Monday Morning Musings:
“Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
–William Shakespeare, Macbeth, (Act V, Scene v)
“Someone tells you you can run the film backward billions of years to an enormous bang and nothing but particles joining up into big clumps like this one one, except not like this one—because on this one the chemistry came alive and kicked into an algorithm that kept unspooling till there was you collecting spit from a poker game, and you don’t bat an eyelid.”
–Tom Stoppard, The Hard Problem
Scientists tell us that the universe was created with a bang,
Not with a whimper. Although who knows, for sure
What existed before our world?
Was there a before?
Or did time begin then, too?
Who heard the dawn of the universe?
Was there another universe
With other creatures who lived then?
Did they have wings to fly about their planets?
Were they shaped in the image of the gods
That humans fashioned?
Now scientists have re-created the sound
Of our universe’s birth.
Did sound exist before then?
Was there anyone, anything
Who felt that shock
The birth
The first cry of the newborn universe?
I ponder the glory of sound
And what we do for music,
Tapping out rhythms with a pencil
On a desk
Singing nonsense songs
To babies.
Humans throughout time
Talking, whistling, singing
Infants reacting to our voices
Even in the womb.
Animals, too.
Cats meowing to humans,
Whales singing to other whales
Wolves howling
Birds chirping,
Learning new songs
To communicate.
When I was young
We had one telephone with a long cord
And an extension in my parents’ bedroom.
When my mother was a child
They did not have a phone
Until her parents got one for their store.
But people want to connect
To hear voices
And sounds.
In the old Soviet Union,
People recorded rock and roll on X rays
Black market trade in sound
On bones made visible by light.
I wonder at the beauty of our Earth.
As we drive over the bridge
Heading west, the clouds so low
I feel that I can almost touch them.
A trick of mind and perspective
Light bending
Mind bending
Well, I have no spatial sense
That’s why I almost failed geometry.
But I’m great a memorizing
And I understand logic
And beauty
And the sounds of nature too,
As we know it here
In our tiny part of the universe,
The tumbling of waves,
The patter of rain
The buzzing of a bee on
A sunny summer day.
We see a play,
The Hard Problem,*
Leave it to Tom Stoppard
To tackle the subject of
What is consciousness?
How does the brain
Differ from the mind?
We listen intently
A man plays a saxophone
Mournful,
Or are they hopeful, riffs
Echoed and echoing
During the scene changes
We discuss the play afterward.
While drinking coffee—
(Hear the perking
Smell that divine scent
Taste its flavor)
I think of the movie,
Ex Machina
Can an android truly think?
Yes, machines can play chess.
Certainly, they can hear,
But what does that mean?
It senses vibrations.
Can a machine truly feel?
The tree falls in the forest
The big bang occurs
Would other beings cry
If they heard Barber’s Adagio for Strings?
Yesterday and today: Merril's historical musings 