam of sunlight that has filtered through to the land beneath your feet.

You peel away that layer of blue from above and stare into the black hole that is the universe. An endless, large black. You will yourself to travel into that abyss and get sucked into the unknown. You spend the next eighty years of your lfie in that blackness, while it rushes past you, only to give way to more blackness.

On the last day of your life, you realize that you have not even made it past your own solar system, the one you labelled in your geography notebooks.

What are you trapped inside? And what does the cloud cradle the earth against? What is it that we are not meant to know. And why?

There have been people who have wondered if the universe has an edge, perhaps a glass wall that defines that the end is 'here' and you can go no further. Nobody lived long enough to find out. Nobody had the means to make that journey happen.

And so you are sucked back into your cocoon and you are once again lying under that great big blue, staring up at the sky. You wonder where to go next.

You decide to try the vortex. You go within.

You single down on your heart, for it is the only organ you can sense all day long as it beats, like a drum that is chasing the end of a song. A countdown. You single down on it, and you feel the blood pulsing in and out of your arteries. You know blood colours your insides and you zero down on the walls of your heart, the expanding, the contracting. You travel further to see that it is made of tissues, membranes. You then see that each tissue is made up of tiny little molecules. But that is not the end. Not yet.

You see a very tiny atom, made up of atomic particles that zing around a radius. Which is made up of sub atomic particles.

You realise now that all things have these atoms, which are just little bits of matter revolving around a centre. And these bits of matter are themselves, tinier bits that are eventually, not even solid. Not liquid, not gaseous. Are they even matter? We are not sure. We do not yet have the equipment to identify the basic unit of life.

Everything around you and inside you is just that...bits of nothingness revolving around nothingness.

Even the people you love. And the people you hate.

If you had that detail in your vision, you probably would just see empty spaces, not people. People who are born and who die, who have souls, trapped balls of energy. As if they are not solid at all. Like memories. Bits floating in and out, living and dying, bits of nothing. What happens to those trapped balls of energy? Energy is always constant, is it not? No creation, no destruction, just reuse, recycle, replace.

Now that you know it is all nothingness with misplaced-trapped balls of energy, where did the big point to your life disappear? Where is mine? What about all the hatred, all the failures? All the successes even? If you could disintegrate failures and success to the level of atoms then...would you be able to make out the difference?

Would it really matter who you loved and who you hated, where you lived and what you ate? Maybe not.

Then again, maybe it would. We have yet not agreed on the absoluteness of reality. So we all have the benefit of doubt.

However...what about the absoluteness of truth?

February 09, 2010

Stories

The winds carry you. To places far and not known yet. Where you will breathe the air I have not yet touched. Or have I?

Where you will see sights I have not yet seen. Sounds I have not heard yet, and smells I have not breathed in. You will be away and you will eat, drink, sleep, work, smile, laugh, learn. By the time you come back, you will be altered. Will you be a new person then?

Will I know you all over again when you are back, from scratch? Will I fall in love with you all over again, will you set my heart racing when you touch me unintentionally? Will it all happen again?

Will I be altered forever in the time I live away from you? Will I be new? Will you know me, the me you are going to leave behind? And will you know me, the me I will have become when you come back?

Will the loneliness matter on that day? Will the tides turn? Will the day seem as windy, as end-of-winter as it does today? Will the landscape change? Will the soil shift, will the skies transform, will the stars realign?

By then, dear story-teller, won't you know me enough?